City,Region,and In Between

The Region Emerges

In 1961, geographer Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis launched the modern study of the region in the United States. Years before “suburban sprawl” entered the American lexicon, Gottmann observed that the area from Virginia to Maine had become an undifferentiated mass of cities and suburbs, one population center merging into the next. Emphasizing the multitude of political jurisdictions and the intermixing of industrial, commercial, and residential functions across space, Gottmann identified many of the significant trends in the development of the East Coast. But his model shed little light on the physical and cultural ties linking cities, suburbs, and hinterlands. ³

Beginning in the 1980s, scholars focused their attention on metropolitan growth patterns, parsing the particulars of urban decline and exurban growth. Economic geographers blazed the regional trail that historians would later follow. A group of geographers dubbed the “California School” investigated the marked decentralization of economic activity that emerged in postwar California and seemingly intensified with each passing decade. Inspired by Marxist geographer David Harvey, these scholars identified the desire for capital accumulation as the cause of economic diffusion. In their view, the critical force driving economic development was the clustering of firms in new locations, a process they termed business agglomeration. The benefits of proximity to a vast network of new techniques, products, and ideas outweighed the potential drawbacks of basing operations in a more remote location. ⁴ Michael Storper and Richard Walker summed up the essential argument: “industries create regional resources and not the other way around.” ⁵ When rents and wages became too expensive in one regional center, firms often relocated simultaneously to new areas, an impulse the geographers called “leapfrogging.” Residential expansion and public infrastructure followed in the wake of industrial relocation. ⁶

In the early twenty-first century, geographers began to explore the connections between urban and rural nature. Richard Walker, a key figure in the California School, scrutinized new aspects of regional development, using land protection in the San Francisco Bay area as a case study. Insisting that “city and country coevolve,” Walker argued that cities did more than pave over the countryside; they also unleashed forces that helped preserve it. ⁷ He concluded that the combined efforts of a wide range of environmental activists and government agencies were responsible for the development of an extensive array of parks and nature reserves throughout the region. On the opposite coast, Matthew Gandy examined the successful resistance to the construction of incinerators in New York City that emerged in the 1990s. With the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill and an inability to overcome vehement opposition in neighborhoods slated to host incinerators, New York had no choice but to ship its refuse to nearby states, reshaping regional geography through its consumption and disposal practices. ⁸

The subfield of suburban history, which also blossomed in this period, linked the themes of industrial expansion and political resistance introduced by geographers to racial politics. In American Babylon, perhaps the most influential of the spate of suburban studies, Robert Self skillfully intertwined these developments, tracking the starkly different experiences of suburban white homeowners and Oakland’s black power activists under the liberal postwar state. Industrial suburbs lured many of Oakland’s white citizens with new homes (subsidized by federal housing policy) and low property taxes (subsidized by taxes paid by new industry). However, the one-two punch of a suburban property tax revolt and federally sanctioned housing discrimination deprived many urban blacks of the benefits of home ownership and steady employment. Where geographers like Richard Walker highlighted the connections between city and country, suburban historians tended to emphasize the divides. ⁹

Perhaps the most important contribution of suburban history was its success in connecting space and politics. Geographer Walker praised the East Bay Regional Parks District for aggressively acquiring land for nature reserves and parks; in sharp contrast, historian Self emphasized the racial exclusivity and resolute opposition to tax increases in these same suburban growth areas. Political geography, these historians demonstrated, really mattered. For example, school desegregation battles played out quite differently in places such as Charlotte, which had a unified city-county school district, and the Boston area, where town borders were coterminous with school districts. ¹⁰

Urban environmental history, which emerged in the 1980s, foreshadowed the metropolitan emphasis of suburban history. The field’s pioneers—Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi—highlighted the metabolism of urban areas, arguing that the environmental impact of modernizing cities could be understood only in a regional context. ¹¹ Sewer systems that emptied into rivers replaced cesspools and privy vaults; dumping refuse on city streets as feed for animals gave way to sanitary landfills; and ever-higher smokestacks dispersed air pollution far beyond city limits. The need to provide modern infrastructure for growing cities also engendered political realignments. Whether through annexation or regional cooperation, Tarr concluded, “Sewerage technology . . . was an important factor in facilitating government integration.” ¹²

