The Sunken Towns

The Hidden Dark Side of New York City's Water System

New York City, some people say, has the best tap water in the country.

Though New York wasn't represented at the 2023 Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, Long Island towns have placed in the competition five times, and New York City's water has been declared better than that of Long Island. New York City tap water is recognized around the world for its taste and high quality, says Vincent Sapienza, the commissioner of the city's Department of Environmental Protection. The department's website contains a similar claim: some of the best tap water in the world. Delicious, writer Mustafa Gatollari calls it. The quality of New York City bagels is often attributed to the tap water used to make them.

That the 8 million residents of the U.S.'s largest city have such good water seems laudable. But in the feats of engineering necessary to bring this water to the city from as many as 125 miles away, who has been left behind?

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None of New York City's water comes from the city itself, but that doesn't mean there isn't any under the ground. There is water somewhere beneath your feet no matter where on Earth you live, says the U.S. Geological Survey, and this is no less true for New York City. According to the latest data, there's a place on East 19th Street in Manhattan where the water table, the depth at which groundwater can be found, is only 2 feet below the surface; in other places it may be as low as 40 feet down. But either way it's there. Long Island, which contains the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, and Staten Island sit atop the Northern Atlantic Coastal Plain aquifer system (aquifers are bodies of rock where groundwater can easily surface via wells and springs). Nevertheless, none of the groundwater is used. It hasn't been since 2007, when an area of southeastern Queens supplied by a network of 67 underground wells was switched over to the main New York water system, likely due to contamination by a toxic chemical called tetrachloroethylene.

There was a time when all of the city's water came from the ground. The first public well in Manhattan was dug in 1667, and early European settlers got their water largely from private wells and a freshwater pond in lower Manhattan – long used for water by the Lenni-Lenape people, now filled in – called the Collect Pond. Around 1800, soon-to-be-infamous duelist Aaron Burr dug a well and created the infrastructure to pipe water to more than 1,000 residents. (Whether this was an altruistic effort to provide clean water or a ruse to allow for the creation of a public bank in New York is a subject of debate.) As its population increased, though, New York City was facing a problem: Even with more wells, there simply wasn't enough water to go around.

Enter DeWitt Clinton. The nephew of New York's first governor, Vice President George Clinton, DeWitt Clinton would make an even greater mark on his home state – and not just metaphorically. Clinton was New York City Mayor when the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, a triumph of city planning which created Manhattan's prominent grid system, was crafted, likely at his urging. Later on, he oversaw the construction of the Erie Canal. Less well-known, but no less important, is his suggestion as mayor that New York City solve its water crisis by getting water from outside the city.

From 1837 to 1842, thousands of laborers, mostly Irish immigrants making the typical wage of a dollar a day, worked on the first project in this vein: the Old Croton Dam in Westchester County, at the time the largest dam in the United States. The water from the dam, which raised its namesake Croton River by 40 feet, was piped through the Croton Aqueduct, which stretched 40 miles long and could carry 90 million gallons of water in a day. The water was collected in a Receiving Reservoir in what's now Central Park, and then transported to a Distributing Reservoir, sometimes known as the Croton Reservoir, two miles south where the New York Public Library's Main Branch is today. This above-ground reservoir, praised by Edgar Allen Poe for the view from its promenade, was described as the most stupendous mass of masonry we have ever seen, or which probably exists in this country by the contemporary New York Evening Post. At the aqueduct's completion ceremony on October 14, 1842, revelers celebrated with a Croton cocktail: pure upstate water mixed with lemonade. The day before, the Evening Post ran multiple ads for plumbers who had been licensed to lay pipes connecting the Croton water from the Croton Reservoir to houses.

But again it soon wasn't enough. By 1870 Manhattan's population had tripled, and the denizens of this burgeoning metropolis would need clean water to drink; the issue surfaced again when Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx joined the city in 1898, bringing all their inhabitants with them. Thus began the explosion of reservoirs and aqueducts whose impressions in the land have lasted to the modern day.

