Manhattan’s Water Came From Forty-One Miles Away, With No Pumps

By the early nineteenth century, the streams and ponds that once covered Manhattan had mostly been filled in and built over. What remained was overused — drinking water, industry, and sewage, frequently the same water.

The result was disease. The 1832 cholera epidemic sent the rich fleeing the city and killed the poor by the thousands. Three years later a fire burned down seven hundred houses, including original Dutch dwellings, and there wasn’t water to fight it.

The city needed clean water and it needed it desperately.

The Croton Aqueduct was built between 1837 and 1842 — forty-one miles from the dammed Croton River down to reservoirs in Manhattan. At the time, it was considered a wonder of the world.

Here’s the engineering that still impresses me. It had no pumps. The whole thing was gravity-fed, on a slope of thirteen inches per mile. Thirteen inches. Over forty-one miles. Surveyed and dug by men with hand tools in the 1830s, and it worked.

The opening was a gala. They lowered a small boat, the *Croton Maid*, into the tunnel at the northernmost point with four people aboard, and it rode the first flow of water down from upstate. The trip took two days.

The receiving reservoir sat between 79th and 86th Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues — land eventually absorbed into Central Park. There was another where Bryant Park and the main branch of the New York Public Library stand now.

The Old Croton was retired in 1955 — the city’s water now comes from the Catskill and Delaware systems, as far as 125 miles out. Most of the old aqueduct is forgotten and unused today. But some of the gatehouses are still standing along the route, and people walk past them constantly without any idea what they are. There’s one at 113th and Amsterdam.

The High Bridge was part of it.