Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [37]
The purity of New York’s tap water borders on myth. It’s the envy of the nation, and it’s touted in foreign-language guidebooks. Some city bakers credit its mineral content and taste for their culinary success; the stuff has been airlifted to the Smithsonian Institution for an exhibit on New York bagel-making. The upstate water is of such good quality, and the watershed so well protected, that the Environmental Protection Agency, in charge of tap water, doesn’t require the city to filter it—a distinction shared with only four other major U.S. cities: Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. New Yorkers drink their Esopus Creek, their Schoharie, Delaware, and Neversink rivers straight from the city’s many reservoirs, with only a rough screening and, for most of the year, a shot of chlorine, to kill bacteria, with chasers of fluoride (to protect teeth), orthophosphate (to coat pipes so that metal doesn’t leach into the water), and sodium hydroxide (to adjust its pH).
New York City’s water wasn’t always tasty, or abundant. When the Dutch arrived on the southern tip of Manhattan Island four centuries ago, they drank from the same creeks and springs as the Algonquin Indians who preceded them. But as the colony grew, residents and their animals fouled the local surface water, and intrepid water purveyors scouted farther north for new sources. Wealthier inhabitants dug private wells, but the water they produced was brackish and hard. During the Dutch period, freshwater was used for livestock and cooking: the preferred beverage was beer, which everyone, including children, drank warm.
In 1666 the new English governor of New York dug the city’s first public well, but the water, distributed through wooden mains, was briny. Wells would provide some water for the next two centuries, though most of the colony drank from the area’s single major source of freshwater, the Collect. Surrounded by wooded hills, this spring-fed pond covered seventy acres between Chambers and Canal Streets, just east of the path that would become Broadway. As the colony grew, the once-beautiful Collect became a dumping ground for chamber pots, the carcasses of animals, and the effluent of tanneries and slaughterhouses. Disgusted authorities eventually filled the pond and its wetlands with earth, then built a neighborhood called Paradise Square atop the site. Alas, the high water table soon caused Paradise to sink, then stink. Affluent residents left, and Paradise Square became the notorious Five Points, a filthy neighborhood of thieves and gangs. At the turn of the century the slum was cleared, municipal buildings went up, and now all that’s left to remind today’s New Yorkers of this seminal spot in their city’s drinking-water history is a forlorn rhombus of asphalt marked with a plaque and a small sign: COLLECT POND PARK.
As New York expanded through the nineteenth century, it had even less drinkable water. Wells were contaminated, and an increase in buildings and paved streets kept rainwater from recharging aquifers. The technology to dig deeper wells, into fresher water, didn’t yet exist. Outbreaks of cholera and yellow and typhoid fever were common, as were fires that burned out of control for lack of water and pressure. Residents clamored for a solution; ignorant of the link between illness and the city’s water, cholera-stricken patients pleaded, “Cold water, give us cold water!”
But demand did not produce supply. City planners had for decades scouted and squabbled over alternative sources of water and who would pay for its delivery, looking as far north as Lake George in the Adirondacks and the Housatonic River in Connecticut. In 1799, the state legislature