New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [202]
“You think the railroad business could be that big?” Hetty asked.
“I do,” said Frank. “When I was a boy, my father took me to the opening of the Erie Canal. That canal alone transformed the shipping of grain and caused a huge expansion of places like Albany. Given time, the new railroads will far exceed what the canals accomplished—they’ll change the whole continent. Unlike canals, they’re easy to build, and the speed at which freight, and people, can travel is going to increase by leaps and bounds. Land prices are going to rise all the way along the new railway lines, if you can just figure out the right places. There’ll be opportunities to invest in the railroads themselves, as well.”
“Let’s look at the maps, then,” said his wife, with a smile.
She’d always been his partner, right from the start. Always supported him, whatever he wanted to do, joined in his interests and enthusiasms. Once, when someone had asked him when he’d first been sure he wanted to marry Hetty, to their great surprise they’d received the answer: “It was the Croton Aqueduct that did it.” But it had been perfectly true.
If the old water supply of New York had been inadequate for decades, the city’s eventual solution was magnificent. Forty miles to the north the River Croton, which ran into the Hudson, was dammed to make a huge reservoir. From there, water was carried south in a covered canal until it crossed by bridge over the Harlem River onto the north end of Manhattan. Passing over two more high aqueducts on the way, it flowed down through conduits into a thirty-five-acre receiving reservoir, which extended between Eighty-sixth and Seventy-ninth Streets on the city plan. Another five miles of conduits and pipes brought water from the receiver to Murray Hill, where the distributing reservoir, a splendid building just below Forty-second Street, and which looked like a fortress, held twenty million gallons.
The whole thing was a masterpiece of engineering, and it hadn’t surprised Hetty in the least that, just before its completion in 1842, while they were still courting, Frank had said that he wanted to inspect every inch of it. What astonished him, and everyone else, was that she cheerfully announced: “I’m coming too.”
And so she had. They’d taken the family carriage up Manhattan, right across Westchester County to the Croton dam, where an engineer had been delighted to show them the sluices and the start of the canals. They’d driven down, looked into the gatehouses at the Harlem River and walked across the bridge. They’d inspected the aqueducts, the reservoirs, the pipes. The whole expedition had taken four days, and many miles of walking.
And finally, right in front of that fortress-like reservoir at Forty-second Street, Frank Master had turned to this remarkable young woman, gone down on one knee and asked her to marry him—which, all in all, Hetty reckoned was worth the walk.
Now, therefore, with the maps spread out on the table, Frank Master and his wife spent a happy half-hour looking at the towns and territories up the new Hudson railroad that seemed most promising for future development. And they were still busily engaged in this manner when a maid announced that Miss Keller and the Irish girl had arrived.
“I want to see this Irish girl, Hetty,” said Master, “because we need to be very careful.”
“Most of the servants in this city are Irish, Frank,” his wife pointed out.
“I know. But there’s Irish, and Irish. There are plenty of respectable ones. The people to avoid are the Irish from Five Points—half of them are so weak that they’re prone to disease.”
“Someone’s got to help them, Frank.”
“Yes, but we’ve young children to consider. And the ones that aren’t sick are criminals. Gangs of them. Look what happened at Astor Place the other day.”
That had been an awful business—a riot of Irish from the Bowery, set off by the appearance of an aristocratic English actor, at the new Astor Opera