A Struggle For Water

Cities, like other living things, need water to grow: water for drinking and bathing, water for industry, water for sanitation and fires. Towns often grow first and get thirsty later, but whenever the thirst becomes evident, it has to be quenched for the town to flourish.

This need is not new. Artificial water supplies go back 4,700 years to the first river-based civilizations of Mesopotamia, Arabia, and India. Ancient Jerusalem had a 1,700-foot canal from a nearby spring; Nineveh brought water by tunnel from fifty miles away; the Greeks built canals throughout their far-flung empire; and American Indians used irrigation to make their desert cities habitable.

The Romans built eleven major aqueducts (including two that were more than 50 miles long) over five and a half centuries, beginning in 312 B.C. The Roman system eventually comprised 250 miles of conduit and had a capacity of 100 million gallons a day, though waste and theft cut the public supply to about 38 million.

Modern American city dwellers take water as a given, but it has not always been so. “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water,” Ben Franklin wrote in 1746, and indeed, the well often did run dry or foul before it was replaced by a tap connected to a modern water supply.

Franklin’s Philadelphia was the first American city to seriously confront its water future, with Benjamin Latrobe’s Centre Square Water Works in 1801. The city soon outgrew Latrobe’s elegant but inadequate system, and another one after that, and new sources had to be found. In the end it was rival New York that first enduringly solved its water needs, with an engineering triumph befitting the world’s leading new city. It did not happen overnight.

Four decades after it took root, the Dutch outpost that was to become New York City clung uneasily to the southern tip of the island that its natives called Manahata: “the place encircled by many swift tides and joyous, sparkling waters.” Salt waters, that is. Manhattan in 1664 was a wild and fertile place. There were dense forests, thicketed hills, and fields that bloomed in a riot of vivid colors. Black bears roamed the woods; cougars and wolves stalked deer; bobcats ate hares. Wild turkeys and heath hens were thick in the forest fringes, and partridges and passenger pigeons filled the sky. Muskrats and beavers worked the marshes and ponds.

Brook trout, perch, and pickerel swam in countless spring-fed streams, running from the island’s sloping central spine of jagged schist to shores of sand, pebbles, and tidal flats. Saltwater fowl fed at plentiful shellfish beds, and the surrounding waters teemed with fish, the prey of otters and harbor seals. In this land of plenty, 1,500 Europeans were about to experience a water shortage.

New Amsterdam in its final days was a compact place. Its main industry was the fur trade, and the townspeople spoke eighteen languages. Three hundred and fifty houses made of brick and wood lined curving streets bounded on the north by a fortified wall, meant to keep the Indians out, where Wall Street would later be. Fort Amsterdam, at the island’s southern tip, was a short-walled affair made of wood, gravel, and sod on low ground. It contained the church, the prison, the governor’s house, the barracks, and a storehouse. What it didn’t have was water. This shortcoming would help undo the Dutch.

English warships, staking the Crown’s claim to all of Dutch America, arrived in the harbor in late August 1664, threatening fire or siege. Popular sentiment compelled Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s troubled governor, to surrender promptly. He later defended his actions to his displeased Dutch West India Company employers. The “little fort,” Stuyvesant wrote, wasn’t built for a fight with Europeans and “was and is without well or cistern. Previous to this time it was hastily provided with 20 or 24 water barrels or pitched casks removed from ships and filled with water. Hence then, ‘tis to be deduced how easy ‘twould be to recover it back; how difficult, nay, impossible for us to defend it.”

“The … excuse … sounds very strange to the Company” was their reply. Stuyvesant and the burghers thought the fort was built on soil too sandy for a well, but their error was swiftly demonstrated by the new English governor. “I am very proud,” he wrote, “of a well in the fort which I caused to be made … beyond the imagination of the Dutch, who would [not] bleeve it till they saw it finisht, which produces very good water.” It was the first public well in New York. Dutch days were done, but the quest for good water was just beginning.

Wells and cisterns, public and private, within the fort and without, rapidly became the prime supply source. Systematic digging of public wells began in 1677, with the costs shared by the town and the inhabitants of each street that got one. But the water in the shallow wells, always a bit briny and never copious, soon showed the effects of the town’s growth. By the turn of the century there were 5,000 New Yorkers. By 1750 there were 13,000, placing colonial New York third in size behind Philadelphia and Boston and gaining. On the east, south, and west, landfill created streets where river used to be. To the north the wall was long gone, and development stretched inexorably uptown.