More recently, urban environmental historians have turned their attention to the development of particular cities. Seeking to demonstrate the relevance of cities to environmental history, they steered the discipline away from its traditional focus on rural resource extraction. To emphasize the region would be to deemphasize the city. ¹³ Their tendency to highlight regional factors in explaining urban development is thus all the more striking. Environmental historians soon discovered that physical changes within the city were inextricably linked to regional landscapes and urban power structures. Urban political and economic power in turn often depended on control of regional resources. Matthew Klingle skillfully intertwined these strands in his environmental history of Seattle. Urban appropriation of rural water supplies directly shaped the physical geography of the city itself. Equipped with water from the Cedar River and high-powered hoses, city workers leveled many of Seattle’s most formidable hills, improving business prospects for some, destroying the homes and livelihoods of others. ¹⁴ In his study of New Orleans and its riverfront, Ari Kelman also probed the city-country relationship, concluding that state officials effectively sacrificed rural St. Bernard Parish in the epic flood of 1927 to spare the Crescent City from significant damage. Kelman, Klingle, and their brethren discovered that the urban environment was firmly tethered to the regional landscape. ¹⁵

The portability of water and its centrality to urban development make water supply an excellent vehicle for integrating the insights of economic geography, suburban history, and urban environmental history. The continuous expansion of New York City’s water network from the midnineteenth century to the present reveals the wide-ranging implications of infrastructure development on city, suburb, and countryside. Traditional narratives of urban water expansion emphasize the despoliation of (a supposedly) idyllic countryside, but this blinkered perspective ignores many of the most interesting and surprising consequences of regional water development. ¹⁶

The regional complexities of New York City’s water expansion remain largely unexplored. Viewing New York’s water system through a regional prism offers new insights into the shifting political relationship between cities and their suburbs and uncovers the hidden connections between rural infrastructure development and urban land use. Beginning in New York City’s northern suburbs, where the city first developed a supply network, the focus of this essay then shifts to the city itself, where the rebuilding of defunct water infrastructure produced some of New York’s most significant cultural and recreational assets, such as the New York Public Library and Central Park’s Great Lawn. In the conclusion, it returns to the suburbs, whose rapid residential and commercial development helped engineer an unlikely transformation of parks in the Bronx at the turn of the twenty-first century. These examples suggest that to obtain a fine-grained view of the city, it is helpful to take a few steps back and consider it from a regional perspective. ¹⁷

The New York City Water Supply

The delivery of water from the Croton River to New York in 1842 was one of the most momentous accomplishments in the city’s history. New Yorkers, long accustomed to an inferior water supply, mounted some of the most elaborate celebrations in the city’s history. But the pressure of continuous population growth and increasing per capita consumption left little time for celebrating, and within a few years New York needed to expand the Croton system to keep pace with escalating demand for water. The city spent decades building additional reservoirs to increase the storage capacity of the water system and in the early 1890s completed a new aqueduct to convey these supplies to New York. By the turn of the century, New York’s extensive network of reservoirs in Westchester and Putnam counties had captured most of the Croton watershed’s available supply. Surging immigration, wasteful consumption, and the consolidation of the five boroughs of New York in 1898 necessitated a massive expansion of the city’s water system. The city would need to reach beyond the Croton to meet the inexorable demand for more water (see figure 1). ¹⁸

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Figure 1.

Note: New York City watershed map: From the 1830s to the 1960s, New York continuously expanded its water network.

In 1905, municipal officials identified the Catskill Mountains as their preferred water source. The challenge lay in convincing the New York State Senate, dominated by rural legislators, to grant the city access to the pristine streams that laced the mountains. Legislators from Putnam and Westchester counties strongly opposed granting the city additional authority to tap rural waters. They argued that New York had taken many of their best lands and treated their citizens with disdain, and they delighted in blocking the city from further expanding its water network. ¹⁹

