How NYC got its fresh water
Nineteen Reservoirs By Lucy Sante ( The Experiment)
Every morning in this newspaper you can, if you dare, check the level of New York City’s reservoir system, which supplies our fresh water, more than a billion gallons a day.
This sprawling upstate network has kept up with the city’s demands for more than a century. This week it’s at about 80% of capacity — not bad but below normal. A writer could begin a buzzardblack apocalyptic novel with a scientist noticing levels are falling.
Lucy Sante’s new book, “Nineteen Reservoirs,” is about the construction of this system from 1907 to 1967, an Egyptian task, and about the villages and farms and schools and churches that were demolished and submerged to make way for it.
Sante is the author of many books, notably “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York” ( 1991) — I don’t think I’ve ever entered the Strand and not seen copies anchoring a display table — in which she commented, in lines that presage her current book, that New Yorkers are “custodians of a history of which they are seldom consciously aware.”
Like Sante, I lived for a long period near one of the vast artificial lakes in the New York City watershed. They are awesome in their beauty but disconcerting. At moments you half- expect a beseeching hand to emerge from the depths, like at the end of John Boorman’s “Deliverance.” Subconsciously, you keep an eye on your dog.
They’re frustrating for the nearby residents, Sante is correct to notice, because they are impossibly inviting “on a hot day in a region with no real lakes, albeit as taboo for swimming or boating as if they were meant for the gods alone.”
I am not uninterested in the reservoir system, but I ( probably) would not have picked this book up if someone else had written it. I’ve followed Sante’s work for decades, the way you follow a band, because her writing has an unmistakable and addictive tone.
Greil Marcus has isolated and described that tone as “a quiet, calm, forceful attempt to get inside those people, places, artifacts and memories that attract him” — Sante has recently transitioned genders — “with a commitment to the subject at hand that is as passionate as it is modest.”
Keeping up with Sante has meant attending not just to her books, which include the autobiographical “The Factory of Facts” ( 1998), but also to her work as an essayist and critic.
I’m filibustering, because while “Nineteen Reservoirs” is a beautiful object — the period photographs and postcards are expertly reproduced and glow with feeling, and the book concludes with an apposite photo essay by Tim Davis — that elusive tone only rarely emerges.
This is a static and somewhat repetitive book that lacks a narrative through line. Sante seldom makes the kinds of connections and associations she does in her best work. And yet: Her semi- failures have more going for them than most writer’s successes.
Sante admires the engineering expertise, and the grandeur, of the reservoir system. About the Ashokan Reservoir, completed in 1917, for example, she observes how “the project was rivaled only by the Panama Canal as an achievement of America’s engineering might,” and how the reservoir’s surface area equaled all of Manhattan’s below 110th Street.
It took three days for a theoretical drop of water from the reservoir to reach Staten Island. She totes up all the facts and figures: cubic yards of excavated rock, barrels of cement for the masonry. “That was the poetic language of enterprise in the 20th century,” she writes. “Nothing else conveyed so well the immensity of every new undertaking and its dwarfing of whatever had preceded it.”
A prober of silences, Sante writes about the tens of thousands of anonymous men, many of them immigrants and African Americans, who toiled on these projects, often living in hastily constructed settlements, leaving few traces.
Sante has always had an underdog’s left- of- the- dial feeling for what’s been threatened or lost. The best material in “Nineteen Reservoirs” is about the people who had their land confiscated, in colonial fashion, and submerged. She writes:
The people whose land was taken reacted with disbelief, sorrow, anger. That land might have been in their families for generations, might have been the family’s sole support, might have been the only home they’d ever known. The city decreed and mobilized and condemned properties for seizure without asking residents’ permission, found all sorts of legal subterfuges for denying the value of their fields and homesteads as established by expert witnesses, lowballed every estimate, treated them with distant contempt.
Certainties were shattered. There were court cases, and holdouts. Graveyards had to be moved. The citizens of Albany drank filtered water from the Hudson River; some argued New York City should follow their lead. No steeple will ever emerge, spookily, from the waterline because all buildings in the planners’ way were razed.