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Nowadays, the two New York City watersheds contain 19 reservoirs and cover nearly 2,000 square miles. The bulk of the area, 1,597 square miles (larger than the state of Rhode Island), comprises the Catskill/Delaware Watershed, which stretches across five upstate counties and provides New York City with 90% of its water. There are six reservoirs in the watershed, all but Cannonsville and Rondout with names cribbed from Native American words: Ashokan, Neversink, Pepacton, Schoharie. (George Rippey Stewart mentions Neversink in his Names on the Land, citing it as one name where the process of folk-etymology must have been conscious, and its aim have been humor and the general jollity of life.) Most of the Lenni-Lenape people who had lived in the region weren't around to opine on the names or protest the construction, having been killed by disease and warfare or forced to reservations in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, but if they had been around, they likely wouldn't have had much say. When the Kinzua Dam was constructed further upstate on a Seneca reservation, in violation of an 160-year-old treaty, the Seneca weren't consulted on a project that would take 10,000 acres of their land and force 600 people to relocate.

The construction of the Kinzua Dam is emblematic of two trends in American history. The U.S. government's infringement of treaties with Native American groups has become more well-known in recent years, but fewer people know about the government's tendency to build reservoirs in places where there are already centuries-old communities. To be fair, reservoirs are big – together, the six reservoirs of the Catskill/Delaware Watershed have surface areas of 36 square miles, larger than Manhattan – and it's hard to find large areas without any inhabitants in a state like New York. Adding to the problem, towns have often been built near rivers (particularly in pre-industrial days), which allow for trade, transportation, and fertile soil; but reservoirs, too, must be built near rivers or lakes, ideally in geologically favorable areas. How to balance the concerns of physical and human geography?

The politicians who planned the locations of the reservoirs had an easy solution to this problem: Situate your reservoirs in the geographically optimal places, and simply ignore the people who live nearby. This was possible because of eminent domain laws, particularly a 1905 law that allowed the city to take possession of land only 10 days after appointing a commission to appraise the land (the appraisals could not be appealed and tended to be quite low). This policy led to the wholesale destruction of entire towns. 2,000 people lived in Neversink and Bittersweet (flooded to construct the Neversink Reservoir). 250 families lived in Lackawack, Montela, and Eureka (sunk under the Rondout Reservoir). There were nearly 1,000 people living in Cannonsville, Beerston, Rock Rift and Rock Royal, Granton (casualties of the Cannonsville Reservoir); another 1,000 in Pepacton, Arena, Shavertown, Union Grove (Pepacton Reservoir); 350 in Gilboa where 22 million gallons of water would form the Schoharie Reservoir. The Ashokan Reservoir, the largest in the Catskill/Delaware Watershed at 8,315 acres, also had the most sunken hamlets. 2,300 people lived in Ashton, Boiceville, Brodhead's Bridge, Brown's Station, Glenford, Olive, Olive Bridge, Olive City, Shokan, West Hurley, and West Shokan. In some cases, the towns were relocated, but most of the churches and taverns and general stores are sunken beneath the water, never to return.

The 7,000-odd people were doctors and fiddlers, blacksmiths and shopkeepers, a whole lot of farmers. They entertained guests in hotels, educated their children in small schoolhouses, drove buggies and cars across covered bridges. These were people who had spent years, decades, generations building up their communities. They didn't want to leave. In some towns they protested at hearings and in others they launched lawsuits, but the city preferred to stick to its plans. To quote a still-bitter recent article from the Ellenville Public Library and Museum, a few miles from where the sunken towns of Lackawack, Eureka, and Montela once lay, the interests of New York City and its need for water trumped any local concerns.