In the early months of 1905, the city’s plan to construct a massive water storage system in the Catskills looked doomed. Unless it could sway some rural lawmakers, New York stood no chance of obtaining the water it desperately needed. City officials and state legislators representing New York devised a brilliant divide-and-conquer strategy to gain the support of lawmakers from districts near the city. They revised the bill granting the city the right to tap Catskill waters to include two enticing inducements for legislators from the Croton counties: New York City would build no additional reservoirs in these jurisdictions beyond those currently under construction, and it would permit Putnam and Westchester communities to tie into the city’s water network. Mountain water would not only facilitate the growth of New York City, it would also provide the burgeoning suburbs east of the Hudson with abundant water supplies at very low cost. (County communities were required to pay for the water they received from New York and for connecting town water systems to the city’s aqueduct but were spared the enormous expense of developing new water sources.) Faced with a choice between loyalty to their rural comrades and water to fuel suburban growth, Putnam and Westchester legislators opted for water, giving New York City access to abundant Catskill supplies. ²⁰ A Catskill newspaper denounced their perfidy: “Loud were the cries that up to this year came from Westchester and Putnam, but the finest and most exquisite sort of politics has been played by the Tammany administration of New York city [sic] in the furtherance of this measure. Those very elements which should be united with us in the opposition to this bill are now in favor of it and are opposed to us.” ²¹

The need for water underscored the contrasting circumstances of rural and suburban communities. While the Catskills succumbed to the juggernaut of New York City’s water expansion, suburban counties exploited their proximity to the city to grow their populations and economies. Assured of an ample water supply and with excellent transportation links to New York City, Westchester County boomed. In the postwar era, Westchester cities and towns became increasingly reliant on New York City water to sustain the growing population, which surged from 625,000 in 1950 to over 800,000 in 1970. ²² By the 1980s, the county drew on New York City’s water system for 90 percent of its total supply. ²³ New York City had become a de facto regional water provider, stoking urban and suburban growth with rural water. Water literally and figuratively changed regional maps; new reservoirs flooded the Catskills, and formerly rural counties began to align their interests with the growing metropolis.

If New York City’s expansion of its water supply transformed the countryside and promoted suburban development, how did it influence the urban environment? How does viewing city growth through a regional prism change our understanding of the urban landscape? In a review essay on urban environmental history, Joel Tarr called for more work in this area, urging historians to “combine a Cronon-like discussion of city-hinterland links with an exploration of changes in the urban environment itself.” ²⁴ Following Tarr’s lead, the remainder of this essay examines the effects of New York’s appropriation of rural resources on the built environment of the city.

The relentless expansion of the city’s water system overshadowed another development that dramatically reshaped the urban landscape: the redeployment of defunct water supply infrastructure for other purposes. The recycling of urban space has long been one of New York’s defining features. By the mid-nineteenth century, New York’s merchants and elites had largely abandoned their downtown residences for more spacious quarters to the north, dividing their large single-family homes into multifamily dwellings. ²⁵ In 1836, one of those who left downtown behind, diarist and former mayor Philip Hone, lamented the shifting cycles of New York real estate: “the old downtown burgomasters who have fixed to one spot all their lives, will be seen during the next summer in flocks, marching reluctantly north to pitch their tents in places which, in their time, were orchards, cornfields, or morasses.” ²⁶

Exploring urban redevelopment in the early twentieth century, when the forces of “creative destruction” were unleashed with a particular fury, historian Max Page captured the tensions between capitalist urbanization and personal and civic identity. Page identified the churning of the real estate market as a major source of the city’s wealth. Although he recognized the role of international factors, such as massive immigration, in shaping the New York landscape, Page focused almost entirely on developments within Manhattan to explain the changing urban streetscape. The regional world beyond the island receded into the hazy distance. ²⁷

However, we cannot fully grasp the continual remaking of the city without accounting for the influence of regional factors. As Page details, the motives of individual property owners, business cycles, and restrictive covenants decisively shaped the landscape of Fifth Avenue. But the avenue’s most famous building—the New York Public Library—has its origins not in neighborhood politics but in regional developments. Before New Yorkers constructed a world-class library, they built a world-class water system. The Croton Reservoir, located in the heart of what is today midtown Manhattan, at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, occupied the site of the future library from 1841 to 1898. The upgrading of the water network outside New York made the Croton Reservoir and other waterworks infrastructure within the city expendable. Building anew in the countryside enabled the city to reuse and recycle within its borders.

