Drinking Water

by James Salzman

  Most New Yorkers relied on these wells and the “Collect” (the anglicized pronunciation of the Kalch-Hook) for free drinking water. During this period, however, urbanization continued and further industrial and population growth were clearly in store. Sanitation, an ever-present problem in British cities, was becoming unmanageable. Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist visiting New York in 1748, observed, in a remark Rodney Dangerfield would have loved, that the well water was so terrible horses from out of town refused to drink it. The Collect, once the best source of drinking water on Manhattan, had become polluted by the tanneries and slaughterhouses on its banks. As the Commercial Advertiser reported in 1798:

  [The Collect] is a shocking hole, where all impure things center together and engender the worst of unwholesome productions; foul with excrement, frogspawn, and reptiles, that delicate pump is supplied. The water has grown worse manifestly within a few years. It is time to look out some other supply, and discontinue with use of a water growing less and less wholesome every day. … Can you bear to drink it on Sundays in the Summer time? It is so bad before Monday morning as to be very sickly and nauseating; and the larger the city grows the worse this evil will be.

  To those with an entrepreneurial spirit, the poor maintenance of the public wells and the increasingly disgusting state of the Collect posed not a problem but a business opportunity. People with means began to purchase water from springs outside of town and from deeper wells. The best known of these wells, located near the main settlement, became a popular source of water for tea and other kitchen uses. In a foreshadowing of bottled water’s future marketing of brands, different water pumps were favored over others. Indeed, a cottage industry developed around a pump operated by the Hardenbrook family, popularly known as the Tea Water Pump, which apparently was the Perrier of its time. With attractive landscaped gardens around the well, the Tea Water Pump became a popular attraction.

  The real value, though, came in water distribution. Water sold from the pump and other sources became generically known as Tea Water. “Tea Water Men” purchased water directly from pump owners and carted it throughout the city for sale in buckets and barrels at a healthy profit. By the middle of the eighteenth century, sale of Tea Water had become the best and dominant source of New York drinking water. As the American Gazetteer described at the time:

  Most of the people are supplied every day with fresh water, conveyed to their doors in casks, from a pump near the head of Queen street, which receives it from a spring almost a mile from the centre of the city. This well is about 20 feet deep and four feet diameter. The average quantity drawn daily from this remarkable well, is 110 hogheads of 130 gallons each.

  Twenty-four wholly separate distributers carted the water around the city. Purchasing a hogshead of water for six cents and selling bucketfuls at one cent a gallon, distributors had a profit margin of 2170 percent, an early example of just how much money could be made selling drinking water to individuals.

  The limitations of public wells and the Collect in providing clean water, growing dependence on Tea Water sales, and general concern over the availability of water to fight fires made clear the need for a serious rethinking of New York’s water supply. Thus, in 1774, the city approved an ambitious plan for a steam engine–powered waterworks that would pump water throughout the city in aqueducts similar to those of Rome. To fund the public works, the city issued £11,400 of “Water Works Money.” Notes were printed with the text “payable on DEMAND, by the MAYOR, ALDERMEN, and COMMONALTY of the City of New-York, at the Office of Chamberlain of the said City.”

  Construction commenced, but the timing could not have been worse. As the colonies descended into the Revolutionary War, the British occupied the city and promptly destroyed the waterworks construction. Following the Revolutionary War, the newly independent government stumbled along for more than fifteen years trying to solve the water supply issues. Plans were proposed for public waterworks and carefully studied, but none were funded. Water from the Tea Water Pump grew increasingly poor in quality and increasingly high in price. Nor did public wells provide a more attractive option.

  Water Works notes were the first paper money issued by an American city.

  New York was not alone in its troubles. The challenge of providing safe drinking water confronted all of the new nation’s cities in the years following the Revolution. In 1793, a yellow fever epidemic shut down Philadelphia. Highly infectious, yellow fever was a death sentence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its victims suffering from fever, nausea, and jaundice from liver failure (hence the yellow appearance of the body and the name of the fever) before eventual death. For three months, the country’s capital and busiest shipping port was paralyzed. Almost half of the city, more than twenty thousand people, fled to escape the contagion. Imagine, for a moment, the hysteria that would ensue today if half of a major city’s population hurriedly left to avoid a rampant disease.

  Benjamin Franklin had already foreseen this danger. His last will and testament, read at the Philadelphia City Hall in 1790, had contained the following instructions of how his £100,000 bequest to the city should be spent.

  And having considered that the covering of the ground-plot of the city with buildings and pavements, which carry off most of the rain, and prevents its soaking into the Earth and renewing and purifying the Springs, whence the water of wells must gradually grow worse, and in time be unfit for use, as I find has happened in all old cities, I recommend that at the end of the first hundred years, if not done before, the corporation of the city Employ a part of the hundred thousand pounds in bringing by pipes, the water of the Wissahickon Creek into the town, so as to supply the inhabitants, which I apprehend may be done without great difficulty, the level of that creek being much above that of the city and may be made higher by a dam.

