FLOWING PROSE
Former local newspaper editor writes major history
of what we gave New York that allowed it to grow big: water
History has its axioms, among them that great cities can develop where there is no port (think Paris or Moscow), that they can mushroom in baking heat (Calcutta, perhaps, or Cairo) or intense cold (Moscow, again, for sure), or even sprout where one might never expect to find human habitation (Las Vegas comes to mind). But no record exists of a city without water. Which brings up the subject of Liquid Assets: A History of New York City's Water System (1999, Purple Mountain Press, 303 pp.,$37), Diane Galusha's comprehensive account of the lengths to which the metropolis to our south has gone--often at the expense of upstate communities--to suck fresh water into five boroughs.
It's a tale of monumental achievement: 18 reservoirs and three lakes capable of holding a total of half a trillion gallons of water collected from 2,000 square miles of watershed. It took well over a hundred years to build the system, cost the lives of scores of people and uprooted thousands, obliterating whole communities in Westchester and Putnam counties, and in the Catskills, too, as late as the 1960s. And most curious of all, it's a story that until now has never been told in its entirety.
Galusha, the editor of Catskill Mountain News in Margaretville for seven years until 1996, was witness to the evolution of the latest chapter of the city's water saga. Beginning in 1990, upstate communities battled New York's attempt to unilaterally impose more stringent watershed land use restrictions as part of the city's strategy for avoiding a costly federal mandate to filter its water supply. That struggle resulted in the historic watershed agreement brokered by Governor George Pataki, under which the city has pledged not to condemn private land it wants for expanded watershed buffer zones. Perhaps as important, the city also agreed to pay millions for pollution prevention programs and to offset the negative economic impact its new restrictions will have on watershed communities.
Having seen the rancor the city's latest proposals created among her upstate neighbors, Galusha said in a recent interview that she became intrigued with the challenge of finding the roots of the controversy. What she quickly discovered was that "comments and decisions were being made by both sides...without adequate historical grounding." What's more, her research led her to the conclusion that people in the Catskills watershed had no concept that their neighbors across the river had borne the brunt of the city's water gathering juggernaut some years earlier and that "the communities [in Westchester and Putnam] had suffered even more."
This, of course, reflects a worldview--if not a bias--centered on the watershed. The alternative is the cosmopolitan outlook, which views the source of all the city's fresh water as the faucet itself and is hardly the stuff of an epic tale. Galusha comes to her watershed sensibility from a lifetime in this region, and the memories of her father's dry cleaning delivery business, which was hurt when some of the communities on his route were razed and inundated.
Like all great sagas of conquest, there is tension here. On one side are the dreamers and doers who marshalled the forces to build massive dams and tunnels for a city whose thirst could not be slaked; on the other are immigrants and native workers, the everyday people who laid the stone, poured the concrete and moved the graves-thousands of bodies had to be disinterred and reburied to make way for reservoirs-and the families forced to leave their ancestral homes, all of whom give Liquid Assets a texture of humanity amid the details of engineering conquest.
As Galusha explains in admirable detail, the fate of the city was tied of the quest for adequate supplies of water even before it became New York. The crusty governor of New Netherlands, Peter Stuyvesant, blamed his surrender of New Amsterdam to the British in 1664 on the lack of fresh water in the fort where the Dutch took refuge. Within less than a century, the shallow wells of lower Manhattan were badly polluted. Equally serious, there was not enough water to fight the fires that periodically engulfed all cities made of wood.
Slowly, inexorably as it turned out, the city looked northward for water, first to private company reservoirs on Chambers Street, then 13th, and then, following a devastating cholera epidemic in the early 1830s, above the island of Manhattan, to the Croton River. In a marvel of engineering, the Croton Aqueduct carried fresh water 42 miles south mustered the political clout to stop the city's plans to expand into their neighborhood. So city water planners looked west to the Catskills, where the challenge was not only collecting the water but getting it to the city. And that entailed constructing underground tunnels of unprecedented length to link reservoirs into a cohesive system and funnel the water to the main distribution points on the east shore.
Some of these tunnels lie more than 1,500 feet below mountains, and the accretion of details about each one--the contractors, the number of workers, the types of machinery and techniques of construction--threaten at times to overwhelm the narrative. But the abundance of illustrations, which include prints, personal snapshots and a trove of photos from the archive of the city Department of Environmental Protection, brighten the pages and rescue the book from its drift toward encyclopedic recitations.
Wisely, Galusha has also chosen to include sidebars on points of interest-what she called her"tangents," admitting that she had to fight the tendency to explore these digressions at the expense of the main thrust of the story. These sidebars range from a brief history of the Board of Water Supply police force, known not-so-affectionately to some in these parts as the "fish police," to the discovery of an ancient forest of petrified prototrees, hundreds of millions of years old, at the site of the Gilboa Dam.
