by Sam Roberts
Whatever the rationale, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that the implacable pattern would engender “relentless monopoly.” Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and whose Chelsea estate would be intersected by the proposed web of roadways, accused the commissioners of tyrannies against property and “the natural inequities of the ground.” He added for good measure: “These are men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.” Henry James would later weigh in by denouncing the map as a “primal topographic curse,” and Lewis Mumford would label the monotony of interminable streets as “blank imbecility.”
But the grid also had its defenders, and not only among prospective developers looking to make a quick buck. In Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (2004), Phillip Lopate wrote that the matrix is an existential metaphor that inspired Piet Mondrian, Sol Lewitt, and Agnes Martin, and radiates “power to invoke clarity, resonance, and pleasure through its very repetitions.” Rem Koolhaas, in his Delirious New York (1994), recalled that while the street commissioners themselves acknowledged that the grid was created to facilitate the “buying, selling, and improving of real estate,” in retrospect, “it is the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization; the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, nonexistent.” In 1811, though, for some New Yorkers the land was not unoccupied. There was nothing conjectural about the people who already lived there or their activities. The pending imposition of the grid threatened to trample a century or more of their heritage.
The first recorded member of the Stuyvesant clan to make a name for himself in North America was Peter, the son of a Calvinist minister. He arrived in 1647, when the Dutch West India Company sent him to govern New Netherland at the age of thirty-seven. The Stuyvesants would become fruitful and multiply, marrying Beekmans, Livingstons, Winthrops, Astors, Ten Broecks, Fishes, Rutherfurds, and Wainwrights (including ancestors of the singer Rufus). Peter was neither Mr. Personality nor an exemplar of Dutch tolerance—he was so despotic, in fact, that in 1664, when he attempted to muster New Amsterdamers to man the ramparts and defend their town against the British navy, they preferred to surrender instead. Still, during Stuyvesant’s watch, the population of the colony quadrupled and, in contrast to the anarchic administration of his predecessor, a law-and-order mind-set reigned; and the economy flourished sufficiently to lure London mercantile interests who recognized its vast potential as a port and a source of furs and other raw materials.
Stuyvesant’s farm, or bowery, extended from what is now Cooper Square north to East Twenty-Third Street. It was bordered on the west by Fourth Avenue (then Bowery Road) and on the east by a line that wiggled between First Avenue and Avenue D. After Stuyvesant died in 1672, much of the estate (in what is now the East Village) remained with the family. Around 1797, his great-grandson, Petrus Stuyvesant III, mapped a street grid on the undeveloped land and aligned it due north. Early in the nineteenth century, the western perimeter became known as Bowery Village. It developed into a popular greenmarket because it was just outside the city limits, meaning farmers could sell their produce tax-free. The private grid included the narrow lane that led from Bowery Road to the first Peter Stuyvesant’s mansion. Petrus’s son named the lane Stuyvesant Street (between Second and Third Avenues and Ninth and Tenth Streets) in honor of the family’s patriarch.
When Petrus III’s daughter Elizabeth got engaged, her father built the elegant house at No. 21 as a wedding present for her and her fiancé, Nicholas Fish, a Revolutionary War veteran who, at eighteen, was the youngest commissioned major in the United States Army and a personal friend of Alexander Hamilton’s. In 1797, the city hired Casimir Goerck and Joseph François Mangin to conduct an official cartographical survey. Goerck died a year later, but Mangin finished the project. He presented his engraved map to the Common Council a few months after he had won the competition to design the new City Hall. Mangin derived part of his map from the lattice of village streets conceived by Petrus Stuyvesant. This work provided a foundation for what the commissioners would adopt in 1811.
The grid was the great leveler, as Clement Moore lamented. Man-made cross-hatched gullies that would someday become paved streets and avenues were gouged into an island whose name has been translated from the Lenape language to mean “land of many hills.” The earth-shattering shifts left houses literally high and dry atop what the road builders had transformed into incongruous buttes, sparing few property owners. Among them was Henry Brevoort (a major landowner, politician, and literary companion of Washington Irving) and his heirs, who managed to fend off the opening of East Eleventh Street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, after appeals that inspired this poem in Harper’s by Gerald J. Tucker:
He fought all their maps, and he fought their reports
Corporation, surveyors, commissioners, courts.