There was no sewage system. Street cleaning was moderately efficient, but roaming dogs and pigs, plus horses and cattle, kept people on their toes. Effective but increasingly inconvenient “ordure tubs” that were carried to the rivers gave way to privies, the backyard rage of the mid-1700s. Understandably, the privies were rarely cleaned and often overflowing. Pestilent human and animal wastes, together with the noxious effluent of foundries, tanneries, distilleries, ropewalks, and slaughterhouses, percolated into a water table too shallow to filter them out. Graveyards, originally established in outlying areas but soon surrounded by houses, contributed their own putrefaction. “There is no good water to be met with in the town itself,” declared Peter KaIm, a visiting Swedish botanist, in 1748.

Pumps over underground springs at the suburban fringes were the biggest advance through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. The most productive was the horse-powered Tea Water Pump, which supplied 14,000 gallons a day in winter and twice as much in summer. The pump opened in the 174Os and had an eighty-year run, tapping into a spring under fashionable Chatham Street (now Park Row) near the seventyacre Collect Pond, the site of today’s Foley Square. The adjoining Tea Water Pump Gardens was a place of refreshing leisure.

Licensed and regulated entrepreneurs paid the pump owner three cents per ISO-gallon hogshead of Tea Water and sold it for one cent a gallon, making themselves the target of complaints from customers. Despite its alluring name, the product was not very good even in its prime. “The Tea Water,” wrote one citizen in 1785, “grows worse every day, so that the common pump water, used only to scrub houses, etc. with, is now preferred.”

A visionary newcomer in 1774 recognized the water problem facing New York’s 25,000 people and took a bold step to solve it. He proposed in April and sold to the city government in July a plan “for furnishing the City of New York with a constant Supply of FRESH WATER .” This first attempt at a public water supply was the conception of Christopher Colles, a thirty-five-year-old Anglo-Irish engineer of boundless energy and inspiration who was connected with many technological firsts that routinely foundered on the shoals of misfortune. “Had I been brought up in the trade of hatter,” he often remarked, “people would begin to come into the world without heads.”

According to Colles’s plan, fourteen miles of hollowed pitch-pine logs would allow water to “be conveyed through every Street and Lane in this City, with a perpendicular Conduit Pipe at every Hundred yards, at which Water may be drawn at any Time of the Day or Night.” The annual tax on each house would be £2—much less than the cost of Tea Water—dropping to 10 shillings (half a pound) after four years. The city would make 55,000 a year from the system “for ever.” The eager Colles offered to do the work for £18,000 and complete it in two years.

The New York Water Works, backed by S9,000 worth of public notes, got off to a promising start. After sinking a deep well near the Collect and finding it “of a very good Quality,” Colles designed and built a steam engine to raise the water to a million-gallon earth-andstone reservoir. He had some experience with steam power; the year before, in Philadelphia, Colles had built for a distillery what is generally considered the first steam engine made in America.

By early 1776 Colles’s wood-burning engine, with a cylinder twenty inches in diameter and seven feet long, working a pump eleven inches across with a six-foot stroke, was raising more than twice its proposed daily supply of 200,000 gallons. In March the New York Mercury wrote: “The Fire [i.e., steam] Engine of the Water Works was work’d many Days last week, greatly to the Satisfaction of vast Numbers of People who went to see it. … The Water is inexhaustible, for the Pump, tho’ continually work’d, cannot lower the Water more than two feet.” As pipe laying began, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur (a resident of the area), in his Letters From an American Farmer , expressed optimism that “New York will very soon be abundantly supplied” with water.

It was not to be. In late August and early September 1776 George Washington and his army backed into, then out of, Manhattan, leaving the town to the British. Like most New Yorkers, the patriotic Colles, with his wife and three young children, fled. A fire one week into the seven-year occupation laid waste to most of the west side of town. By February 1777 it was reported that the waterworks had been “wantonly destroyed.”

