NYS Grade 8 Practice Test 10

Water for a Thirsty City

¹In the early 1800s, New York City had a water problem, and it grew worse every year. The city's population was exploding, from about 60,000 people in 1800 to more than 200,000 by 1830. Yet most residents still got their water much as their grandparents had: from public wells, from cisterns that collected rainwater off rooftops, and from a few small private water companies. Much of that water was unpleasant at best and dangerous at worst. Wells sat close to outhouses and stables, and as the city crowded together, waste seeped into the ground and into the water people drank.

²In the summer of 1832, the danger became impossible to ignore. Cholera, a disease spread through contaminated water, swept through the city and killed thousands of people in a matter of months. Doctors at the time did not yet understand how the disease spread, but many New Yorkers suspected that the city's filthy water had something to do with it. Those who could afford to fled to the countryside. Those who could not stayed and waited for the outbreak to pass.

³The epidemic pushed city leaders to act. Engineers studied several possible sources of fresh water and settled on the Croton River in Westchester County, more than forty miles north of the city. The plan was enormous and expensive, so the question was put to the voters. In the spring of 1835, they approved it by a wide margin.

⁴Months later, a disaster showed why the plan mattered. On a freezing night in December 1835, a fire broke out in a warehouse in lower Manhattan. Strong winds spread the flames from building to building. Firefighters rushed to the scene, but the cold was so severe that water froze in their hoses and pumps, and the few wells and cisterns nearby could not supply enough water to stop the blaze. By the time the fire burned out, it had destroyed hundreds of buildings across more than a dozen blocks. The city now had two terrible reasons to want a steady supply of water.

⁵Construction began in 1837 under chief engineer John B. Jervis, who had learned his trade working on the Erie Canal. The first step was to dam the Croton River, creating a lake that would store water and feed it into the aqueduct. The next challenge was far harder: carrying that water forty-one miles to Manhattan.

⁶Jervis's design used no pumps at all. Gravity alone would move the water, so the aqueduct had to slope downhill the entire way, and the slope had to be just right. Too steep, and the rushing water would scour the channel's brick lining until it crumbled. Too flat, and the water would barely move. Jervis settled on a drop of about thirteen inches per mile, a slope so gentle that a person walking alongside would never notice it. Thousands of workers, many of them recent immigrants from Ireland, spent five years digging, blasting, and laying stone and brick to build it.

⁷The aqueduct itself was mostly a tunnel shaped somewhat like an egg, about eight and a half feet high and seven and a half feet wide, lined with brick and buried beneath a mound of earth. About every mile, workers built a stone tower above the channel to let air circulate inside it. Where the route crossed a valley, workers built up tall embankments of earth and stone so the channel could keep its gentle downward slope. Where it met a hill, they cut straight through the rock.

⁸The water reached Manhattan in the summer of 1842. It flowed first into a receiving reservoir in the open country north of the city's crowded streets, a spot that is now the Great Lawn in Central Park, and from there into a distributing reservoir on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. This second reservoir looked like a fortress, with massive sloping stone walls. A promenade ran along the top, and on pleasant evenings New Yorkers strolled there to look out over the city and the water below.

⁹On October 14, 1842, the city celebrated. Church bells rang, cannons fired, and a parade several miles long wound through the streets. In City Hall Park, a new fountain sent a jet of Croton water about fifty feet into the air. For people who had spent their lives hauling buckets from murky wells, it must have seemed like a miracle.

¹⁰The aqueduct changed daily life in the city almost at once. Clean water flowed to public hydrants and, over time, into private homes. Firefighters now had a reliable supply. People bathed more often, and indoor plumbing became practical for more households. Within a few decades, though, the city had grown so much that even the Croton Aqueduct could not keep up, and in 1890 a larger New Croton Aqueduct went into service.

¹¹Today, most of New York City's water comes from reservoirs much farther north, in the Catskill Mountains and the upper Delaware River watershed, and the system still relies largely on gravity, just as Jervis's did. The old aqueduct no longer carries water to the city, but much of its route survives. A walking trail now follows its path through Westchester County, and High Bridge, the stone-arched bridge that once carried its water across the Harlem River, still stands as the oldest bridge in New York City. The reservoir walls on Fifth Avenue are gone, and the city's grand main library stands on the site, but the idea behind them lives on in every glass of water New Yorkers pour from the tap.