He hired his lawyers well learned in the law;
The plans and the statutes to fragments they tore.
But before all was through, Mr. Brevoort expires,
And calmly he sleeps at St. Mark’s with his sires.
But this of the Dutchman’s good pluck we can say—
Eleventh Street’s not opened through to this day.
Another partial victor against the grid was the Stuyvesant family. Petrus III had died by 1811, when the street commissioner’s plan took effect. By then, the family was headed by his son, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, who, fortuitously, two years earlier had married the daughter of one of the commissioners, John Rutherfurd. The family received a dispensation, perhaps with some help from the clergy of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, the Episcopal chapel consecrated in 1799 on property donated by Petrus III, and where Governor Stuyvesant was buried. The commissioners agreed to a compromise—they would shorten the street to just over one block, but would not obliterate it, “for the accommodation of a large and respectable Congregation attending St. Mark’s Church as well as the owners and occupants of several large and commodious dwelling houses.” All those owners just happened to be named Stuyvesant. (In 1970, the death of Peter Winthrop Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, who owned a portion of Peter Stuyvesant’s original purchase fronting the Bowery and Fourth Avenue, ended what may have been the city’s longest continuous ownership of property by a single family.)
Petrus III’s daughter, Elizabeth Fish, meanwhile, had given birth to a son, the first of a long line of Hamilton Fishes, and in 1824 the couple hosted the Marquis de Lafayette on his American tour. Nicholas died in 1833, Elizabeth in 1854. No. 21 remained in the family for decades, but, as the neighborhood lost its luster around the time of the Civil War, it was operated as a rooming house, and by the turn of the century No. 27, two doors away, had become what was euphemistically known as a disorderly house. (Since a police officer was often stationed outside the door, the madam testified, not only was it anything but disorderly but, she claimed, hers “was the only respectable house in the block.”) In 1964, what had become known as the Stuyvesant-Fish house sold for about $140,000 to an advertising executive, F. Philip Geraci, who restored it to a private residence and rehabilitated the slate roof, red-brick chimneys, two arched dormers, original ironwork, and obligatory stoop. Thirty years later, Geraci donated the house to the Cooper Union, the college of art and engineering, which reserved it as a residence for its president and family.
Today, 21 Stuyvesant Street has been restored and is the home of the president of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. (George Samoladas)
9
THE HIGH BRIDGE
The High Bridge is the oldest connecting Manhattan to the mainland and was originally built to carry water from the Croton Reservoir. (Moses King, ca. 1892)
Perhaps because they were never more than a mile or so from a river, the early occupants of Manhattan apparently took their water supply for granted. But while beer and tea remained the preferred beverages of the populace, making those drinks
required a dependable source of fresh water, a demand soon compounded, too, as epidemics and fires swept the colony. It took more than two centuries for New Yorkers to devise and adopt a solution, which remains a public works paradigm, even if only one major vestige of the innovative project is still visible within the city limits.
In the late 1650s, the usually pragmatic Peter Stuyvesant ignored a request from the city’s burgomasters to sink New Amsterdam’s first public well at the foot of Broadway. And in the summer of 1664, the city fathers made another shortsighted and fateful decision. In what amounted to their first (and last) environmental review, the burgomasters and schepens rejected a joint petition from the owner of the Red Lion Brewery, near what is now Beaver Street downtown, and his neighbor, a carpenter, to prohibit the operation of a newly opened tannery on the property between them. The petitioners argued that the toxic tannery would pollute their private wells. The government’s license to pollute New Amsterdam’s water supply, essentially because everyone else had been doing it, turned out to be among the final legacies of forty years of Dutch rule. On the very day that the government decided against the tannery’s neighbors, ominous news reached the city that although England and Holland were temporarily at peace, a British fleet had sailed for the Americas.
