Urban Park Rangers Reveal All About Manhattan Water, Other Wonders

While Manhattan Island is surrounded by water from the Battery up to Spuyten Devil Creek, that doesn’t do most folks much good if they need a drink, a shower, or a place to wash the dishes. Today water comes from bottles, or when you turn a faucet the H2O flows. Not so in colonial times, and for many years after. How Manhattanites got freshwater, nearly ruined it completely, and then got some more was the topic a recent Urban Park Rangers event alluringly titled “Before the Aqueduct: NYC’s Toxic Wells and Lost Pond.”

That pond is Collect Pond and it’s not completely lost—there’s a park named after it on Leonard Street between Lafayette and Centre Streets in lower Manhattan, though it is dry. As for that aqueduct, it’s not the horse race track out in South Ozone Park, Queens, where Jimmy Breslin grew up. Rather, it was named for the same solution—a brilliantly designed aqueduct— that would solve the freshwater crisis that threatened the future of both 19th century Brooklyn and Manhattan. Without ample freshwater, a city can’t live, let alone grow.

There was one huge difference between New York and Kings Counties, however. Brooklyn’s freshwater was pumped from Long Island aquifers and stored in the Ridgewood and Mount Prospect Reservoirs, the latter of which today is a park adjacent to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Manhattan’s freshwater coursed down from the Croton Reservoir, 20-odd miles north of the city in northern Westchester County, and stored in what was called the Croton Distributing Reservoir or Murray Hill Reservoir. Today, the main branch of the New York Public Library is here.

Before explaining why and how the Croton Aqueduct and its attendant reservoirs were built, who are the Urban Park Rangers, and what are they doing talking about such things in public, educating seniors, kids and everyone in between, for free?

The unit was formed in 1979 at the initiative of then Parks Commissioner Gordon J. Davis. Their primary mission was to serve as uniformed ambassadors and educators of the parks system, though they were also trained in first aid and authorized to enforce park rules, with illegal barbecues, illegal campfires and arson all problems of the day. Indeed, a July 1981 profile of the unit in the weekly Brooklyn Home Reporter newspaper noted that the Urban Park Rangers were often greeted by calls of “Yo, Smokey!”—referring to Smokey Bear, the iconic hat-wearing, bare-chested, blue-jeans clad, shovel-wielding mascot of the U.S. Forest Service whose catchphrase was “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

When not confronting conflagrations, the Home Reporter continued, Urban Park Rangers “are the most potent force in environmental education in New York City. Urban Parks are the ideal classrooms where natural and built environments converge. With the entire park at their disposal, rangers are free to give their audiences the ‘hands-on’ experiences which are the key to effective learning.”

This fact holds true five decades later, when each borough has 15 Urban Park Rangers—except for Manhattan which has only 12.

Yo, Smokey! Where the Water At?!

Making up in quality what they slightly lack in quantity, the Rangers’ Aug. 2 “Before the Aqueduct” event was co-led by Ranger Ginny Rejilian and Nature Center Associate Meghan Walsh. Both were amiable, enthused, well-spoken and well-informed on all things water and local history-related. Allowing for a brief grace period for late arrivals, the program began shortly after 1 p.m. on the Lafayette Street side of Collect Pond Park. Around 15 people were in attendance, with more joining along the way.

The story of Collect Pond itself is remarkable, and a revelation to those who spend any time around the New York Criminal Court building at 100 Centre Street on the opposite side of the park. Not only was Collect Pond, which was substantially larger than the park’s footprint today, Manhattan’s most important freshwater source through the 1830s, it’s present design, which opened in 2014, includes two handsome reflecting pools, or ponds, with a walking path spanning them. Unfortunately, those ponds are presently dry, a victim of the Park Department’s eternal struggle between a limited budget and expanding maintenance needs.

If accidental and unfortunate, the plight of Collect Pond Park is an apt companion to what happened then. Though the indigenous Lenape Indians made do with the pond and various streams, including those at present day Minetta Lane, Spring Street and the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, the two hundred years of population increase, including Dutch and British colonization, made intense demands on the water system.

Wells could be dug but saltwater intrusion was an issue and as the city surged northward, pollution at Collect Pond, which was used for every imaginable purpose by the residents of the nearby Five Points district, grew ever worse. Fire devastated lower Manhattan in 1776 and would so again 1835. A June-July 1832 cholera epidemic centered around Five Points terrified New York, and rightly so.

This is the extremely simplified story of why myriad competing political and business interests came together to build the transformative 41-mile gravity fed Croton Aqueduct. Constructed from 1837 to 1842, the Murray Hill reservoir was filled on July 4, and a huge celebratory parade held that October. Though another Great Fire would engulf Broad Street in 1845, there was ample water to fight the blaze, and Manhattan’s freshwater future was more or less assured.

Scores of other pertinent details were shared by Ranger Ginny and Meghan, as were helpful maps and illustrations they carried with them. The pair gave special credit to a 2001 book, “Water for Gotham,” by Gerard T. Koppel. Those interested in placing Koppel’s work in greater contexts—which both Ranger Ginny and Meghan alluded to while remaining focused on water—the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” by Edwin Burrows and the recently deceased Mike Wallace, founder of the Gotham Center for History at CUNY, is highly recommended.

From Collect Pond, Ranger Ginny and Meghan brought their merry band of history lovers to two more locations, first to Thomas Paine Park, then Columbus Park, explaining how their watery significance continues to this day. This includes the controversial Chinatown Jail, which is being constructed just across Baxter Street at White Street—atop ground that was once covered by Collect Pond.

The Urban Park Rangers maintain an active online calendar that’s worth keeping an eye on. Some upcoming Manhattan highlights include Intermediate Canoeing at Inwood Hill Park, Sep. 12; Heather Garden Highlights at Fort Tryon Park, Sep. 13; and Birding: Fall Migration at Riverside Park, Sep. 27.