Finally, New York had plenty of fresh, clean water for everyone, and all it took was the obliteration of a few upstate towns.
It was Oct. 12, 1917, and Mayor John Purroy Mitchel was formally dedicating the Catskill Aqueduct, a 120-mile engineering marvel a pipeline from the newly created Ashokan Reservoir that more than doubled the water supply of the thirsty metropolis.
The festivities began at City Hall at noon, with speeches from Mitchel and former Mayor George McClellan, who had launched the Catskill project 10 years earlier to meet the fast-growing city’s demands. They continued at the Central Park reservoir at 86th St., where Mitchel turned a handle to debut a glorious fountain an 80-foot jet of water that the aqueduct had brought down. Finally, at the Sheep Meadow, 15,000 school children and 1,000 Hunter College women commenced a pageant called “The Good Gift of Water.”
The great spectacle was to feature dances by Corn, Wheat and Flower Maidens, a singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and an appearance by what were billed as “mountain spirits.” Unfortunately, the gala celebration of the good gift of water was interrupted by rain, and the maidens and the spirits fled the field in their soaked pink cheesecloths.
It was an ironic moment for a city that had suffered from a water shortage for as long as anyone could remember.
Decent drinking water, in fact, was hard to come by for more than 200 years after Peter Minuit came to Manhattan.
Through the 17th and 18th centuries, New Yorkers relied on rainwater cisterns and public and private wells. Townspeople also drew water from a 48-acre pond called the Collect, located at what is now Foley Square.
But this water was often fouled by dust, privies, cesspools and dead animals. The best available came from what was called the Tea Water spring north of the city, whose population was then concentrated below Canal St. and east of the Collect. Tea Water vendors would fill 130-gallon barrels, then sell water to townspeople by the bucketful.
As the city grew, the water became more obviously hazardous to the public health. Cholera killed 3,500 in 1832, for example. Meanwhile, there wasn’t enough of it for firefighting, and great conflagrations destroyed large portions of the city in 1776 and again in 1835.
Several unsuccessful attempts were made at a municipal water system. British engineer Christopher Colles built a reservoir on Broadway between Pearl and White Sts. in 1774 and sought to feed water through mains made of bored logs; the Revolution put an end to this operation. Twenty-five years later, Assemblyman Aaron Burr established the Manhattan Co., sank a well, built a reservoir and installed a 40-mile hollowed-log system of his own. But it never served more than a fraction of the population, and it was widely agreed that the water was terrible anyway. Burr’s company subsequently got out of the water business and went into banking instead, becoming Chase Manhattan.
Not until the 1830s, when the population numbered 220,000, did the city begin work on a public system. Rather than sink another well or, as some suggested, draw water from the Bronx River, officials took the advice of civil engineer Col. DeWitt Clinton Jr. and decided to tap the Croton River, more than 40 miles away. Starting in 1837, gangs of Irish immigrants labored to build the Croton system a dam on the river, an aqueduct to the city, a receiving reservoir where now sits Central Park’s Great Lawn and a distributing reservoir at Fifth Ave. and 42nd St.
The first Croton water started flowing into the city in June 1842. There was a jubilant 5-mile parade in celebration of what was plainly a perpetually inexhaustible water supply as well as of a new icon dominating New York’s landscape and life. For more than 50 years, until it was retired from service and torn down to make way for the New York Public Library, citizens would promenade atop the great stone walls of the four-acre, 24 million-gallon Murray Hill reservoir.
The croton-fed system, which by 1850 included 200 miles of cast-iron pipes, at first supplied nine times more water than anybody thought New York would ever need.
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But by 1885 it was necessary to build a second Croton aqueduct. Then, in 1898, Manhattan and the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island consolidated into Greater New York; the population was now 10 times what it had been six decades earlier. While Manhattan and the Bronx got Croton water, Queens and Staten Island were relying on wells and Brooklyn drew its water from Long Island. Future planning would have to take the needs of all the boroughs into account.
And so McClellan had initiated construction of the new Catskill system. In 1914, the great Ashokan Reservoir had been completed with a dam that had flooded over the homes of several thousand upstaters, requiring them to move elsewhere and now New York City’s 6 million were getting a half-billion gallons of water every day.
And plainly, this was going to be plenty of water forever.
The Ashokan Reservoir became inadequate in less than 20 years. It took a Supreme Court battle with the State of New Jersey, but in 1937 the city began a 30-year project to draw water from tributaries of the Delaware River.
New York’s water system currently feeds the city 1.3 billion gallons a day through more than 6,000 miles of pipes, nearly half of which are at least 70 years old.
First published on April 10, 1998 as part of the “Big Town” series on old New York. Find more stories about the city’s epic history here.