In a 1937 article for the Catskill Mountain News, George F. Kaufman wrote about the imminent flooding of Lackawack and the smaller Eureka and Montela: While it will benefit millions of human beings in Greater New York, it will also vitally and lastingly affect the lives and fortunes of a multitude of people residing outside of [the] five boroughs. Its accomplishment will necessitate the destruction of thousands of homes, farms, places of business, churches, schools, cemeteries, highways, railroads, water powers, quarries, businesses, jobs and means of livelihood. Entire communities will be driven from their homes and means of sustenance and forced to re-establish themselves elsewhere. In Lackawack, the sort of tight-knit town whose population was more commonly measured in families than people, lawsuits were launched and nearby Ellenville made an official attempt to stop the project, but most people were effectively in denial. The residents, reported the New York Times, were in no hurry to move. The four Shiels sisters, some of the town's oldest residents, pledged to stay where they were until absolutely necessary.

For this was not the sort of town that people were ready to leave. Marie Empt, who challenged the low appraisal of her condemned property, described the beauty of the valley and its well-constructed buildings, and mourned that her security for old age was being taken away. Nellie Hornbeck, a lifelong resident of next-door Montela, recalled a childhood full of sleigh rides and dominoes, where you could show up to any neighbor's house for cakes and cider. The community wasn't just welcoming to each other, it was welcoming to outsiders. The hotel owned by the Shielses' brother James had once entertained 250 people at a time with a bowling alley and pool hall and served as a Summer Tammany Hall for New York City politicians. Now, his hotel would house the engineers those politicians had sent to destroy their town and any goodwill these rural residents had towards the city's government. Soon enough, the hotel would be demolished, and the reservoir water would flood in.

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There are still people in places called Neversink, Arena, Olive, West Shokan: towns that were relocated or whose names were transferred to nearby plots of land. These people may or may not remember the sunken towns, but the nearby reservoirs are omnipresent as backdrops for the drive to work or places to go fishing in a flat-bottomed boat. What the people don't have, though, is access to their water.

The water from these reservoirs is reserved for residents of New York City and a couple of its northern suburbs; none of it goes to the towns in the reservoirs' watersheds. The state, luckily, has good enough water that this rarely causes major water quality problems, but that doesn't mean the residents are happy with the usage of their reservoirs. In 2010, New York City politicians allowed for muddy water from the Ashokan Reservoir to be released into the nearby Lower Esopus Creek. The move ensured that the reservoir could remain sparkling clear, but the creek became ugly and polluted, ruining industries like fishing and tourism. The county executive claimed that the city was acting like an occupying nation. These upstaters are locked in the same battle with the city as many of their ancestors a century ago.

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The population of New York City hasn't increased sharply since 1940. It's unlikely that the city will need to add more reservoirs to the largest unfiltered water system in the country. Instead, the city is facing the opposite problem: too much water. Groundwater levels are rising, causing persistent flooding in the city's lowest-lying areas. It's a problem that's likely to increase with sea level rise – but it could be mediated easily. Groundwater levels rose 40 feet from the 70s and 80s to 2013, as the city decreased levels of groundwater withdrawal before cutting it off completely. By resuming the use of groundwater for drinking, the water table would lower, potentially preventing levels of flooding from becoming catastrophic. This solution wouldn't right the wrongs done to so many upstate residents in the past, but it could leave some of the reservoir water for local use and control, and it might save other forgotten New Yorkers from a terrible fate.

Kaufman's article about the building of the Rondout Reservoir continues: The merchant must abandon his store, the business or professional man his office, the minister his church, the schoolmaster his classroom. The butcher, the baker and candlestick-maker must likewise depart. Buildings, structures and improvements representing lifetimes and even generations of struggle, toil and self-denial must be ruthlessly demolished. These merchants and ministers are dead, but if we forget them and their lives – lives of struggle, toil, and self-denial, yes, but lives with moments of unspeakable joy – we forget the merchants and ministers whose homes and livelihoods may soon be demolished by the next onslaught of water.

New York City, some people say, has the best tap water in the country. But water is a fickle thing. It gives life – but it also drowns.