As the book progresses chronologically toward to building of the Pepaction and Cannonsville reservoirs, both constructed in the last half century, the stories of the individuals affected by the dams become more vivid, not surprisingly because these sections rely on firsthand accounts of those still living, people who could tell Galusha in their own words what it was like before their homesteads slowly disappeared beneath the water.
Galusha, 46, has written two previous books, one about the Delaware County settlement of Halcottsville, where she now lives, and another about early women photographers of this region. She has a journalist's devotion to interviewing, hoping that Liquid Assets will inspire others to write more about the communities sacrificed for city water. She readily acknowledges the contribution of Olivebridge writer Bob Steuding, whose 1985 book The Last of the Handmade Dams (Purple Mountain Press) documents the construction of the Ashokan Reservoir, and she shares with other writers in the burgeoning local publishing industry the conviction that "every community has a living, breathing history that cries to be told."
Liquid Assets reflects a prodigious amount of research, which makes it not only a good yarn but an invaluable reference book. It includes maps of the water system from the far reaches of the Catskills to the Metropolitan Area, a thorough index, valuable footnotes and a clear appendix consisting of thumbnail sketches of the system's vital statistics--who knew the city that consumes 1.2 billion gallons of water per day manages to spew out 1.3 billion gallons of sewage?
For the last few years, Galusha has handled public relations for the Catskill Watershed Corporation, the organization created and funded by the city as part of the watershed protection and economic development programs. But she says her present position hasn't influenced her chronicle. "I really wanted to tell the story of the people who put these things together," she says. And she has.
Reviewed by Parry D. Teasdale, Editor, Woodstock Times,
Woodstock, NY, December 16, 1999.
Another review appeared in The Nimham Times Magazine,
a Putnam County quarterly journal, Spring 2000, by Robert Tendy:
Diane Galusha closes her magnificent book, Liquid Assets: A History of New York City's Water System, with the following Chinese proverb: "When you drink the water, remember the source." It is a perfect ending to her nearly perfect "history" book, for this is indeed a history book more than anything else. And the point of recording history is to remember and, hopefully learn.
As with any well written history, Ms. Galusha's tome clearly sets out her subject matter and allows it to speak for itself. There is little, if any, editorializing, nor is any necessary. Liquid Assets tells a most fascinating tale of how water is and came to be delivered to New York City form the counties which lie to the North. If this seems to be hardly the stuff to fascination, think again. It is a tale of great human endeavor and achievement of lost lives and homes, of numerous court battles, of the intentional destruction and flooding of whole towns so that water could be stored and delivered to New York City.
The source of New York City's water is not just the reservoirs and mountain streams. The source includes more than one hundred years of remarkably difficult work by skilled laborers, brilliant engineers, businessmen, and visionary leaders.
The author is one who can tell the story from a personal perspective: The Cannonsville Reservoir was built not far from her childhood home of Windsor, New York. The writing was obviously a labor of love. Her book is loaded with footnotes, photos, newspaper clippings, and interviews with workers, planners, and several citizens who lived in the areas which are now under water. And throughout, it is laced with both the whimsical and the poignant: characters with Runyonesque names such as "Six Fingers Merrick" and "Hay Bag Grant"; a faithful and forlorn dog named Missy searching in vain for the home which was destroyed to make way for the Cannonsville reservoir; an elderly Brewster resident, Mrs. Ellen Morgan, who, sobbing and covering her face with her apron, deperately bid five dollars at an auction to get her home back after is was claimed by the city in its inexorable quest for water space. (She was successful: no one was so cold hearted as to bid against her.) Ultimately, as Ms. Galusha points out, it is a book which teaches us a great deal about the never ending conflict between individual property rights and the needs of the masses. The story begings in 1664 with the British takeover of the settlement of New Amsterdam, as New York was then called. Peter Stuyvesant, Directory General of the province of New Netherlands, and his men put up little resistance to the British invader Richard Nicolls and his fleet. Stuyvesant claimed it was the lack of water in the Fort which prompted him to surrender.
Stuyvesant's obsevation was prophetic with a twist: in time, counties the North ultimately surrendered water, land, towns, even businesses, schools, churches, adn homes to the invading city of New York. Resistance was ultimately futile, for the needs of what was rapidly becoming the most important city in the world would not be denied. The first "Northern" source was a 48 acre pond where the prison called the Tombs now stands. As the city rapidly grew in size and population, the need for drinking water also grew. This relentless march to bigger and purer water supplies and reservoirs moved up to Chambers Street, 42nd Street and 5th Avenue (where now stands the New York City Public Library), north to what is now Central Park: further north and northwest to the counties of Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Ulster, Delaware, Sullivan, Greene and Scoharie. It becomes very clear in the first few chapters of Liquid Assets that as surely as water flowed down from the North, New York City would be successful in going up to get it and claim it for its own.