The New York Public Library’s Aqueous Origins

The decision of cultural elites and municipal officials to raze the Croton Reservoir and replace it with the New York Public Library appears at first glance a quintessentially urban story. In fact, the transformation of the site suggests the need for a broader conception of public space that recognizes the impact of regional developments on the urban landscape. Historian of technology Thomas Hughes coined the phrase “ecotechnological environment” to refer to the “intersecting and overlapping natural and human-built environments.” Seen from this perspective, cities can be conceptualized as natural landscapes that are especially subject to manipulation by humans. They are also places whose form and function are made possible by the resources obtained from other places. The construction of grand public spaces such as the New York Public Library was rooted not only in the rise of the City Beautiful movement and the cultural vision of urban elites but also in the control of rural nature and sophisticated waterworks technology. ²⁸

The Croton Reservoir embodied New York City’s midnineteenth-century aspirations to cosmopolitanism. Engineer and architect James Renwick Jr. adorned the reservoir’s four-story gray walls with Egyptian-style cornices to evoke New York’s connection to ancient hydraulic civilizations. Chosen for its location at the highest point of Murray Hill (thus increasing water pressure to densely populated downtown districts), the reservoir was an odd symbol of urban accomplishment. When completed in 1841, it had few neighbors and towered over the handful of scattered structures in the surrounding area. Across Fifth Avenue lay “an open field, upon which stood a single country house.” ²⁹ When Augustus Fay painted the reservoir and its surroundings in 1850, the immediate neighborhood still retained its rural character, but new brick buildings loomed in the distance, signs of the encroaching city (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Augustus Fay, View of the Croton Water Reservoir, New York City (circa 1850).

By the 1860s, this vital component of New York’s infrastructure doubled as an elite gathering spot. The reservoir’s lofty parapet provided an ideal aerie from which to survey New York’s growth. Affluent New Yorkers promenaded on weekend afternoons, displaying their finery and taking in the increasingly crowded vista of the developing city. Novelist E. L. Doctorow memorably depicted the reservoir’s heyday: “New Yorkers loved their reservoir. They strolled along the parapet arm in arm and were soothed in their spirits. If they wanted a breeze in summer, here is where it would blow. Puffs rippled the water. Children launched their toy sloops.” ³⁰

The reservoir’s popularity could not withstand the onslaught of urban growth. Fifth Avenue had become one of New York’s most exclusive streets, making the reservoir an eyesore. When the water department connected Murray Hill to a new high-elevation water distribution system in 1876, it ruptured any remaining affection neighborhood residents had for the reservoir. ³¹ No longer reliant on the reservoir for their water, property owners appealed to city officials for the removal of what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle would later dub “a relic of a former municipality.” ³² The reservoir survived this first attack, but succumbed two decades later when some of New York’s most powerful residents joined together to construct the city’s flagship public library. Two forces—the reservoir’s central location and elite aspirations for the booming city—combined to launch the era of infrastructure recycling.

The campaign to construct a library on the reservoir site began in earnest in 1893, when the state legislature voted to replace the reservoir with a library to be built with funds bequeathed by New York lawyer and former presidential candidate Samuel Tilden. The trustees of Tilden’s will soon recognized the need to recruit other partners to the project and approached the boards of the Astor and Lenox libraries, the city’s most prominent research libraries, with a proposal to establish a unified library. Both libraries boasted excellent collections, but neither had the space nor the resources to create a research library on par with those in Paris or London. By 1896, the two libraries had joined with the Tilden trustees to push for the establishment of a world-class library. Their chosen site remained the Croton Reservoir. ³³

Location proved a critical component in the public relations campaign for the new library. In their appeal to the mayor to grant them the reservoir site, the library trustees emphasized its location, “the most central and easily accessible spot on the Island.” ³⁴ Land that had been considered well uptown, on the fringe of the developed city when many of the trustees were children, now sat at the transportation crossroads of New York. With Central Park occupying the center of the island from Fifty-ninth Street to 110th Street, any uptown location would prove inconvenient to a substantial number of New Yorkers. A real estate expert hired to find a central location for the new library reported that alternative sites would be prohibitively expensive. The library trustees argued that a gift of city-owned property would enable them to devote their limited resources to buying books rather than land. ³⁵

