Sections

Pre 1834

Browne & Burr

An Act

Burr’s Bank

Manhattan Company

Tapped Out

First Croton

Second Croton

Delaware

1938 NYC Water Supply

New York City delivers one billion gallons of clean water to more than nine million people, including eight million city residents. Managed by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), New York City's water is delivered from a watershed that extends more than 125 miles from the city and comprises 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes. Approximately 7,000 miles of water mains, tunnels, and aqueducts bring water to homes and businesses throughout the five boroughs, and 7,400 miles of sewer lines take wastewater to 14 in-city treatment plants. Additionally, 95% of the water supply is moved through the network by gravity.

New York City is famous for having great-tasting, clean drinking water. The DEP tests water from over 1,200 sampling locations throughout the city more than 900 times per day, 27,000 times per month, and 330,000 times each year. More than 230,000 additional tests are conducted in the watershed annually. This ensures the city’s water is free from dangerous contaminants and safe to drink.

“Ebb & Flow: Tapping into the History of New York City’s Water” examines over 200 years of the city’s efforts to deliver clean water to residents and how the city built such an impressive water system. The outer walls of the exhibit trace New York City’s pursuit of a safe and reliable water source, and the trials faced along the way. The story of the Manhattan Company is highlighted in the center, shedding light on a most tumultuous time in the city’s water history.

Native Americans in what is now New York City didn’t have to think too much about clean water. Manhattan was a wild land with natural terrain including fresh water streams and ponds. Early Europeans, settling at the southern tip of Manhattan, tapped wells for drinking water and collected rain water for livestock, cooking, and to make beer, the preferred beverage of the day.

Private well water couldn’t sustain the growing population of the city for long, nor could the city’s water withstand the growing contamination from improper garbage and waste disposal. By 1677, the city government stepped in with a public well that soon, too, was insufficient. Residents were required to dig wells or pay a fine. Eventually they were expected to contribute to costs of a neighborhood well, which was part of a public well system.

Poor city sanitation continued to wreak havoc on the water supply, and epidemic disease became commonplace. The direct link between poor water quality and disease was not yet fully understood, but scientists were beginning to notice a connection between the two. As a result, the government put sanitation laws into effect with varying degrees of success.  

Poor sanitation continued to wreak havoc on the water supply, and epidemic disease was commonplace. The direct link between poor water quality and disease was not yet fully understood, but scientists were beginning to notice a connection between the two. As a result, the government put sanitation laws into effect with varying degrees of success.

With the groundwater in such poor condition, New Yorkers sought a new source of clean water in the mid-18th century. “Tea water,” superior to well water, was carried in from springs and wells at the edge of town for those individuals able to pay for the luxury. Carting and selling fresh water soon became an industry, but not everyone could afford this service. The city made its best attempt to keep up the free, but taxed public wells largely to fight fires. Most New Yorkers did not drink straight well water; rather, they boiled well water and mixed it with other ingredients—mainly alcohol—which was in greater supply. Tea and hot chocolate consumption were also on the rise; anything but straight water.

After the Revolutionary War, New York City, growing in population and industry, languished without fresh water. Fires, drought, and deforestation had a large impact on groundwater. Sanitation and well maintenance declined, and a famed tea water pump lost popularity. The Fresh Water Pond (often called the Collect Pond), used for drinking water, began filling up with dead animals and waste from laundry, furnaces, potteries, and tanneries.

Epidemics returned, and while exactly how diseases such as yellow fever and cholera spread was yet unknown, it soon became clear that clean water was vital for good health. The death toll and tensions ran high. New Yorkers pressed government to bring clean water to the city as a first priority. When it seemed delivering fresh water from Manhattan was no longer a viable option, the Common Council, the city’s authority on water matters, received a proposal to bring in water from farther afield.

Joseph Browne, a doctor from Westchester, believed availability of fresh water was vital to the health of the city. In July 1798, he proposed piping in fresh water from “the River Bronx.” This plan was priced at $200,000 (over $5.5 million today). Dr. Browne proposed that a private enterprise operating in the best interest of the public might be the best way to quickly bring in the much-needed clean water supply, while accommodating the city’s inability to cover such costs.

In his proposal, Browne recommended a company that would issue 2,000 shares of stock at $100 per share with no individual owning more than one share. In return, the company would provide 300,000 gallons of water each day in a way that  permitted all the water to  be diverted to any location for use in firefighting. Unused water from the daily allotment could be used to clean the streets. Households would be charged $10 per year in exchange for 30 gallons of water piped directly into each house per day; or households could pay $2 per year to forgo hooking into the water system but retain protection from fire. The return on investment of the shareholders was expected to be 13% after 10 years. 