Not much thought was given to the water supply during the Revolution, nor was there much change during the reconstruction boom years that followed. By 1800 there were 60,000 New Yorkers, few of whom were aware that contagious disease could be spread by foul water, which was all the city had. Severe epidemics had occasionally ravaged the colonial town (yellow fever in 1702, measles in 1729, smallpox in 1731), but by the closing years of the eighteenth century widespread death by communicable disease, especially the mosquito-borne yellow fever, had become an annual event. Hundreds died whenever the weather got hot; the worst was the summer of 1798, when more than 2,000 perished.

The epidemic of 1798 could not be ignored. While health experts, professional and amateur, debated the causes of disease and what to do about it, a Common (later City) Council committee advertised for and received numerous water-supply proposals, none of them feasible. Then in 1799 a notable citizen rushed to the rescue of parched and plagued New Yorkers, or seemed to. What followed was a model of political intrigue, social connivance, and plain old financial opportunism.

Aaron Burr’s place in water-supply infamy had been readied during the plague summer of 1798. As the fever took hold that July, an elaborate report was submitted to the water-supply committee by one Dr. Joseph Browne, a physician, amateur engineer, and brotherin-law of Burr. Whether Burr was leaning over his relative’s shoulder as he wrote or whether Browne’s independent interest in public health simply worked to Burr’s benefit is unclear. Whatever their genesis, Browne’s recommendations were significant.

He argued for piping the clean and copious Bronx River, fifteen miles north on the mainland, to Manhattan through works to be built by a private company. It was the first time an off-island supply had been suggested. Browne condemned all on-island sources, especially “the disgusting water of the Collect… [that] large stagnating filthy pond.” Browne laid out a detailed plan that would bring 360,000 gallons of Bronx water to Manhattan daily. A dam, a canal, pumps, a reservoir, and sufficient six-inch cast-iron pipe could be had for a moderate $200,000.

The Common Council water-supply committee was much impressed with the plan and hired William Weston, a noted English canal engineer, to evaluate it. The committee recommended one change. Since a private company wouldn’t be interested “unless upon the Prospect of considerable Gain; and that such Gain must be acquired at the Expence of the City,” a public venture was deemed the best route. In December 1798 the full Common Council voted to proceed with a public company and petitioned the state for a charter. New York seemed on its way to becoming the first American city with an adequate supply of good water, a Rome for the New World.

As with the Colles plan of a quarter-century earlier, it was not to be. Burr, a master manipulator, was angling for a private company under his control. It didn’t hurt that he chaired the state assembly committee meeting at Albany, the new capital, which in February 1799 was to consider the Common Council petition.

All thirteen committee members were from the New York City area; twelve were Republicans ostensibly under Burr’s control. But three of them were also members of the Common Council, which had voted for a city-owned water supply, and several of the others were simply reluctant to counter their local government’s expressed wishes. A separate petition from the city, regarding public sewage and drainage projects, further confused matters. The committee was unable to make a recommendation, and the assembly gave Burr ten days to return to the city to see if a private company was what the citizens really wanted.

Burr raced the 150 miles from Albany to New York on horseback and went to work. He formed a six-man committee of influential New Yorkers to approach the Federalist-dominated Common Council and argue for a private company. Three of the six were Federalists; one of these was Alexander Hamilton. Though Hamilton and Burr were politically opposed, and Burr would fatally shoot Hamilton in a duel a few years later, at the time they were on good social terms and even worked together occasionally on legal cases. For reasons not then, now, or perhaps ever completely clear, Hamilton decided to support the privatecompany idea and told Mayor Richard Varick so. The council resolved on February 28 that “they will be perfectly satisfied if the objects in View are pursued in any Way that the Legislature may think proper.”

While the council deliberated, Burr planned the Manhattan Company, with a prospective board of directors made up of prominent citizens, well designed to win popular and political support. Back in Albany, Burr spent March shepherding his water bill through the assembly and senate. Along the legislative way he quietly made a few changes. Capitalization was doubled to two million dollars, the board was expanded, and fewer shares were allocated to the city. The final amendment was a brief clause of Burr’s devise inserted deep in the proposed legislation just before the full assembly considered the bill.