To city boosters and the elite guardians of the Astor and Lenox collections, the need for a massive, amply endowed research library in New York was glaring. Secure in its reputation as a center of commerce, New York’s civic status now depended on its cultural achievements. Like civic leaders throughout the nation, the library trustees had fallen under the sway of the City Beautiful movement. They looked to shed the old gray image of the city symbolized by the reservoir and replace it with a library, a powerful sign of New York’s physical and cultural attainment. If city hall withheld its support, New York would, claimed one magazine editor, “remain, no one can say how many years longer, under the imputation of being the one great metropolis of Christendom which has no public library worthy of the name or adequate to its needs.” ³⁶

The dispute revolved around dueling aesthetic visions and questions about the reservoir’s utility. Stalwart defenders of old New York resisted the attempt to tear down the Croton Reservoir and erect the City Beautiful in its place. In their view, the reservoir was not a gray menace but a dignified structure bearing testament to a bygone era. Samuel McElroy, chief of the Brooklyn Aqueduct, urged the Board of Aldermen to preserve the city’s heritage: “The structure itself is a most admirable specimen of Hydraulic [sic] architecture, and of the most substantial construction and as such ought to be preserved.” ³⁷ The voice of an older era, McElroy could imagine few structures more beautiful than the Croton Reservoir.

Library supporters had little patience for this sentiment; New York’s greatness depended on constructing well-proportioned buildings that would enrich the cultural and educational life of the city, not preserving old ones of dubious architectural value. One library trustee expressed the new calculus of civic worth by comparing the holdings of New York’s research libraries to those in Paris: “It is humiliating to think that the metropolis of America has in this combination of great libraries but one-ninth the number of books that the French institution has.” ³⁸

In the background of these disputes lurked larger questions about the role of public space in the city. When they designed their plan for Central Park, Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux relied on natural rock outcroppings and extensive plantings to obscure the rectangular reservoir they deemed a blot on their vision of a rural idyll in the city. ³⁹ Just as Olmsted and Vaux sought to create a rolling rural landscape to soothe and uplift park visitors, library proponents viewed access to books and information as critical to edifying their fellow New Yorkers. The public value of both the park and the library resided not so much in the interaction between members of the public as in the private pursuit of leisure and education that these spaces afforded. As historian Mary Ryan has observed, the vigorous use of public spaces to assert social claims and democratic rights faded over the course of the nineteenth century, yielding to a democracy of newspapers and publicity. The drive to construct the library reflected this new conception of democracy based on individual access to resources in a print-dominated culture. The neoclassical design of the library reinforced the connection between the library and the democratic traditions of ancient Greece. ⁴⁰

The reservoir tussle also marked a clear transition in the visual hierarchy of public space. Awe-inspiring structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, clearly doubled as both infrastructure and art, and were widely recognized as exemplars of civic accomplishment. But municipal government increasingly shunted other components of urban infrastructure underground or to the edges of the city. In the early 1890s, after protracted legal battles, the city finally succeeded in forcing utility companies to bury all electrical wires. Streetcars and elevated rail would soon give way to subways. ⁴¹

Water infrastructure reflected this subterranean trend. The original Croton aqueduct entered the city over the High Bridge, a structure built expressly to carry water into the city; its successor, the New Croton Aqueduct, slinked into New York underground, ending at a comparatively modest gatehouse in upper Manhattan. ⁴² The expansion of the supply network in rural areas provided more water under greater pressure, obviating the need for large-scale water storage within the city. The construction of new water mains running from the reservoirs in Central Park to densely populated downtown neighborhoods eclipsed the usefulness of the reservoir at Murray Hill. By far the smallest reservoir in the system, it offered little protection in case of a disruption in water delivery. In the space of a few decades, the Croton Reservoir had been reduced from a prominent symbol of civic pride to an outmoded remnant of urban infrastructure. ⁴³ Workers dismantled the reservoir, and active library construction began in 1902. The skyscrapers that grew up around the library did not diminish its stature as a powerful symbol of the new mode of democratic public space in twentieth-century New York. If anything, these looming edifices only accentuated the city’s dual commitment to commerce and culture.

Given the dearth of alternative sites on which to locate the library, the water system played a crucial role in helping New York attain the high cultural standards it so anxiously sought in this era. This assistance proved concrete; much of the library’s foundation consists of stone taken from reservoir walls and basins. The library is the most prominent urban by-product of the perpetual construction of water supply infrastructure that New York City undertook in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900, Westchester and Putnam Counties were home to eight New York City reservoirs, and four additional reservoirs were either under construction or in the planning stages. By developing the region’s natural resources, New Yorkers unwittingly gave birth to one of the city’s cultural landmarks.