The Common Council continued to accept plans for delivering clean water to the city, but made no decision until the summer’s bout with Yellow Fever came to an end in November. Ultimately, the Common Council decided to move forward with a variation on Browne’s proposal. Opposed to a private company taking on the project, as it feared the company would gain while the city suffered, the Council proposed state legislation that authorized taxes, loans or auction sales to fund the project. Aaron Burr – attorney, war officer, and politician – having previously held the positions of State Attorney General and US Senator, was newly elected to head the New York State Assembly with a wave of fellow anti-Federalists in the spring of 1797. Burr was also Browne’s brother-in-law.

As the  head of the New York State Assembly in 1799, Burr was responsible for seeing the bill through the legislative process. Newspapers published conflicting opinions on the quantity and quality of water in the Bronx, as well as the costs of bringing water to New York City. Burr’s New York Assembly delegation found it difficult to prepare the bill for a full vote. He pressured other committeemen to allow a private company to run the project as Dr. Browne suggested. He reportedly even intercepted correspondence and excluded delegates from meetings to press his case.

Burr was granted a 10-day leave to return to Manhattan from Albany to get a better sense of the opinions of the Common Council and the public. On February 22, 1799, he visited Mayor Richard Varick with five other notable citizens, including his political rival, Alexander Hamilton (former US Secretary of the Treasury and founder of the Bank of New York). This group convinced the Mayor and Council to endorse Burr’s plan. Hamilton, in particular, made the case for a private water company, fearing the city and state would be unable to pay for the venture. The proposed plan was for a private company, incorporated by the state, to be “capitalized at $1 million in $50 shares,” of which the city would be entitled to a third. Those shares could be purchased through taxes, loans, or state auctions. Seven directors would manage the company, six of whom would be elected plus one city official. This proposal won over the city officials, but Burr had a different idea about who would manage the company.

Meanwhile, Burr gathered public petitions to send back to the Assembly in support of the private company. James Fairlie introduced Burr’s petitions in the Assembly on March 27, 1799, along with a draft bill: “An act for supplying the city of New-York with pure and wholesome water.” Instead of the typical debate and full vote, Burr arranged for Fairlie’s bill to go to a special committee of three, who approved it the next morning. The bill moved to the State Senate, and on March 30, Burr met with his friend Thomas Morris to help get the bill passed through a similar committee process. The bill officially became law on April 2, 1799.

The company the State Legislature authorized was not what the city had agreed to, and it was unlike any other company in America. The Manhattan Company would be capitalized at $2 million, double what Hamilton had proposed and only a small fraction of its shares would be available to the city. The number of elected directors increased from six to 12, diminishing the power of the city officials. This “water company” was not required to repair streets after laying pipe, it could set rates for service as it saw fit, and it was not obliged to provide free water for firefighting. Furthermore, it was granted a perpetual charter if it succeeded in delivering fresh water for the citizens of New York within 10 years.

What made this company most unique, however, was a small clause in the ninth paragraph of the charter:

And it be further enacted, 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 monied transactions or operations not inconsistent with the constitution and laws of this state or of the United States, for the sole benefit of the said company.

This clause allowed the company to invest its surplus capital and engage in lawful financial transactions of its choosing. Shortly after the water company’s founding, it opened an office of discount and deposit to direct the use of the company’s surplus capital and perform banking functions, including taking deposits and lending money. Ultimately, the company used only $100,000 of the authorized $2 million for the water system. The rest was diverted to start what would become the Bank of the Manhattan Company, which opened at 40 Wall Street in September 1799. In effect, it provided Burr with a Republican bank to rival Hamilton’s Federalist Bank of New York.

The Manhattan Company wasted no time in getting started. Its charter was delivered to the Common Council on April 10, 1799, a week after the bill was signed into law, and the company convened its first meeting the next day. Officers decided against Dr. Browne’s costly Bronx River plan, which had already been approved by the city. Instead, because it would be fastest (and cheapest), the Board voted to use the already-polluted Collect Pond as the water supply. The Manhattan Company existed because of the outcry for clean water in the face of epidemics and fires, but it did not prioritize and thereby did not ultimately fulfill its purpose of providing fresh water.