“ And be it further enacted ,” the clause read, “That it shall and may be lawful for the said company to employ all such surplus capital as may belong or accrue to the said company in the purchase of public or other stock, or in any other monied transactions not inconsistent with the constitution and laws of this state or of the United States, for the sole benefit of the said Company.”

The public service that Hamilton had helped conceive in New York City had developed without his knowledge into an altogether different creature in Albany. At the end of March the bill with the “surplus capital” clause passed without comment through a distracted assembly; it considered Burr’s self-described “trifling act” for less than a day. The senate, on the basis of a favorable report from a Burr-arranged select committee, passed the bill a few days later.

The Council of Revision, at that time the last legislative barrier, got the bill on April 2. “Surplus capital” raised the eyebrows of one judge on the council, but his objection was a solitary voice. By day’s end the Manhattan Company was born. The state believed it was authorizing a water business; Burr knew he had himself a bank.

Burr and his fellow Republicans had wanted a bank for some time, but charters weren’t easy to come by. In those cautious days of corporation-fearing democracy, government’s stamp rarely came down on private organizations not of clear public benefit or necessity. It had taken Alexander Hamilton seven years to get his Federalist-run Bank of New York approved in 1791; eight years later it was still the only state-chartered bank in town.

The Manhattan Company, with a low public stake, high capitalization, and the unprecedented freedom to do anything legal with it, made a much better supplier of loans than of water. The law that created the Manhattan Company was titled “An Act for supplying the City of NewYork with pure and wholesome Water.” The cry for “pure and wholesome Water” would persist for the next fortythree years.

It became evident within weeks that a big mistake had been made. First, against the opinion of Browne and other advocates of Bronx water, the Manhattan Company abruptly decided that the less expensive and more expedient Collect supply would do just fine, and that reopening the old pre-Revolutionary Colles well was the best way to start. The company solicited the views of the reputable Colles, who, perhaps flattered by the attention, gave the company his papers and his opinion that “with respect to Bronx’s River, there appears to me many difficulties.” He also unsuccessfully offered himself as engineer and superintendent. (Colles was right about the Bronx; its water, formally proposed and studied no fewer than five times between 1798 and 1832, would never be used in Manhattan.)

Then, ignoring William Western’s recommendation of iron pipes, the company opted for cheaper pine. On May 15, long before any “Manhattan water” was flowing, the company resolved to open “an office of discount and deposit”; it rapidly became the powerful Bank of the Manhattan Company and survives today as Chase Manhattan. The company did build a reservoir, on Chambers Street. It held 132,600 gallons, far short of Weston’s estimated daily need of 3,000,000. The company also put down a jumbled network of wooden pipe that eventually supplied water of uncertain quality and quantity to no more than 2,000 customers.

Even the city itself became a paying customer, because the company was not obligated to supply free water for fire fighting or street flushing. Nor was the company required to repair or repave the streets it tore up laying pipe. And the stepchild water operation often left customers like this one in 1803 high and dry: “Not long since I discharged my tea-water man, and had a Manhattan Cock introduced into my cellar, and for the first ten days I was highly pleased with it, as it afforded me good water—But, alas! for the last fourteen days, I have turned my cock repeatedly, but nothing comes from it.”

It was back to foul wells and pumps for the people of New York, who numbered nearly 100,000 by 1810 and double that number twenty years later. With a wretched water supply and surging demand, New York had entered the nineteenth century worse off than it exited the seventeenth. Indeed, the bad water that had formerly spawned summer epidemics was now a year-round hazard. The sad state of New York’s water supply contrasted sharply with that in Philadelphia, newly replaced by New York as the largest American city and also struggling with yellow fever. While New York had cast its lot with lowly Manhattan water, Philadelphia had harnessed the fresh waters of the Schuylkill River with the help of Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

Just two years after his first proposal for a municipal water supply, Latrobe opened Philadelphia’s Centre Square Water Works on January 27, 1801. Cool, clean Schuylkill water collected in a marble-paved tidal basin. It was pumped by gravity and a steam engine through sluices and tunnels to Centre Square, where a second engine raised the water to wooden reservoirs holding 20,000 gallons. From the Centre Square engine house, a stately domed and porticoed marble building of Latrobe’s design, the water flowed through six-inch wooden mains and four-inch hollowedlog conduits to public hydrants and paying households and businesses. There were problems—leaky pipes, inefficient and cranky engines, widespread freeloading, and low receipts—but at last Philadelphia had an abundant, cheap supply of good water.