The 1930s: The Height of Infrastructure Recycling

While workers put the finishing touches on the elegant new library in Manhattan, other laborers toiled in the Catskill Mountains to collect mountain water and convey it to New York City. It was in the Catskills—where the construction of the Ashokan and Schoharie reservoirs submerged communities and rearranged landscapes—that the regional implications of the city’s thirst for water were most keenly felt. But the ramifications of rural water expansion went far beyond the dramatic alteration of country landscapes. The introduction of water from the Catskill Mountains to New York in 1917 also significantly reshaped the urban built environment. ⁴⁴

Catskill water was delivered under greater pressure, enabling municipal officials to dispense with many of the pumping stations and reservoirs that supplied water to buildings at higher elevations. In the 1920s, municipal officials focused on increasing supplies, and virtually all work on the water system occurred outside of city limits. Ironically, it was not until the depths of the Great Depression that New York City actively redeployed the urban land made available by the extension of the water network. In the 1930s, economic contraction stalled most reservoir and aqueduct construction outside the city. However, the availability of city-owned land and the willingness of the federal government to provide generous funding for the redevelopment of former reservoir sites transformed New York City’s recreational landscape. ⁴⁵

The conversion of reservoirs into parks reflected the economic, social, and aesthetic tumult of the 1920s and 1930s. The City Beautiful aesthetic yielded to modernism, and the notion of self-improvement now encompassed physical health as well as intellectual development. ⁴⁶ In many respects, the massive expansion of New York City’s recreational infrastructure in the 1930s blended Progressive Era ideals of community with modernist architectural styles. As architectural historian Marta Gutman observed, New York City park commissioner Robert Moses integrated “monumental modern buildings into the fabric of everyday urban life.” Led by Moses and his boss, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, municipal government enhanced cultural and recreational life by reclaiming defunct water infrastructure sites for new purposes. ⁴⁷

Impressed by the state park system on Long Island that Moses created from scratch in the 1920s, Mayor La Guardia named him the first commissioner with jurisdiction over parks in all five boroughs. ⁴⁸ The availability of federal relief funds provided Moses the means to overhaul the city’s degraded parks. But a string attached to Works Progress Administration (WPA) money threatened to strangle his ambitious program: the funds could not be used for land acquisition. If New York wanted to deploy federal largesse to revamp its inadequate park system, it would need to use city-owned land. Before he gained notoriety for constructing highways through established neighborhoods, Moses garnered acclaim for making the most of precious urban space. The master builder was also an expert scavenger. Moses scoured the holdings of other municipal agencies, seeking to appropriate underutilized parcels for the Parks Department. His success won him fulsome praise from the press and a public desperate for more recreational opportunities. The New York Times marveled at his ingenuity fewer than three months into his term as commissioner: “The man who found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks and sermons in stones had nothing on Commissioner MOSES. He discovers recreational facilities in the most unexpected places; for him even the toads have ‘precious jewels’ in their heads.” ⁴⁹

One of these unexpected places was Highbridge Park, located in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. ⁵⁰ No place in the city bore the physical imprint of the water system more clearly than the stretch of land along the Harlem River in the vicinity of 173rd Street. The park was named for the High Bridge that carried the Old Croton Aqueduct from Westchester County (this portion of the county would later become the Bronx) to Manhattan. Designed to resemble late-Roman aqueducts such as the one still standing in Segovia, Spain, High Bridge was widely regarded as New York’s most beautiful span. ⁵¹ In the 1870s, just a stone’s throw from the bridge, the city added a Romanesque water tower and a reservoir, which drew water from the aqueduct to supply the high-elevation areas of northern Manhattan. With the arrival of water from the Catskills, officials shut down the Old Croton Aqueduct inside city limits. Henceforth, it would only be reactivated when the Catskill aqueduct needed to be shut down for repairs. The reservoir lay in a similar state of suspended animation—kept full in case of emergency but disconnected from city water mains. ⁵²

