Artifact NYNineteenth-Century Water Main Don Wildman (bio) Beneath the teeming streets and sidewalks of Lower Manhattan, under some of the most densely built and rebuilt urban environment on the planet, lay the vestiges of hundreds of years of human habitation. Construction and utility crews have licensed archaeologists on call for the inevitable moments when excavations bring them face-to-face with New York City's buried past. In October 2004, during a routine installation of an electric service box at Coenties Slip Park near South Street Seaport, workers uncovered a length of bored-out log several feet underground. It was determined that this hollowed hemlock had served as an early nineteenth-century water main, still retaining the now-corroded metal ring that once stabilized its connection to a network of subterranean conduit throughout the city. This log pipe, along with two other sections found at the site, recalls a complex if underhanded plan to bring fresh water to a thirsty and diseased Manhattan, a scheme orchestrated by one of America's most notorious figures. At the rise of the nineteenth century, Manhattanites faced an urgent water crisis. A disorganized system of wells, pumps, and ponds left an expanding population of twenty-two thousand residents severely undersupplied. Many sources had become dangerously contaminated by careless industry and human and animal wastes. The city's many residential privies had begun to seep into the groundwater. The whole polluted mess inevitably led to outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, which over decades killed thousands. Like Philadelphia and Boston, New York badly needed to innovate its water system if the city was to grow and prosper, but unlike those other cities, New York would do so in its own peculiar and idiosyncratic fashion, following the dubious leadership of Aaron Burr. Burr was a powerful and influential New Yorker with an ironclad résumé. He had commanded a regiment in the Revolutionary War, been elected to the New York State Assembly, served as New York's attorney general, and even run for president of the United States in 1800. He was a calculating player on the New York political scene, and as Manhattan faced this pressing water crisis Burr spied an opportunity not only to address the desperate need but to slake his own thirst for power and riches. [End Page 139] Click for larger view View full resolution Early nineteenth-century log water mains recovered from Manhattan's Coenties Slip during park renovations in 2004. (photo by joan h. geismar) Burr established the Manhattan Company, a private, for-profit entity established by in 1799 to transport fresh water from the Bronx River to Lower Manhattan, eleven miles south. However, in the company's state-approved charter, Burr had inserted a clause that allowed surplus capital to be used for fiscal debt and deposit transactions. The water utility would also be a bank! In time, cost-saving decisions were made to transport water not from the Bronx but rather from a spring-fed source much closer to town that city dwellers back to the Dutch had used for various purposes: a small, befouled lake known as Collect Pond. Over time, the company would only ever connect four hundred paying subscribers to its network. Burr would leave the Manhattan Company soon after, eventually going on to serve as vice-president under Thomas Jefferson. In 1808—the same year the Manhattan Company divested itself of its water operations, thus becoming solely a bank after all—Burr infamously shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. He would spend his remaining decades under a cloud of suspicion pursuing political and financial glories he would never achieve. As for the Manhattan Company, despite drastic shortcomings its water system remained in service until 1842, when renewed efforts to address still-rampant disease finally [End Page 140] Click for larger view View full resolution Water main pipe detail after conservation treatment in 2016. (courtesy of new york state museum collections) resulted in a genuine solution, the Croton Aqueduct. The bank, which grew into a financial giant, eventually constructed its headquarters on Wall Street and in 1955 merged with Chase National to become Chase Manhattan Bank. Today, the New York...
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Dec 19, 2023
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