Expanding on Latrobe’s innovative but soon overwhelmed system, Philadelphia completed a powerful new public waterworks farther up the Schuylkill at Fairmount in 1815. With six water wheels housed in an acropolis of Classical Revival buildings, the Fairmount Water Works by 1837 had a twenty-two-million-gallon storage capacity in four reservoirs. Cast-iron pipes, the first in America, delivered water into 20,000 homes, 1,500 of which had taps in their bathrooms. A third of the way through the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was a city of just under 200,000 people that Capt. Frederick Marryat, the seagoing English novelist, said was “so admirably supplied with water … that every house has it laid on from the attic to the basement; and all day long they wash windows, doors, marble steps, and pavements in front of the houses.”

Fairmount, like its predecessor, would soon run afoul of the future. Increasing population overwhelmed the supply, and industry polluted it. By the early 1900s, after decades of stopgap additions, all of the original Fairmount facilities had been closed and a new system, tapping into the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, had been installed, complete with filtration and chlorination.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, though, envy of Philadelphia’s improvements—notably among New York’s brewers—brought forth a flood of water-supply plans. The Bronx River was often discussed. So was its source, the Rye Ponds in Westchester County, thirty miles north of Manhattan. Various sites were promoted as being ideal for artesian wells. In 1825 the New York Water-Works Company employed engineers to investigate the Rye and Byram (Connecticut) ponds; hampered by a defective charter, the stockholders voted to dissolve the company the next year. Financial schemers behind the Sharon Canal Company spent the 182Os vainly promoting a waterway from the Housatonic River in northwestern Connecticut. Others suggested Hudson River water from above Poughkeepsie, eighty miles north, where the river ran fresh. One man proposed New Jersey’s Passaic River, its water to flow into Manhattan in iron pipes beneath the Hudson. He also suggested, as others would, the Croton River, forty miles north in Westehester; but mention of the remote Croton invariably led back to the more accessible Bronx.

In the midst of all this scheming, the city actually built what amounted to its first operational public waterworks. It was only for fighting fires, because the quality was so poor. In 1831 a 230,000-gallon iron tank went up in a lot on Thirteenth Street east of Broadway; a steam engine raised water from a well one hundred feet deep. Six miles of distributing pipe were laid in the next few years, providing a modest 21,000 gallons a day.

New York would need more than its Thirteenth Street reservoir, because fire was the latest scourge of city life. Uncontrolled blazes in 1808, 1811, 1828, and 1833 cost lives and destroyed much property but were just preludes to the Great Conflagration, which broke out on the bitter, blustery night of December 16, 1835. By dawn an estimated $20 million worth of property had been lost, including almost seven hundred buildings in the heart of the business district. No one died, but most fire insurance companies were bankrupted, thousands of merchants were ruined, and many workers were left without jobs.

The fire may have been a sign. It took with it nearly all of the old Dutch city that had survived the fires of the Revolution, including the excavated cornerstone of the church in old Fort Amsterdam (the fort itself had been torn down in 1790). And it convinced many doubting New Yorkers that something major needed to be done about the water supply.

In fact, the glimmer of great waterworks to come had been sparked three years before. The wheels had been set in motion by fire’s evil urban twin, disease. New Yorkers, inured to the ravages of yellow fever, got their first dose of a devastating new plague, Asiatic cholera, in June 1832. After crossing the Atlantic into Canada, the disease had headed south with a vengeance into the eastern United States. By October, some 3,500 people were dead in New York, but fewer than 900 in Philadelphia. A second outbreak in 1834 yielded a similar disparity. “The only way we can account for this difference in the health of the two cities,” concluded a report to the government, “is, that Philadelphia is supplied with an abundance of pure and wholesome water … while New-York is entirely destitute.” Thoughtful New Yorkers became convinced that their filthy, ill-watered city was killing them. The two-hundred-year thirst was soon to be quenched.