The company used ground wells within the city, rather than bringing water from the Bronx. It placed ground wells in unsanitary locations and risked mixing sewage with fresh water. It built a waterworks next to the Collect Pond and used horses to work the pumps until they were replaced by a steam engine in 1803. The 100,000-gallon reservoir the company built instead of the planned million-gallon reservoir ensured it would never meet the needs of the growing city. Crudely hollowed out pine logs were used. The logs did not insulate well, and water froze in the winter. They were also easily pierced by tree roots, which caused backups in the system.

Only a small number of households participated. During the height of a yellow fever outbreak in the summer of 1803, the company suspended water service for two weeks for well repairs, with some reporting outages of nine weeks. The number of households drinking Manhattan Company water dwindled.

Embroiled in a three-year legal battle with the city over payment for the Manhattan Company’s damage to the streets after laying pipes, Hamilton defended the company until he died in 1804 in a duel at the hands of the company’s creator (and sitting Vice President), Aaron Burr. Burr’s deception about his intentions to start a competitor bank with the Manhattan Company was one of the many disagreements between the two that eventually led to the duel. Burr’s career, in politics and otherwise, was all but over after that day. The company settled for $5,000 on a $6,881.14 bill. Burr’s relationship with the company had already been severed, as he was ousted in 1802 after his $48,000 loan from the company bank (to pay off old debts) grew to $120,000.

With exclusive water rights, the Manhattan Company continued as the only supplier of water until the 1840s. During this period, New York City suffered two major cholera epidemics. In 1832, cholera killed more than 3,500 people, and another 5,000 in 1849.

In the 1820s, the Common Council attempted once again to create a system to bring fresh water from the Bronx River. Civil engineer Canvass White completed a detailed feasibility survey in 1824, and the New York Water Works Company was created to build the system. The new company never began construction, as its plans conflicted with those of the New-York and Sharon Canal Company, which was chartered a year earlier to construct a canal between Connecticut and New York, and provide drinking water to New York City. The canal company later determined that bringing water from anywhere farther than the Croton River was too expensive. Many other surveys funded by the city came to the same conclusion. Finally, in the 1830s the city embarked on creating a reliable municipal water system, the Croton System.

After the Croton system opened, the Manhattan Company waterworks emptied out and was torn down in the early 20th century. To maintain its state charter, water was pumped at the site everyday by a bank employee until 1923. The Bank of the Manhattan Company is the earliest predecessor of today’s JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. In 1965, Chase Manhattan was granted a federal charter that was no longer dependent on providing clean and wholesome water.

By the late 1800s, the Croton Aqueduct could not keep up with the city’s population, which had tripled to more than one million residents between 1850 and 1870. Modern plumbing and changing notions of cleanliness required more water.

Between 1870 and 1905, the city planned and built additional reservoirs and a second aqueduct from the Croton watershed that was three times the size and much deeper underground than the first. The New Croton Aqueduct remains in service today and consists of 12 reservoirs and three controlled lakes in Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. It supplies 10% of the city’s water.

Unlike Manhattan, Brooklyn had ample fresh ground water for centuries. But, as population grew the well water supply was inadequate and Brooklyn imported water from Long Island and Queens. By the 1890s, this supply was insuffcient and the need for fresh, clean water compelled voters to approve the consolidation of the greater city of New York in 1898.

In 1905, New York began work on the Catskill System to supplement the water supply from the Croton Aqueducts. The Catskill System originates from a watershed in Delaware, Ulster, and Sullivan counties and supplies 40% of New York City’s water.

This map provides an excellent overview of the water supply system as it existed shortly before the 1939/1940 World’s Fair. It shows the reservoirs located in their watersheds north of the city, the rivers that are their primary water sources, and the routes of the aqueducts that carry the water south to the city. Absent from the map is the Cannonsville Reservoir and the 44 mile long West Delaware Tunnel that connects it to Rondout Reservoir and the rest of the Delaware system – projects that would not start until 1955. The East Delaware Reservoir (pictured top left) was eventually renamed Pepacton.

On Long Island, we see the Ridgewood Watershed, which, at the time, was still a source for water in parts of Queens and Brooklyn. In the mid-19th century, this watershed was developed for the Brooklyn Water Works by building a network of ponds, reservoirs and conduits that supplied water to Brooklyn. One of its major features was the Ridgewood Reservoir, which operated until 1959 when it was taken offline and held in reserve as a backup supply. Today it is no longer a source of drinking water for the city, and like many of the city’s retired reservoirs and water structures, it is now part of the New York City parks system.