  While the city fathers initially ignored this prescient advice, the yellow fever epidemic shocked them into action. Philadelphia’s water system was completed in 1801, and its residents enjoyed reliable public water supply with streets washed down daily. Thanks to this bold public investment, Philadelphia avoided many of the terrible epidemics that afflicted other American cities in the following decades.

  New York had been badly hit by yellow fever in 1795, and many blamed the disease on the city’s foul water and fouler streets. With citizens and business leaders alike demanding action, the city council directed that the state legislature in Albany pass a bill providing the city with the power to tax goods sold at auction and use these proceeds to build the necessary water infrastructure. These were, by no coincidence, the same powers that the Philadelphia City Council had requested from the Pennsylvania state legislature in its push for civic improvement.

  However, affairs in Albany took a decidedly different turn in an alliance that would seem unthinkable years later. Assemblyman Aaron Burr teamed with Alexander Hamilton, recently retired as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, to transform the city’s request for public financing powers into a private project. This is the same Aaron Burr who, nine years later as vice president, shot and killed Hamilton in a duel over insults supposedly made by Hamilton about Burr’s candidacy for governor in New York.

  In the portraits above, Burr is on top and Hamilton, the face on the $10 bill, on the bottom.

  In an argument that would echo two centuries later through privatization debates in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and other cities around the world, Hamilton persuaded the New York state legislature that privatization was preferable to public financing because the service provider would be able to raise the necessary capital and save the city the politically difficult task of raising money through loans and taxes. Nor was this an unreasonable argument. While Philadelphia’s waterworks had been provided by the municipality, this was uncommon. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, urban water projects were generally provided by private enterprise. Municipal authorities were often politically weak and, daunted by the high capital costs and maintenance
expenses, city councils were much more comfortable relying on private capital to provide a public service. The corporation’s shareholders might reap the profit, but they also bore the risk.

  Burr hurried a bill through in just three days. Authorized by the New York state legislature, the Manhattan Company, as the new organization would be called, was limited to $2 million in capital but granted broad-ranging powers. With the power of eminent domain, it was free to select whatever land it thought necessary for construction and any waters it deemed appropriate. If the parties could not agree on the proper compensation for private property taken by the company, a three-person body appointed by the New York Supreme Court would arbitrate. In stark contrast to other charters creating water companies during this period, the Manhattan Company had no obligation to repair city streets torn up placing pipes, provide free water for fighting fires, seek approval for water rates, or open its books for official inspection. Indeed, the only constraint was that, within ten years of its creation, the Manhattan Company shall “furnish and continue a supply of pure and wholesome water sufficient for the use of all such citizens dwelling in the said city as shall agree to take it on the terms to be demanded by the said company.” If this condition were not met, the company would lose its charter.

  This was a sweeping range of powers for a water company, but Aaron Burr had more than water supply on his mind. Near the end of the company’s charter, a short paragraph revealed the real game afoot.

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

  Burr didn’t care about providing water. He wanted a bank charter, and one with far fewer constraints than other banks of the day. In short order, the company directed only 10 percent of the Manhattan Company’s $2 million toward investments in waterworks. The other money was profitably invested in the banking business. The bank could not ignore water completely, for its existence depended upon satisfying the charter’s requirement to furnish and supply “pure and wholesome water.” Just how pure and wholesome, though, was a matter of dispute.

  The lawmakers’ assumption seems to have been that water would be piped in from the Bronx River, since the water sources on Manhattan Island had come to be regarded as undrinkable. But the Manhattan Company waterworks drew most of its water from the closer, cheaper, more revolting Collect. Doing the bare minimum to maintain its charter, the company laid only twenty-three miles of pipe in its first thirty-two years. Centuries before the invention of water meters, the company charged customers based on the number of fireplaces. Houses with fewer than five fireplaces paid $5 annually, with a charge of $1.25 for each additional fireplace and a maximum charge of $20. There were bitter complaints over the quality of the water. A letter in the New York Evening Journal angrily asserted:

  I have no doubt that one cause of the numerous stomach affections so common in this city is the impure, I may say poisonous nature of the pernicious Manhattan water which thousands of us daily and constantly use. It is true the unpalatableness of this abominable fluid prevents almost every person from using it as a beverage at the table, but you will know that all the cooking of a very large portion of this community is done through the agency of this common nuisance. Our tea and coffee are made of it, our bread is mixed with it, and our meat and vegetables are boiled in it. Our linen happily escapes the contamination of its touch, “for no two things hold more antipathy” than soap and this vile water.

