Via David Goehring, the Ashokan Reservoir in Ulster County:
Stanley Greenberg, writing for The Architectural League, took a photo of a nondescript tunnel entrance and did a nice job explaining how that concrete and steel protrusion shows our water supply system.
The very short version: after a long period of New Yorkers drinking water that was expensively carted into town or was from Manhattan sources of varying (and poor) cleanliness, the city built a dam, aqueduct, and distribution reservoirs to get a clean supply from the Croton River, a small tributary of the Hudson. When that turned out to be inadequate, two large and interlocking systems were built to get water from the Catskill and Delaware Rivers on the west side of the Hudson. That supply has been sufficient now for a hundred years.
But there’s a problem that was recognized more than sixty years ago. The two aqueducts from the Catskill and Delaware systems – Water Tunnels 1 and 2 – are both needed for supply, so there has never been any way to shut them down for inspection and maintenance. The construction of Water Tunnel 3, now nearing its end, will not increase the overall supply, but will allow for each tunnel to be taken out of use in rotation for condition inspections and repairs.
Back to Mr. Greenberg’s find: that vent shaft is part of Tunnel 1. As minor an intrusion into the landscape as it is, we’ve gotten even better at hiding our infrastructure since that was built in the 1910s. I’m not sure that’s a good thing: New Yorkers are surrounded by water, water everywhere, but rarely think about where the drinking supply comes from.
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