It’s hard to describe how much I love the illustration above. It’s from a booklet (that I’ll be discussing in more depth in the near future) called “Illustrations of the Croton Aqueduct” by an engineer named F. B. Tower who worked on the Croton project.
The Croton dam and aqueduct were absolutely necessary for New York City’s continued growth in the early mid-1800s. The few reliable sources of fresh water on Manhattan island had been variously used or polluted, and the nearby fresh-water streams (such as the Bronx River) were sufficient for the need at the time but wouldn’t have allowed for any increases in demand. The Croton River, a tributary of the Hudson some 40 miles upstream from the city, was able to fill demand for most of the rest of the century.
The construction of the dam and aqueduct was a huge undertaking given the state of American engineering at the time. The city was justifiably proud of the accomplishment, which helps explain the pamphlet. The illustration above shows the lower reservoir (the main storage in the city, as opposed to upstream). This reservoir was abandoned in the early 1900s with modernization and expansion of the water-supply system, and removed in the 1930s. But there’s a quirk in the illustration which jumps out at natives: the map is horribly wrong. Here’s a modern-day map of the same area, with the reservoir marked in red (rotated so the orientation matches the map above, sorry about the upside-down lettering):
It’s possible, of course, that all of the streets shown in the reservoir map (made in 1843) were removed when Central Park was laid out in the late 1850s. Here’s an 1852 map, oriented almost the same way. (The discrepancy between the Manhattan street-grid “north” and actual north is nicely shown on the right-hand side.)
The built-up area of the city at that time dwindled out well south of 42nd Street (the near-vertical line on the right at the juncture of two green areas, a pink area, and a yellow area). So there would have been no need to actually build the streets as far north as the 70s and 80s because there was no demand yet.
Perhaps that logic is unconvincing. The Commissioners’ Plan creating the numbered grid became law in 1811 and all of the streets were surveyed in the next decade, but they still had to be “opened” (the pavement and utilities laid) and “worked” (the adjacent lots surveyed and auctioned). Any number of sources, such as Marguerite Holloway’s The Measure of Manhattan, make it clear that the streets at Central Park had not been opened prior to the beginning of park construction. So the map at the top, in 1843, represented a theoretical future layout of streets that did not come to be; leaving the reservoir (which was quite non-theoretical) as a rectangular intrusion in the naturalistic park. That map could only have been made between 1840 or so, when the Croton plan was finalized and 1856, when Olmsted and Vaux won the competition for the park plan.
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