The British built the first public wells. But for the next century or so, New Yorkers depended on potable water largely from the hand-cranked Tea Water Pump at Pearl and Chatham Streets, the dwindling number of safe private wells, and casks imported from suburban springs. The primary source for much of lower Manhattan’s pumped water was becoming tainted beyond human consumption, a condition brought home with each new epidemic. Much of the aquifer drew water from the Collect, a forty-eight-acre pond north of the Common where City Hall would be built early in the nineteenth century. The Collect enjoyed a relatively short distinction as the Fresh Water Pond, when a stream along what became Canal Street flowed toward both rivers, which merged in the pond at high tide. The proliferation of nearby tanneries, breweries, slaughterhouses, laundries, and free-roaming pigs transformed the Collect by 1785 into what a letter writer to the New York Journal described bluntly as “a very sink and common sewer.” But it was only as a relief project in response to the Embargo Act that, in 1808, the city government hired unemployed sailors and stevedores to finally level the surrounding hills and fill in the pond (it’s now the site of Foley Square).
A potential longer-term solution that had emerged before the War for Independence, a revolutionary steam-powered pump and reservoir proposed in 1774 by Christopher Colles, an Irish-born engineer, didn’t survive the British occupation. After the war, the fear of future epidemics and, perhaps, sheer greed, fostered an unlikely collaboration that solved the water problem temporarily, on paper, at least. While it’s common knowledge that Aaron Burr got the best of Alexander Hamilton in their fatal 1804 duel, what’s less known is that Burr hustled Hamilton in one of their last convoluted legal and political collaborations—a case of duplicity and self-fulfilling failure.
The on-again, off-again rivals temporarily joined forces to support Burr’s legislation in Albany to charter the Manhattan Company, a private utility that would pipe fresh water from the Bronx River and deliver it downtown. Its prospectus was pure hyperbole. The company never sought sources of wells beyond Manhattan. It tapped the same tainted aquifer and delivered water through hollowed pine logs. It also built a reservoir on Chambers and Centre Streets—four Doric columns supporting a majestic sculpture of Oceanus, the sea god, whose urn was overflowing with a bountiful supply of libation. Not bountiful enough, though. Engineers recommended that the company be prepared to supply as much as three million gallons a day. Instead, the reservoir could hold only 132,000 gallons. (Its original octagonal design prefigured the logo of its corporate descendant, JPMorgan Chase, although the trademark’s designers said that was coincidental.)
Burr had nothing against water. His secret priority, though, was liquid assets of another sort entirely. Once the state legislature approved his charter, he took advantage of an overlooked provision that allowed him to divert all but one hundred thousand dollars of the two million dollars the Manhattan Company had raised to establish a competitor to Hamilton’s Bank of New York. (“He has lately by a trick established a bank,” Hamilton wrote of Burr in 1801, “a perfect monster in its principle; but a very convenient instrument of profit and influence.”) To protect its state charter, Burr’s Bank of the Manhattan Company would ceremoniously pump water as late as the early twentieth century. The bank flourished, but so did the summer epidemics that sent Manhattanites fleeing to their country homes in Greenwich Village and that had prompted warnings from Dr. Joseph Browne, who happened to be Burr’s brother-in-law, that a better source like the Bronx River was needed because “the health of a city depends more on its water, than all the rest of the eatables and drinkables put together.”
In 1832, the City Council finally launched an inquiry that, like the street grid and the Erie Canal, galvanized the development of Manhattan beyond any urban planner’s expectations. Cholera and yellow fever outbreaks, coupled with the catastrophic Great Fire of 1837 and the Manhattan Company’s failure to supply sufficient potable water, triggered construction of the innovative Croton Reservoir system.
The Croton Aqueduct, as it came to be known, was publicly owned. Instead of drawing on the Bronx River, it tapped a series of lakes, reservoirs, and aqueducts in northern Westchester. The project director was John B. Jervis, whose schooling had ended when he was fifteen and who had no formal engineering training. But Jervis had learned on the job, starting as a teenager clearing timber for the Erie Canal, then building other waterways and railroads before securing his position as the aqueduct project’s chief engineer. The project took only five years from the first shovelful of earth to the first flow of water.
The city’s water came from a reservoir that covered four hundred acres and could hold five hundred million gallons of Croton River water, created by the first major masonry dam in the United States. The flow forty-one miles south from near Ossining was driven entirely by gravity, which is one reason that so many nineteenth-century walk-up tenements in Manhattan were limited to about six stories—the maximum height that the water could reach without being raised by mechanical pumps. It was delivered to the 150-million-gallon Receiving Reservoir in Central Park (which would be filled in around 1930 and become part of the Great Lawn). From there, it coursed downtown to the fortresslike twenty-million-gallon Egyptian-style Distributing Reservoir on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street (which would be razed in 1899 and replaced by the New York Public Library).