  A letter in the New York Commercial Advertiser described the company as “the most outrageous insult ever offended to an afflicted city.” Despite unhappy water customers, the company defended its monopoly power over water provision and helped drive Tea Water pumps out of business. New Yorkers were thus forced to rely on the increasingly noxious Collect pond and local wells. People with money turned to imported soda water and well water mixed with liquor. As a historian of the era has described, “As for New Yorkers, drinking no more Tea Water and scant Manhattan, it was once again back to street wells and carted spring water. New York had entered the first American century with less good water than the Dutch had bequeathed to the English.”

  Over time, this water company gave up all pretense and developed into the powerful Chase Manhattan Bank (now known as JP Morgan Chase), undoubtedly the first commercial bank that owes its origins to drinking water. In homage to its origins, the corporate logo of Chase Manhattan is a stylized cross section of a wooden water pipe. Ironically, Burr, the mastermind of the enterprise, ran into financial difficulties, sold his stock in the company, and was forced off the board in 1802.

  By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the citizens of Philadelphia enjoyed ample supplies of clean water for drinking, cooking, battling fires, cleaning, and washing down the streets. Boston and Baltimore were in the process of building public waterworks based on Philadelphia’s model. But following the debacle of the Manhattan Company, New York did nothing. In 1828 a large fire caused extensive property damage, and in 1832 a severe cholera epidemic killed 3,500 people. Philadelphia, by contrast, had lost just 900 lives during the same scourge. A water commission appointed by the New York City Council had to admit the obvious in its 1835 report: New York suffered by comparison with its rival City of Brotherly Love.

  No disagreeable odor assails the persons who pass through the streets of that city [Philadelphia]; everything calculated to annoy the senses is swept away by the running stream; but in New-York a person coming in the city from the pure air of the country, is compelled to hold his breath, or make use of some perfume to break off the disagreeable smell arising from the streets. … The only way we can account for this difference in the health of the two cities is, that Philadelphia is supplied with abundance of pure and wholesome water, not only for drinking and culinary purposes, but for bathing, and for washing the streets of the whole city, while New-York is entirely destitute of the means for effecting any of these purposes.

  The need for new infrastructure to store and distribute water was clear. The key question was how to pay for it—whether to rely on public or private financing, municipal funds or private capital. Philadelphia’s experience certainly showed that public funding could be successful. London, however, was the capital of the world’s greatest empire, and it relied on private means.

  Through the Middle Ages, Londoners had gathered drinking water from local springs, wells, and the Thames River (the Romans never built aqueducts for London). In the thirteenth century, a connection known as the Great Conduit was built from springs near Tybburn to cisterns in the city and provided a source of clean drinking water, which apparently was sold by leasing official tankards to people for drawing water. The poor relied on the unsanitary and foul-smelling Thames, and some merchants even tried to charge for that. A 1417 city ordinance forbade owners of wharves and stairs on the Thames from charging for access to the river.

  During the sixteenth century, with the rise of England’s first industrial revolution, the city was unwilling to spend money on public works and relied instead on private commerce for water supply. As early as 1609, an open canal nearly forty miles north of London had been dug. It was known as the New River, and its management was granted to a private company. In 1721, the Chelsea Waterworks Company was founded, followed by six more private water companies over the next century. In all, eight companies provided more than twenty-eight million gallons of water from various sources in and around London. Supporters of privatization pointed to the might of the British Empire and urged New York to follow the privatization path of London.

  Yet the same story could just as easily provide the opposite conclusion. Much of the water was taken from the River Thames, the receiving body for the city’s sewers. Terrible cholera outbreaks were quite common but shrugged
off as an unpleasant fact of urban living. The different water companies did not compete. Far from it. Following a model familiar to crime bosses, they realized far better profits by dividing the territory into separate monopolies where they each set their own rates as they saw fit.

  In the end, chastened by the Manhattan Company debacle and envious of rival Philadelphia’s success, New York’s water commission strongly recommended public financing for construction. A permanent Board of Water Commissioners was created and authorized to raise infrastructure capital and condemn land in order to supply water to the city. Surprising even today, the condemnation authority extended beyond the boundaries of the city, for the water source lay upstream of New York in the town of Croton. By 1838, condemnation of thirty-five acres of land in the Croton watershed had been completed.

  The Croton Reservoir was a massive project, piping ninety-five million gallons daily through forty-one miles of pipe to a reservoir located in Central Park, lavishly decorated with Egyptian designs. The civic pride in the completion of the new water system is hard to imagine. The four days of inauguration ceremonies in October 1842 put a modern-day ticker-tape parade to shame. As Mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary at the time, “Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impede our progress through the streets. Political spouting has given place to water spouts, and the free current of water has diverted the attention of the people from the vexed questions of the confused state of the national currency.”

  Commencing the festivities, amid one hundred firing cannons and ringing church bells, a five-mile parade snaked through the city. City Hall Park featured a fifty-foot fountain, and a hymn, “The Croton Ode,” written specially for the occasion, was performed by the New York Sacred Music Society.