Within weeks of taking office as parks commissioner in 1934, Moses had identified the Highbridge Reservoir as a prime location for a city pool. Many of the Jewish and Italian residents of Washington Heights had fled the close quarters of the lower East Side for the comparatively spacious environs of upper Manhattan, but they continued to lack recreational amenities. The reservoir and its surroundings grounds proved both spectacular and eminently practical as a site for a massive new pool. Patrons could gaze out at the stately water tower hovering just outside the pool’s fence; after swimming, they could amble over to the landscaped promenade near the tower’s base and enjoy stunning views of the High Bridge and the Harlem River valley. ⁵³

Residents loved their new facility, which included an attractive brick bathhouse with a capacity of almost five thousand and large swimming, wading, and diving pools. Undeterred by admission fees and long lines, children and their parents flocked to the pool after it opened in July of 1936. Washington Heights resident Herbert Levenson wrote Moses in thanks: “I want to tell you how we folks who do not own cars and do not necessarily use the roadways appreciate the swimming pools you have built for us. I cannot send my youngster away for the summer but even so as long as she can go down to the High Bridge pool for the afternoon she is delighted.” ⁵⁴ Another neighborhood resident, Jane Rush, complained to the mayor about the poor access for baby carriages at the pool yet echoed Levenson’s general enthusiasm: “That pool was such a God send to us that I don’t know what to tell you in appreciation.” ⁵⁵ Changes in the countryside, in conjunction with federal funds and active city planning, had turned a vestigial wart on New York’s landscape into a shining new symbol of recreational and civic health. The thousands of New Yorkers who flocked to Highbridge on steamy summer days embodied the democratization of recreation that was one of the signal accomplishments of the New Deal. ⁵⁶

Bronx residents experienced a similar transformation the following summer when WPA workers converted the Williamsbridge Reservoir, located in the northern reaches of the borough, into the Williamsbridge Oval, one of the city’s premier recreational facilities. With the completion of the first phase of the Catskill system, the reservoir had become expendable. ⁵⁷ The influx of federal work relief funds enabled New York to expand recreational opportunities for the growing population of the outer boroughs. ⁵⁸ Robert Moses proposed converting the reservoir into one of New York City’s premier sporting facilities, where thousands of spectators would gather to watch swimming and track events. Neighborhood residents craved a recreational complex that offered activities for all age groups, not an entertainment destination for the city at large. ⁵⁹

Under pressure from Williamsbridge residents, Mayor La Guardia visited the reservoir in May 1934 and assured them that the city would finally put it to good use: “There are 19 acres of land here that have been idle for 15 years, and it’s time something was done about it.” ⁶⁰ In 1934, La Guardia still feared voters more than he feared Robert Moses; in late June he announced the transfer of the property to the Parks Department on the condition that it serve as a large neighborhood park rather than a sports stadium for citywide events. Williamsbridge rejoiced. ⁶¹

The reservoir’s oval configuration and ample grounds yielded an impressive park. Moses retained the oval for a track, trimming the thirty-seven-foot-high embankment walls and raising the basin’s floor twelve feet. Pedestrians who strolled along the inner portion of the embankment walls gazed down on a two-level recreation facility that included a wading pool, tennis courts, playgrounds, and ball fields. Just as they had at Murray Hill, workers recycled both the reservoir site and the materials of the reservoir itself; a field house was built largely from stone taken from the reservoir, “a most economical and attractive material for the purpose,” observed the Parks Department. ⁶² Williamsbridge Oval soon became the center of neighborhood cultural and recreational activity.

The development of parks at Highbridge and Williamsbridge reflected the New Deal’s linkage of healthy bodies and strong communities. Careful to avoid the strict regimentation that characterized the recreation boom in much of continental Europe, WPA officials nonetheless viewed recreation as a way to foster community cohesion. ⁶³ An avid swimmer, Moses hoped to cultivate a love of vigorous physical activity among city dwellers. He shared prevailing elite concerns about the growing allure of mass culture and the need to provide recreational outlets as an alternative to commercial pursuits. But the parks were more than places for solitary physical exertion; they were showcases of public power and communal identity. Park proponents argued that providing green space and recreational opportunities would help ensure the smooth functioning of civilization. ⁶⁴