Water began flowing on the morning of June 22, 1842—just enough to float a sixteen-foot-long, four-person boat. It carried the water commissioners and engineers at two miles per hour, starting that morning where the aqueduct originated and arriving the following afternoon at the Harlem River across from Manhattan. When the city officially turned on the water, on October 14, 1842, New Yorkers celebrated with more gusto than at any time since 1783, when the last British troops finally evacuated the city after seven years of occupation.
President John Tyler attended the official opening of the ceremonial spigot, which touched off a fifty-foot-high gusher from a fountain in City Hall Park and an ocean of praise. “Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water,” the diarist Philip Hone exclaimed. “Water! Water! Is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses!” The neoclassical winged bronze Angel of the Waters sculpture later erected at Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace endowed the miracle of ample potable water with a spiritual symbolism that few New Yorkers who had endured droughts, disease, and foul-tasting brackish water considered the least bit sacrilegious.
With New York’s population expanding exponentially, the demand for water outpaced the supply. In 1858, engineers began turning a former swamp in the city into a forty-foot-deep, billion-gallon reservoir
called Manhattan Lake. Central Park was already being fashioned around it, so engineers designed this additional reservoir to follow the natural contours of the land (in the man-made park) instead of building it at right angles like the Receiving Reservoir (it would be decommissioned in 1993 and named for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). A larger New Croton Aqueduct opened in 1890; fifteen years later, the legislature authorized the city to begin building an entirely separate water supply system west of the Hudson River in the Catskills. Today, the Catskill-Delaware River systems supply about 97 percent of the city’s water.
The Central Park Reservoir still exists. So do a few of the nineteenth-century stone gatehouses in the park and on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that enclosed valves to regulate the flow of water. But time has expunged virtually all of the Old Croton Aqueduct’s other aboveground features in New York City. The oldest visible remnant is often overlooked and rarely even associated with John Jervis’s prodigious public works project. Moreover, it also holds another distinction: it is the oldest bridge linking Manhattan to the mainland of the United States.
Jervis had already designed a 536-foot-long granite arched bridge to carry the aqueduct over Sing Sing Kill, near Ossining. The bigger challenge facing him was how to convey the water pipes across the Harlem River Valley to Manhattan from what was then Westchester (and now the Bronx). Jervis favored an inverted siphon carried on a low bridge, only fifty feet above the river with a single arch, as the cheapest and simplest alternative (although it would have had to rise up the opposite slope, with a resulting loss in water pressure).
“The object was economy,” Jervis wrote in his memoir, particularly since at the time “there was no navigation on this part of the river.” Engineers had already awarded a contract for a low bridge when local property owners protested (land was acquired from, among others, the estate of Eliza Jumel, the widow of Aaron Burr). Jervis accused them of being less concerned with maritime commerce than with seeking “an ornament to the district” that would enhance the value of their holdings. But they persuaded the legislature to mandate a minimum height of one hundred feet from the river’s high-water mark to the underside of the arches at their crown so as not to impede future navigation (which was largely blocked at the time anyway by Macomb’s Dam and mills at Kingsbridge). Jervis considered burrowing under the river, which he also estimated would be more economical, but, as the protracted construction of the Thames Tunnel in London had already demonstrated, was still experimental. He settled on the inverted siphon as a temporary solution so as not to impede the pipeline’s progress. Jervis had estimated that the bridge would take four years to build and be finished in 1843. That was before he found himself coping with a riverbed that included mud and sand rather than the solid rock that he had anticipated. But by 1848 and nearly a million dollars later (about twenty-five million in today’s dollars), Jervis had constructed a majestic 1,450-foot-long bridge that soared 140 feet (a plan originally proposed in 1832 by Colonel DeWitt Clinton of the Army Corps of Engineers, the former governor’s son). Supported by fifteen granite masonry arches, the span carried two thirty-six-inch-diameter pipes that could funnel thirty-six million gallons of water a day across the 620-foot-wide river. Once it reached Manhattan, the water flowed through cast-iron pipes in a brick conduit crosstown to Central Park down what became Amsterdam Avenue.