It was about time. An 1831 study by the city’s distinguished Lyceum of Natural History had detailed the chemical components of public well and Manhattan Company water. While clean water had a grain or two of “foreign impurities” per gallon, city samples rang up 126 grains, more than double the modern federal limit. Common ingredients included lime carbonates and sulfates, and muriates of sodium and magnesium. The primary source was identified as the daily deposit into the soil of one hundred tons of excrement. The city’s otherwise hard water was softened with the “earthy salts” produced by stale urine. The water of wells near graveyards had “a ropy appearance.” It was hardly the stuff of a great city, which led to the Lyceum’s conclusion that “ no adequate supply of good or wholesome water can be obtained on this island for the wants of a large and rapidly increasing city like New York ”—just what Joseph Browne had concluded in the previous century.

In November 1832, as the cholera epidemic was abating, a health-conscious city alderman named Myndert Van Schaick arranged for Col. De Witt Clinton, Jr., then a federal engineer, to study the city’s water-supply problem. Clinton, whose famous father had presided as governor over the building of the Erie Canal, filed his report three days before Christmas. It was a watershed document. Van Schaick had become convinced that the Croton River, not the Bronx, would be New York’s salvation, and Clinton agreed. A forty-mile open canal could be built for $2.5 million, Clinton wrote, and gravity alone would bring the city as much water as it could possibly need.

Clinton’s plan for Croton was oversimplified and underpriced, but his reasoned rejection of other sources and his analysis of the fiscal benefits of an adequate public water supply proved of great influence. He accurately predicted that “sixty years will not elapse … before this island will be inhabited by a million souls” and concluded: “It must not only be a matter of surprise and profound regret that [New York] is destitute of a supply of good and wholesome water, and that there should exist any hesitation to grant her power to obtain an element so essentially connected with the prosperity, health, and comfort of her citizens.” Colonel Clinton would wear the crown of projector of the great Croton Aqueduct.

In February 1833 the state legislature passed an act, requested by the city and drafted by Van Schaick (a newly elected state senator), for the appointment of five city water commissioners. Van Schaick selected the commissioners, all respected members of the Democratic (formerly Republican) party, and they selected Maj. David B. Douglass, a canal engineer and a War of 1812 hero, to conduct surveys. That fall Douglass confirmed that Croton was the place. Its water was pure and abundant year-round, and gravity was indeed the only power needed to make it flow south. The river would have to be dammed, though, and the aqueduct would have to be enclosed in masonry. Douglass’s curiously precise estimate of maximum costs was $4,718,197.

The rising cost and complexity of the Croton project gave hope to Bronx advocates and led the relentless promoters of artesian wells to disparage the “far-fetched, and dear bought water of the Croton,” but clear eyes prevailed among the city fathers. Rejecting the pleas of assorted schemers, the Common Council early in 1834 applied to the state for authority to raise $2.5 million in loans for a canal from the Croton. Senator Van Schaick drafted a bill providing for a new set of water commissioners to build and run the system. On May 2, 1834, the legislature passed a new act for “supplying the city of New-York with pure and wholesome water.” This time it was a public project, and this time it would actually happen.

The new water commissioners, who were simply the old ones reappointed, issued their report the following February 16. The Croton River would be dammed into a four-hundred-acre lake near its mouth; a closed stone aqueduct would carry the water south to the Harlem River; and a low bridge supporting inverted siphons of eightfoot wrought-iron pipe would bring the water into Manhattan. Another section of stone aqueduct and iron pipes would deliver the precious liquid down the island to a reservoir on empty high ground at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The cost estimate was $5,412,000—about five times the annual city budget.

Undaunted, the Common Council in March 1835 approved the plan and put a referendum on the ballot in the next month’s municipal elections. Well drillers, water carters, and Westchester farmers concerned about their property rights inveighed against Croton water, but after voting April 14, 15, and 16 (and sipping free samples from barrels at the polls), the people had spoken: 17,330 in favor and 5,963 against. It was a more conclusive result than even the Crotonites had expected. Of the city’s fifteen wards, only three (those with the fullest wells) had voted against the plan.

