newcritics

Against the background of the ongoing hand wringing over bottled versus tap, I fell headlong into Kevin Bone’s Water-Works – The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply (The Monacelli Press, 2006), a handsome volume I had purchased for my father – the retired mechanical engineer – last Christmas. Wading through 150 years’ worth of archival materials produced during the planning and construction of the Croton, Catskill, and Delaware water systems, Bone, a professor at the Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, and a group of colleagues emerged with a richly illustrated history of one of the most amazing, continuing public works projects ever…one that, today, supplies over a billion gallons of water a day to the City’s five boroughs.

The book’s text provides a compelling overview of the contagious diseases, fires, and increasingly unsanitary conditions attendant to the City’s explosive growth in the 1800’s that fostered the political will needed to launch such a daunting effort…as well as the insidious forces of self-interest and corruption (hello, Boss Tweed) that constantly threatened to derail it. It describes, too, the continuing project deep below the boroughs to complete Water Tunnel #3, and the relatively recent efforts focused not on the development of new sources, but on water usage conservation and on the protection of the existing watershed.

The real treat, however, and what originally caught my eye, are the book’s pictures: the archival photographs and, especially, the elegant, painstakingly hand-drafted line drawings of structures both large and small – cross sections of dams that reveal them to be land-locked icebergs with tons of their mass buried beneath river beds; sluice-gate lifting machinery; bridge superstructures over spillways; details of giant blow-off valves; cross-sections of aqueduct tunnels; and before-and-after maps of areas to be flooded by the construction of reservoirs. Looking at these, one cannot help but re-think the water supply network as anything less than the world’s largest art installation, largely invisible (cf. Walter de Maria’s “Vertical Earth Kilometer,” anyone?), designed and executed by hundreds and thousands of men who joined form and function in ways both novel and intricate.

They knew full well the magnificence of their efforts. Approaching the completion, in 1913, of the Catskill Water System (twenty-two years’ worth of work which added 571 square miles of watershed to the system), the project’s Chief Engineer J. Waldo Smith wrote:

“The work we set out to accomplish has been very largely completed, and practically every difficulty has been overcome. With relatively little remaining to be done, it is but inevitable that many of us must seek elsewhere for places where our activities may continue and where we can go on doing good and useful work. To none, more than to me, is this parting a sorrow, as I look back over what we have together succeeded in doing and as I recall our many pleasant, useful and happy associations.

To those of us who remain the parting is as hard as for those who go, for, one and all, we realize the extreme improbability, in the years that are left to each of us, of ever again being connected with an organization of such magnitude, of such cohesiveness and unity of spirit and, withal, of such intense honesty and loyalty of purpose.”