“How much water does it take to quench our thirst?” Mercer asked.
“And bathe you? And flush your toilets? Start with 1.4 billion gallons every day.”
I could tell from Mike’s pensive expression that his fascination with history was driving his need to know more about this dig.
“I’m missing something here. When the island of Manhattan was settled in the seventeenth century-when they kicked the Indians off to the mainland-weren’t those Dutchmen smart enough to know they needed something to drink?”
“Sure, they knew they were completely surrounded by salt water, Mike. But it wasn’t so much a problem a few hundred years back,” Golden said. “The major settlements were all on the southern end of the island, as you’re probably aware.”
Most New Yorkers were familiar with the tale that Mannahatta had been purchased from the Lenape Indians by the West India Company for sixty guilders-the equivalent of twenty-four dollars. New Amsterdam was colonized close to the tip of the waterfront, and the population pushed northward slowly over the next two centuries.
“In those days, there were a lot of freshwater streams and brooks all over the island,” Golden went on. “Sherman’s Creek up in Washington Heights, Harlem Creek, Lispenard Meadows. And there were several kills-like the Great Kill, right at Forty-second Street, and the Saw Kill in Central Park.”
“Yeah, we happen to know some of the kills pretty well,” Mike said, looking over at Mercer. The Dutch word for “channels” had given its name to inlets and waterways all throughout the New York harbor.
“The greatest natural feature of Manhattan was probably the Fresh Water Pond. Seventy acres of perfectly pure spring-fed waters. Added to the neighborhood wells that were dug near many of the residences and the cisterns that folks filled with rainwater, it seemed like more than enough for everybody.”
“Fresh Water Pond? Never heard of it,” Mike said.
“How about the Collect?” Golden replied. “That’s what it was called when the English took over. Kolck is Dutch for a small body of water.”
Mike shrugged. “So where is it today?”
Golden pointed to me. “You work in the courthouse, Alex? One hundred Centre Street?”
“Yes.”
“Well, right about there. The pond covered most of the area east of Broadway, from Chambers to Canal streets. Your offices were built right on top of the Collect.”
That acreage now encompassed the grid of concrete government buildings in lower Manhattan, from City Hall to Federal Plaza to all of the civil and criminal court structures that exist today-the ones the original city planners had called the Halls of Justice.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mike said. “Why build over a water source when the stuff was so scarce? Did it dry up?”
“Easiest to say a combination of population expansion and sanitary implosion did in whatever fresh water there had been. The wells were stressed by the growing numbers of people arriving in the city every day, and it didn’t take long for the streams to become putrefied by carcasses of dead animals and human waste. Totally polluted,” Golden said. “Then throw in some plagues-it was yellow fever in the 1790s that caught the city fathers’ attention about clean water, followed by a typhoid outbreak from time to time. And the cholera epidemic of the 1830s that got them off their asses.”
It embarrassed me to realize I had never given much thought to these things. I knew that cholera patients developed an insatiable need for drink, and that ironically, the disease is caused by exposure to contaminated water in the first place.
“You know how many New Yorkers died of cholera in 1832?” Golden asked.
“No idea,” I said.
“More than thirty-five hundred people. Thousands more fled to the country just to avoid the spread of the disease. There simply wasn’t any clean water in the city by that point in time. Not a drop.”
“So what did they do to get it?” Mercer asked.
“Same thing the Romans did, three hundred years before the birth of Christ,” Golden said. “It’s been our model for all this time-the eleven ancient aqueducts built by Roman slaves, all working from the basics of gravity and the downhill flow of water, brought millions of gallons a day into that city from rivers and lakes in the faraway hills.”
“So we’ve got the Croton watershed,” Mike said, referring to what was today a twelve-reservoir system, created in Westchester County by harnessing the Croton River.
“Exactly.”
“But that’s almost fifty miles north of the city,” Mercer said.
“It’s a piker, compared to the distance covered by the original Italian aqueducts,” Golden said. “The Croton River starts much farther north, in Dutchess County. Its watershed covers more than three hundred and sixty square miles, capable of putting out four hundred million gallons a day.”
Mike gave out a low whistle. “And what gets it to Gotham?”
“First they had to create a plan to dam the river, by flooding acres and acres of homes and farmland in the area. Breaking the hearts and spirits of everyone who had settled in that fertile part of the state. Just like the government does today-pay them a few bucks and claim eminent domain.”
Golden continued, “Miles of pipeline were laid, zigzagging south through Westchester County, cutting through rock ridges and valleys, water being forced down the hills by the sheer force of gravity and then entering Manhattan in very dramatic fashion via the High Bridge.”
That fabulous structure, the oldest remaining span connecting the island to the mainland, must have been spectacular when it was built in the 1840s. It had sported fifteen of the same elegant arches that characterized the Roman aqueducts and had carried water to New York County over the Harlem River.
“How big were those tunnels?” Mike asked.
“Only eight feet wide.”
“And how was the water distributed once it reached Manhattan?” I asked.
“Well,” said Golden, “it flowed into the Receiving Reservoir, which looked like a giant fortress, capable of holding one hundred and eighty million gallons of water.”
“But where was that?”
“It was built on York Hill, Alex. You know where that is? The land all belonged to one gentleman, a fellow named William Mathews, and it was pretty prime real estate, both then and now.”
Mercer laughed, but the name meant nothing to me. “A brother, if I’m not mistaken. Deacon of the African Union Methodist Church, back in the 1840s. That neighborhood was the Harlem of its day.”
“Where?” I asked.
Golden answered, “Smack-dab in the middle of Central Park. The Receiving Reservoir fed fresh water to Manhattan until 1940, when it was drained and completely filled in to create the Great Lawn.”
“So recently-just a few generations ago? That doesn’t seem possible.”
“Take it one step further. The water flowed downtown from that facility to what was called the Distributing Reservoir. That’s where it was provided to homes and businesses in the city. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Imagine that where the New York Public Library now stands was once another enormous fortification filled with water.”
“And it’s come to us that way for almost two centuries,” Mercer said.
Golden stroked his beak and nodded. “Croton sort of maxed out at the beginning of the twentieth century. So the engineers just kept digging farther north, reaching into the mountains above the city, tapping into the Catskills and the Delaware River.”
Mike said, “I got a whole new respect for all the liquid gold.”
The door to the shack opened and a workman stuck his head in and called out, interrupting Mike, “Hey, George! You got an all-clear in the shaft.”