The structure of Liquid Assets is a fairly straight line: as the city's water needs increased, surveyors, engineers, and other professionals were sent to examine the land and water sources of the Northern Counties. These men returned with detailed information, laying before the city's leaders the most promising sources of water available and possible methods of delivery. Each chapter recounts a recognized need for additonal water, the identification of a desirable source, the plan for acquisition, the struggles to acquire, and the opposition from property owners and town leaders who often could neither accept nor understand that a city very far to the south could take over entire communities simply because it wanted water.
The two biggest obstacles facing the city were how to confiscate the land and water sources, and how to get the water to the city. The latter problem was solved by brilliant engineering, hard labor, and gravity: 95 percent of the system is gravity fed. But how could the city claim the water? The answer was both simple and startling: basically, the city's claim has always been "we need the water, we have a lot of people here, we are an important city, so give us your land and water." This is only a slight simplification of the legal argument the city used to eventually confiscate almost 2,000 square miles of land and water sources.
After each successful legal battle, the city got to work, real physical work. The book informs us to how the tunnels were built carry the water. Hundred of miles of underground tunnels, much of it cut through solid rock, lie as much as one thousand feet beneath the surface of the earth. Ms. Galusha gives an almost unbelievable recitation of the labor needed to create this system. Men armed with shovels, cement, wheel barrows, pickaxes, dynamite, and railroad cars literally cut and blasted their way through the earth. Many of them died in accidents during the excavation. In one of the author's finest moments, found in of all places the appendix, not only is a summary of the tunnel excavation given (miles, depth, carrying capacity, etc.) but also documented is the number of lives lost per tunnel. During the construction of the Catskill Aqueduct built between 1907 and 1917, 283 men died.
One of the greatest assets of Ms. Galusha's writing is that though her book is basically a recounting of a government project, it is prevaded with a sense of humanity. In the case of the New York City water system, especially in the pre World War II era, the back breaking, life threatening toil was done to a great extent by immigrant laborers and blacks who needed a job and wanted to raise families. The author quotes from the Pine Hill Sentinel of January 1913: "Approximately 10 out of every 100 workers are killed or injured every year...The men doing the rough work are virtually all foreigners or negroes. Owing to the laborers being so inconspicuous, the death by accident of one or more of them attracts no public attention."
This is simply damn good writing, and anyone interested in journalism is sure to enjoy these newspaper accounts sprinkled throughout the book. They are historically absorbing and stylistically refreshing. Not all of them are so somber. Written during a time when political correctness had not yet replaced journalistic observation, one writer for The Putnam County Courier, describing the laborers employed on one section of the building of the Croton Dam, noted that "last Saturday was payday at the dams here. Out of every 100 men, 75 went on a drunk and did not report for work on Monday. This is probably a fair sample of the men we will have to deal with for the next four years." There was apparently no march on the offices of the Courier by the maligned workers.
Perhaps the most touching aspect of Liquid Assets is the recounting of lost homes and communities. It is something that should be taught to every grammar school student in the state: for every reservoir built, people were displaced. Hotels and restaurants were flattened and burned, houses were taken over and destroyed, whole cemetaries were removed, communities were commandeered and literally dug out and flooded by stream and river so that the city could have a supply of clean drinking water. People would speak about what would happen "when the water takes our house." As one resident said, "unless you have lived through having your home and whole community wiped away, you can't understand the void it leaves in you. I can never take my children and grandchildren and show them where I grew up, or where their grandparents and great grandparents lived."
A small photograph of a tidy store with a white fence is shown, an American flag flies in the center of the photo. It is summertime. Ther store is surrounded be beautiful trees; a Coca-Cola sign is in the window, and a white sign above says, simply, "Sam's Place." A few men stand nearby. The caption under the photo reads: "Sam Platania sold spaghetti and gave haircuts at Sam's Place in Shavertown, an area now under the Pepacton Reservoir." Without saying anything other than what was and is, Ms. Galusha's caption under this little picture speaks volumes about what was lost and gained in New York City's quest for water. And despite the inherent pathos in displacing people from their towns and homes, it cannot be denied that much was gained.
Accordingly, this is a book that should be read by every government leader in the State as well as the country. As cities and communities grow, so does the need for water and other resources which will in time need to be shared. The perspective one gains from understanding the events which led to the near miraculous accomplishment known as the New York City Water System is of profound governmental utility. Ultimately, the reader is left with an understanding that the project which took over one hundred years to create (indeed, it is still being created) was necessary.
As time passed, the city and the communities effected by the city's need have begun to work together in a recognition from both sides that cooperation is necessary if earth's most precious resource is to be available for all. This acknowledgment led the the 1997 signing of the New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement.
Yet, In Tampa Bay, Flordia, and other Coastal towns in America, the population and growth boom has placed in jeopardy the ability of these towns to supply enough drinking water to its occupants. The underground water table in areas of some of our Western States gets lower every year. Each day, an estimated 25,000 people in developing countries die of water-related diseases, and 15,000 children under the age of five die of dehydration. However, for the residents of New York City, water is seemingly plentiful and delicious. And, to a certain extent, this is true. For now.
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