Various issues, notably involving the rights of the Manhattan Company (which would retain its unused wells for decades for fear of losing its charter), delayed the start of construction for nearly two years. In the meantime, John B. Jervis, a veteran of the Erie Canal, replaced Major Douglass as chief engineer of the Croton project. Douglass, who had conducted the original surveys, was removed for either professional, personal, financial, or political reasons, depending on one’s perspective. The cantankerous Douglass had proceeded slowly, had hired many high-paid assistants, and was a Whig unfavored by the Democratic “Albany Regency,” with which Jervis was popular.

The controversy over Douglass’s dismissal continued for years, but in fact Jervis was probably the best man for the job. In a career of pioneering canal, railroad, and watersupply work, the self-taught Jervis, who rose from axman to superintending engineer on the Erie Canal, would be- come known for successful engineering linked to prudent economics. Jervis said he “had in my own mind decided the Croton was the true source as early as 1825,” but public interest had needed time to gather steam. As the project took shape, it became clear that Croton would be a historic undertaking. Except in Philadelphia, there was nothing so grand in the United States or elsewhere.

Contractors bid high on the speculative project and generally got what they asked. Westchester farmers sued for, and usually received, high value on their condemned lands. Residents in the area of construction complained of the vile and criminal behavior of the labor gangs, mostly recent immigrants from rival Irish counties. Some four thousand men were working (and living) along the line by 1838. They struck for higher wages that year and again in 1840 but succeeded only in lowering their daily wage from 81¼ cents to 75 cents, except for summertime windfalls of a dollar a day.

Still, a million dollars in annual wages, high payouts to contractors and landowners, and necessary but costly additions to the original concept of the works drove the tab for Croton to unforeseen levels—an estimated $8.5 million by early 1838. One addition, at a half-million dollars, was a thirty-acre receiving reservoir in what is now Central Park. This reservoir (later replaced by the current hundredacre, billion-gallon Central Park reservoir, which is itself now slated for closing) would be the first stop for Croton water on Manhattan, storing 150 million gallons; the aqueduct would then continue south two more miles to the 20-million-gallon distributing reservoir already planned at Murray Hill.

Crossing the Harlem River became the most troubling and costly problem. The thrifty Jervis preferred a simple and cost-effective low bridge. Such a structure would not impede navigation, because there wasn’t any on the rapidsstrewn Harlem. Others, though, wanted a high bridge that would allow shipping should the river someday be improved. Area landowners and speculators envisioned higher values with a higher bridge. Some citizens simply thought the great Croton should not slink into town but rather should be carried on a grand work of engineering art that would make New York proud. After two years of wrangling, the state stepped in and decided the matter in 1839. Jervis could build a bridge one hundred feet over the river or dig a tunnel beneath it. Jervis opted to go high.

The result he ultimately achieved was magnificent—fifteen high stone arches rising from the Bronx countryside, crossing the river in eighty-foot spans, and merging with Manhattan’s wooded highlands—but it cost an extra million dollars and wasn’t ready until 1848, the same year Boston completed its twenty-mile Cochituate Aqueduct, for which Jervis served as consulting engineer. While the High Bridge was going up, Croton water was carried in pipes on a temporary embankment across the Harlem. Nobody seemed to notice any navigation problems. (The bridge got its current look in 1937 when a single steel span replaced five stone arches sitting in the riverbed.)

The works in progress were dealt their most serious blow in the harsh early winter of 1841. Two days of rain and melted snow sent the new Croton Lake fifteen feet over the lip of its dam before dawn on January 8. The impending disaster was contained temporarily by an earthen embankment below, but the embankment was breached, flooding the valley. Bridges, mills, and houses were washed away, and three lives were lost: two locals and one drunken laborer.

Jervis by this point had proven adept at keeping detractors at bay and supporters in his corner. The obliging water commissioners wrote: “This disaster, though calamitous and unexpected … will enable us to guard against a recurrence of such an accident, for we have seen the Croton in its most dangerous and unprecedented condition” and declared themselves “happy to say, that all the aqueduct work, on the line, has stood remarkably well.” Nature, not the hand of man, shouldered the blame; Jervis redesigned and enlarged the dam and built a new embankment of stone, and the end of the work came into sight. In the meantime, pecuniary damage from the flood totaled nearly $700,000, helping to push eventual overall costs toward an astounding $13 million, including interest on state loans and water stock that was selling below par.

