Most people turn on a tap without a second thought. You might have filled a kettle, rinsed a mug, or left the shower on until it got hot. Nothing dramatic happened, which is the point. Clean water on demand is so normalised that we only seem to notice when there isn't any. Early New Yorkers would have found our shrugging difficult to understand. According to a 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers report, written by Leslie Nemo, the city spent roughly its first 217 years only occasionally offering anyone a clean glass of water. The solution was the Old Croton Aqueduct, which opened in 1842. The Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct note that the 41-mile route was gravity-fed over carefully graded falls of just 13 inches per mile. So, if 1840s New York could manage to do this, why is it so apparently hard to keep the water flowing in modern times?
Fires, fevers and filthy wells
According to the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct article, the aqueduct was built in response to the fires and epidemics that had been plaguing the city, exacerbated by insufficient water supplies and tainted wells. Nemo in the 2023 report noted that Collect Pond had become polluted by the end of the 1700s, mostly through industrial waste, and a local doctor blamed it for an illness outbreak following yellow fever in 1798. Fires in 1828 also caused $600,000 worth of damage, with firefighters using salt water because fresh water was in such short supply.
