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Imagine standing in the center of that large, open area behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking a deep breath … and sucking in water.

For more than two centuries, Manhattan residents scraped by with only water from wells, ponds, and streams. Then, in 1825, the Erie Canal opened. Want farmland in the West? The easiest way for an immigrant to get there was via New York. Want to produce and sell goods in America or transatlantic? Do it close to cheap shipping, in New York. Want to get off the farm? New York’s job market was booming.

From 1820 to 1830, Manhattan’s population doubled. Two hundred thousand people were crammed into four or five square miles. The local water sources became contaminated. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever killed thousands.

The Croton Aqueduct and its reservoir

In 1835, the city council approved construction of the Croton Aqueduct. Engineer John B. Jervis designed a dam on the Croton River in Westchester. From there water flowed gradually downhill to Manhattan, through forty-one miles of iron pipes protected by brick masonry.

The pipes ran down the east side of the Hudson and across the East River at the High Bridge. The High Bridge and the water tower on its west end are still landmarks on the east side of Manhattan.

From there the pipes ran to the huge receiving reservoir in the middle of Manhattan. This reservoir was designed to allow dirt and sediment to settle out of the water after its trip from through the aqueduct. It was 836 x 1826 feet, with walls thirty-eight feet high and eighteen feet wide at the top.

After seven years of intense construction, 150 million gallons of water poured into the receiving reservoir. On July 4, 1842, water flowed from the aqueduct into the Egyptian-style “distributing reservoir.” (Bryant Park and New York Public Library now occupy that site.)

On October 14, 1842, the city celebrated as a fifty-foot jet of water shot out of a fountain in City Hall Park. The Croton Aqueduct – one of the engineering marvels of the nineteenth century – was fully operational, providing abundant fresh water … for a decade or so.

The new reservoir

From 1830 to 1850, the city’s population swelled to half a million. In the 1850s, Manhattanites began debating what part of their island to preserve as an open space. “The Central Park” edged out the competition because it held, at its center, the city’s huge reservoir.

The rules for the design of Central Park required competitors to allow space for a reservoir six times the size of the original, capable of holding a billion gallons of water. It was completed in 1862. In keeping with Olmsted and Vaux’s vision for a pastoral landscape, the new reservoir had graceful curves rather than sharp angles.

The old reservoir site, transformed

The original reservoir was finally drained in 1930. Rubble from the construction of Rockefeller Center helped fill the gaping hole. Among the proposed uses for this huge, reclaimed space were an airplane landing strip, a sports arena, an opera house, and an underground parking garage.

Then … the Depression struck. The huge dust bowl became a “Hooverville,” where hundreds of homeless men threw together shanties from boards, flattened gasoline cans, sheet iron, cardboard … whatever was handy and free.

Against stiff opposition from traditionalists, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses turned the site into a grassy lawn surrounded by baseball diamonds and playgrounds. The Great Lawn is now one of Central Park’s largest open spaces. The only trace of the old reservoir is tiny Turtle Pond.

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• You can still see part of the wall of the old reservoir at its north end, behind the Central Park Police Precinct on the 86th Street Transverse. Thanks to Ron Korcak, Central Park Conservancy volunteer, for letting me know that there’s also a remnant of the reservoir wall in the south west corner – a short row of 3-4 stones from the wall that’s located where the line starts for Shakespeare in the Park.
• For more on Central Park in the 1850s-1870s, see my book Central Park: The Early Years.
• For early images of Central Park, see the pages on this site for through 1860, 1861-1865, and 1866-1870.
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