Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [975]
The Brooklyn Bridge, linchpin of the new prosperity, was a casualty of its own wild success. In 1890 over forty million people used it, roughly a quarter million each day. The thousands of Brooklynites descending on it at rush hour made it a human maelstrom. Men fought women and children for places in the cars, and the weaker were forced to walk over or take the ferry. Brooklyn and Williamsburg merchants clamored for additional East River bridges, but New York’s commercial and political establishments were hostile; Mayor Grant, not atypically, worried in 1889 that the benefits of new construction would accrue wholly to Brooklynites.
The bridge was symbolic of other irrationalities. There was no through transport across it. Manhattan transit cars traversed the bridge, dumped their passengers, turned around and returned to Manhattan; and vice versa for Brooklyn trolleys. Neither the Metropolitan nor the BRT was prepared to establish the coherent, integrated, and vastly expanded rapid transit system that was patently key to keeping real estate values surging.
The transport dilemma, however, was as nothing compared to the water crisis. Brooklyn was about to run dry. In 1896 its water system was delivering ninety-four million gallons a day. Sober estimates suggested demand would reach that level within three years; some people were already experiencing shortages. Wells had been sunk down to suck water from layers of gravel 150 feet deep, and the city was pumping in fifty million gallons a day from the wells, ponds, and streams of Long Island, but the only remaining expedient—imperial expansion eastward—was about to be foreclosed.
In January 1896 Alfred Tredway White, then serving as commissioner of city works, urged Brooklyn to buy land in central Suffolk, suggesting that eastern Long Island’s streams, and the watershed beneath its pine barrens, might well bring in an additional eighty million gallons a day. But Suffolk farmers, baymen, and homeowners had no intention of letting that happen, having witnessed the ecological impact of extractions to date. They had been forced to dig their own wells deeper and deeper to reach the sinking water table; oystermen’s creeks were filling up with mud; ponds were turning into stagnant bogs teeming with the germs whose significance had recently become menacingly apparent. In June 1896, accordingly, Suffolk went to Albany and got a law preventing Brooklyn from drawing off its water without the approval of a majority of the county supervisors. This meant that for the foreseeable future, Brooklyn had reached its limit. Without a new source of supply, it could look forward to outbreaks of pestilence or an unquenchable conflagration that might lay half the city in ashes.
New York, meanwhile, was swimming in water. The original Croton Aqueduct’s capacity of ninety million gallons a day had been exceeded by the early 1880s. Thanks to lobbying efforts by Andrew Haswell Green, among others, a New Croton Aqueduct had been authorized in 1883, begun in 1885, come partially on line in 1891, and fully completed in 1893. It had already expanded carrying capacity to three hundred million gallons daily, and plans were afoot to expand the Croton watershed itself by building new dams and reservoirs. Even without these, the new system, when added to the former Croton’s ninety million and the Bronx River’s twenty million, could supply roughly four hundred million gallons per day, enough to support four million people, or a million more than the combined population of both Brooklyn and New York. Immediate relief via connecting pipes under the East River was therefore only a consolidation away—an argument deployed with equal cogency and force in Queens and Staten Island. Even the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, one of the staunchest Brooklyn independista organs, came out for a merger of the two cities’ water supplies, though nothing else.
Water, the BCL noted, wasn’t the only thing