Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [38]
It took until the late 1820s for exasperated officials to commit to impounding the waters of the Croton River, in Westchester County, and sending ninety million gallons a day through an enormous aqueduct to distribution reservoirs in Manhattan. On October 14, 1842, the city officially opened the Croton waterworks with parades, a thirty-eight-gun salute, and speeches by ex-presidents. The New York Sacred Music Society sang “The Croton Ode,” and a clear stream of Croton water spurted fifty feet from a fountain in City Hall Park. The festivities lasted for days. In the background, officials were already discussing Manhattan’s need for more water.
From that point on, the water system grew just as New York did. By 1890, engineers had constructed several more reservoirs in Westchester County, in addition to a new aqueduct. The increased supply let the five boroughs expand, and the installation of sewers, flush toilets, and household faucets inevitably led to increased water use. To meet demand, the city in 1905 turned to the Catskills, capturing in reservoirs first the Esopus Creek, then the Rondout and the Schoharie. After drowning nine villages, which bitterly fought the eminent domain proceedings, relocating 2,350 people, and reinterring 3,937 graves, the Catskills system was, in 1928, complete, but not before the city was again on the prowl for more water. This time, engineers impounded branches of the Delaware and Neversink Rivers, at the western edge of the Catskills. The enormous project inundated thirteen communities and displaced another 3,457 people. But the city had doubled its water supply.
It’s tempting to compare Fryeburg, which also gives up water for people it never sees, to upstate communities, where resentment against the city still simmers. But while those towns deal with the environmental and social destruction of large dams, they do get something in return: New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection pays more than one hundred million dollars a year in property taxes to watershed towns. It also paves roads, develops pollution-prevention plans, builds wastewater treatment plants, and employs more than eighteen hundred people. Fryeburg, so far, enjoys few such benefits from its water exporters.
Today, New York City’s tap water originates in watersheds that sprawl over nearly two thousand square miles, filling nineteen reservoirs and three controlled lakes. Twenty-four hours a day, engineers bathed in the glow of cathode-ray tubes flip through computerized maps, charts, and graphs that track every drop of water, its quality and quantity, moving into and out of the system. Not only do they deliver water to the city, they also make allotments for fish conservation (or the trout-fishing industry, however you want to look at it), for “flood mitigation” (lowering reservoirs to make room for storm water), hydroelectric power, independent kayakers, and companies that drop beer-drinking tubers into Esopus Creek in Phoenicia, New York, then pick them up, considerably more relaxed, two hours downstream.
The aesthetic and mechanical beauty of the drinking-water system—95 percent of which is gravity-fed—causes city officials to wax sentimental. “It’s miraculous that the system replenishes itself,” Commissioner Lloyd tells me as the wind sculpts the surface of the Ashokan and plays with her dark coat. “And if we take care of it, it will provide drinking water for New York forever.”
But will we want to drink it?
On a quiet street in Queens on a January morning, Virgilio Tiglao—Tiggy to his friends—lowers the tailgate on his white DEP truck, then opens a silver box