• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7850 0

B. Jervis as chief engineer. Jervis had learned his craft on the Erie Canal—working his way up over eight years from axman to surveyor to Resident Engineer—and honed his skills further on the Delaware and Hudson Canal and the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad. Now Jervis managed construction of the forty-one-mile aqueduct, parceling out the work to private contractors in half-mile sections. Fierce competition kept bids low. To clear a profit, builders had to keep wages down, which they easily accomplished by recruiting their labor force from the port’s vast reservoir of unemployed workers. Eventually three to four thousand were employed, including many mechanics from the devastated construction trades and large numbers of recently arrived Irish immigrants.

Laborers who resented the rock-bottom wages and strict work rules periodically launched violent strikes. In April 1840, when men working in upper Manhattan demanded higher pay, the city called out the reliable Twenty-seventh Regiment. The troops traveled to 42nd Street by railroad, dispersed the strikers, and returned to the city by late evening. There were further labor protests, which halted progress until slight raises were extended, as well as riots between immigrants from different Irish counties, each determined to channel precious jobs to their own community.

Despite this, progress was rapid. By the spring of 1840, work crews had run the masonry conduit, over eight feet high and seven feet wide, down to the city’s edge, while others were laying pipes and constructing reservoirs in Manhattan itself and launching the spectacular 1,450-foot granite High Bridge that would span the Harlem River.

On June 23, 1842, water was successfully conveyed—along with a four-person boat, the Croton Maid—from the dammed-up Croton River to the giant receiving reservoir bounded by 79th and 86th streets and Sixth and Seventh avenues—a basin capable of holding 180 million gallons. Fifteen to twenty thousand New Yorkers traveled by foot, horse, carriages, or trains to Yorkville for a preliminary celebration, as the Croton Maid came sailing out of the great aqueduct to cheers, cannon salutes, and toasts of the “sweet, soft, clear water.” On July 4 water flowed through three-foot-diameter pipes down Fifth Avenue to the distributing reservoir at Murray Hill. Located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, this fortress-like container, whose embankments rose thirtyeight feet above street level, was topped by a railed promenade, reachable by a stone staircase. It held twenty-four million gallons and fed water down to the 13th Street tank, and thence into the network of underground piping that supplied the heart of the city.

Croton Water Celebration, October 14, 1842. As the huge procession came down Broadway and swung into Park Row, it passed the new fountain in City Hall Park. The prominence of fire engines in the line of march reflected the importance of the new water system for fire protection as well as health and sanitation. (© Museum of the City of New York)

On October 14 New York gave itself over to one of its most extravagant Festivals of Connection, on the order of those celebrating the Federal Union and the Erie Canal. In what the Commercial Advertiser called “the largest procession ever known in the city,” a parade five miles long marched through town with noisy jubilation, every bell pealed, and a hundred-gun salute honored the eruption of a fifty-foot plume of water from a fountain in City Hall Park. “Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water,” Philip Hone recorded. “Fountains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impede our progress through the streets. . . . Water! water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.”

Charles King, president of Columbia College, hailed the new system as “the crowning glory and surpassing achievement of the latter part of the half century,” and the Croton Aqueduct was indeed one of the era’s great engineering achievements. But it proved