Robert Sullivan / November 10, 2022
UNDERWATER
The Towns at the Bottom of New York City’s Reservoirs
Lucy Sante’s new book uncovers the story of New York’s pursuit of water, and the homes and communities destroyed in the process.
One of the ways New York City set itself apart from the rest of the world as an economic capital in the twentieth century was by setting itself apart from its water supply. Proximity to fresh water is an age-old problem for human settlements; as cities consume, they (sorry) excrete things too—cumulatively, in the form of sewage and solid waste, which taint that most sensitive local resource, water. The famous first water source for lower Manhattan’s Dutch and English colonists was the Collect Pond, funky by the end of the eighteenth century (“a common sewer,” said a resident). Aaron Burr owned a reservoir downtown, which he ran as a subscription service for the wealthy, though the project fell to the wayside as his affiliated corporation, Chase Bank, increased Burr’s cashflow. The city’s growth demanded water from elsewhere.
Lucy Sante’s book,
Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water, begins with the first big siphoning of waters outside of city bounds, the Croton reservoir system, created by flooding what had been, in the words of one visitor at the time, “a remarkably healthful region.” The surveyor on the project believed the water supply would be “inexhaustible,” but the more water New Yorkers got, the more they consumed. (One culprit: the flushing toilet, implemented shortly after the Croton system’s 1842 opening; even though sewage systems weren’t implemented for a decade, wealthy homes flushed anyway.) By 1868, New York was consuming 124 gallons of water per day person, compared to London’s 42. Politicians debated, then discarded, the idea of metering water use and instead just built more reservoirs, farther north in the Catskill Mountains—which meant flooding even more land to the north, moving more farms and lives.
Having lived for decades in the reservoir zone, Sante aims “to give an account of the human costs, an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.” In contrast to the more exhaustive accounts of the system, like David Soll’s
Empire of Water and Diane Galusha’s
Liquid Assets,
Nineteen Reservoirs—begun during the 2020 lockdown as
a series of pieces for Places Journal—is a meditation, a forensic accounting of the damage the reservoir system did and how it still resonates. Sante is expert in the excavation of neglected and buried histories: Her books
Low Life, a survey of the fabric of turn-of-the-century New York, and
Evidence, an examination of the tragically banal crime scene photos made in New York between 1914 and 1918, make her the ideal archaeologist of the hidden thefts and forgotten land grabs in the hills north of New York City.
And as the book traces New York’s relentless pursuit of water, it’s also a reminder of the fragility of that infrastructure. The city may not always be able to rely on the lands to its north for its needs. “New York, like other cities, is filled with people who have no idea where their water comes from and are only occasionally made aware that it is a precious and very finite resource that will become scarce again one day—perhaps quite soon,” Sante writes. “By then, there will be no untapped mountain valleys to draw from.”
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.” I thought it was just a comment on NYC, until I learned about a little town my family had known, disappearing under the waves. NYC’s drinking water is so clear, you can still see a number of the towns. I wonder how many roofs are appearing above the surface…
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