The city was groaning under the fiscal load, and anxiety spread in the real estate community. The urge to sell their properties before taxes rose gripped landlords until one of them reportedly paid a call on the aging baron John Jacob Astor at his summer mansion. “We can hardly spend too much for a good supply of good water,” the richest man in America calmly advised. A selloff was averted. City real estate values would double in the next two decades.

By October 1841 the aqueduct line to the Harlem was complete. On its course through Westchester the conduit of hydraulic cement, eight and a half feet high by seven and a half feet wide, went through a dozen towns, hundreds of acres of private land, sixteen tunnels, two dozen streams, and countless brooks. The grade of the aqueduct was thirteen and a quarter inches per mile for the thirty-three miles from dam to river.

In Manhattan the reservoirs and conduit work were nearing completion. Philip Hone, a former mayor and tireless diarist, made the short drive from the city to view the Murray Hill reservoir. Its thick granite walls, gently sloping facade, Egyptian cornice, and flagged promenade on top moved the diarist to reverence: “The Philadelphians may boast of their Fairmount Works, but they are no more to be compared to this than the Schuylkill to the Hudson. I doubt whether there is a similar work in Europe of equal extent and magnificence with the Croton Aqueduct, its dams, bridges, tunnels, and reservoirs.”

The waters of Croton—along with four commissioners in a “subterranean barge” dubbed the Croton Maid , which floated on the surface of the water inside the pipes—were allowed into the aqueduct at 5:00 A.M. on June 22, 1842. Water and commissioners emerged the next day at the Harlem bridge. On the twenty-seventh Croton water was sent through the Harlem pipes into Manhattan and down to the receiving reservoir. “Croton Water is slowly flowing toward the city, which at last will stand a chance of being cleaned—if water can clean it.” So wrote an aristocratic young lawyer, George Templeton Strong, in the beginnings of his own great diary, picking up where Philip Hone’s would soon leave off.

With an “immense concourse” bearing witness, water gushed into the Murray Hill reservoir at sunrise on July 4. With hydrants and service pipes still to come, the new reservoirs became the cool resorts of the summer of ’42, where clean water could be sipped for the asking. “There’s nothing new in town,” wrote the precocious Strong, “except the Croton Water, which is all full of tadpoles and animalculae, and which moreover flows through an aqueduct which I hear was used as a necessary by all the Hibernian vagabonds who worked upon it. I shall drink no Croton for some time to come. Jehiel Post has drunk some of it and is in dreadful apprehensions of breeding bullfrogs internally.” (The following year, when his father had a bathroom installed in the house, the young Strong felt much better about Croton water: “I’ve led rather an amphibious life for the last week, paddling in the bathing tub every night and constantly making new discoveries in the art and mystery of ablution. A real luxury, that bathing apparatus is.”)

The elder Hone sampled the water for himself: “Clear it is, sweet and soft, for to be in the fashion I drank a tumbler of it and found it all these. … [This] wholesome temperance beverage [is] well calculated to cool the palates and quench the thirst of the New Yorkers, and to diminish the losses of the fire insurance companies.”

By October Croton water was ready to be piped to customers. Spectacular fountains shooting Croton water high into the air had been erected at Union Square (near the old Thirteenth Street reservoir) and City Hall Park, and Friday, the fourteenth, was set for a great celebration. From midmorning to late afternoon politicians, soldiers, firemen, engineers, and assorted celebrities paraded through the city. With the big fountain playing backdrop, a choir of two hundred sang a George Pope Morris ode:

After two centuries without, the city had finally gotten its “abundant supply of pure and wholesome Water.” The lingering echo of “no well in the fort” faded to a misty memory of Old New York; and Manahata, “the place encircled by joyous, sparkling waters,” became the place endowed with good water of its own.

A century and a half later, New York’s 7.5 million people use a billion and a half gallons of water a day, mainly from the vast Catskill and Delaware systems, completed during the twentieth century. Though it is threatened now by suburbanization, the Croton system, expanded after 1891 with a new aqueduct, dam, and reservoirs, still delivers 150 million of those gallons to the lips of New Yorkers. No other American city drinks from so venerable a source.