These new recreational spaces bridged the gap between individuals and their neighbors and between the private realm and the state. New Yorkers stood in long lines to gain access to Highbridge and other city pools. After they entered, they shared bathhouses, patios, and pools with neighbors and residents from other parts of the city. Mayor La Guardia and Robert Moses frequently attended the opening ceremonies for these facilities, embodying the beneficence of municipal power. The city’s presence lingered long after the ribbon cutting ceremonies. The Parks Department and Mayor’s Office sponsored swim teams at the city’s municipal pools and organized meets at which swimmers from different pools competed. At all-city meets, contestants wore bathing suits emblazoned with the insignia of the Parks Department, whose team of swimmers and “fancy divers” frequently performed after large meets. ⁶⁵ The parks provided New Yorkers inexpensive entertainment; swimming competitions frequently attracted several thousand spectators. At Williamsbridge, the Parks Department hosted events in all seasons, ranging from dance competitions and children’s pet contests to ice-skating. ⁶⁶

The rapid expansion of playgrounds and parks in Depression-era New York City did not signal a complete abandonment of older ideals of park management and design. While most observers recognized the need for more play areas and recreation facilities, many upper-class New Yorkers wanted to reserve substantial park acreage for passive recreation. This tension between active and passive recreation had defined Central Park from its inception. Olmsted’s vision of a rural idyll for enervated city dwellers continued to resonate with many New Yorkers. He believed that spending time in natural surroundings would uplift lower-class New Yorkers and endow them with traditional values. Moral environmentalism, not active recreation, would strengthen the body politic. Frustrated by the presence of one reservoir in the park and the impending construction of another, the Greensward Plan of Olmsted and Vaux sought to redirect visitors and their gazes away from these unfortunate human intrusions. Ironically, the redevelopment of the original reservoir offered New York’s landscape architects an opportunity to revive an Arcadian vision for Central Park. ⁶⁷

New Yorkers debated the fate of the lower reservoir (so-called to distinguish it from the newer upper reservoir directly to its north, completed in 1862) for almost three decades. ⁶⁸ Utterly devoid of whimsy or grandeur, the rectangular lower reservoir found few protectors when expansion of the water system outside the city made it available for park purposes. A 1931 editorial captured the dominant sentiment: “The ‘lower reservoir’ in Central Park has long been a waste of precious space. Even when it was a sheet of water it was fenced off and hidden so that it was no “good” to anybody except the apartments which overlook it.” ⁶⁹

Redevelopment of the thirty-five-acre reservoir site became engulfed in larger questions of aesthetics and class conflict. In 1910, Charles Stover, the Manhattan Parks commissioner, proposed converting the reservoir to a formal garden. Subsequent plans called for a sunken garden, a monument to the Catskill water system, and a World War I memorial. As late as 1919, the Department of Water Supply claimed that it needed the lower reservoir as an emergency supply. In the absence of a firm redevelopment plan, there was little pressure on the department to surrender the site. ⁷⁰

In 1930, the city finally drained the reservoir, and the debate over the future of the site intensified. In June 1930, the New York chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects released a plan calling for a “Great Lawn for Play,” an oval-shaped green space to be surrounded by a handful of playgrounds. The New York Daily News observed that “Great Lawn for Play” was an unwittingly ironic title; the lawn would be reserved for special occasions, with only a small portion of the site set aside for active recreation. ⁷¹

The battles lines were clearly drawn: aesthetics versus recreation. Although the conflict in some ways reprised nineteenth-century discourse about the purpose of the park, cultural circumstances had changed. A campaign for health and exercise had swept the country in the 1920s, bolstering support for expanded recreational opportunities. ⁷² Giving voice to this new enthusiasm, the Daily News strongly advocated draining the reservoir to create more play space. The prospect of losing out to an elite group of architects who elevated aesthetic contemplation and the integrity of park design above the needs of children raised the editorial hackles of the newspaper. It waged a vigorous campaign against the Park Association of New York, which endorsed the architects’ plan, and the association’s allies in the press, in particular the New York Times. ⁷³

For the Daily News, the Great Lawn controversy boiled down to class. Advocates of the Great Lawn plan were a bunch of “Brahmins” whose wealth enabled them to spend their summers outside the city. ⁷⁴ The News ran large photo spreads that featured children like Thomas O’Sullivan, who lived on nearby Amsterdam Avenue and had strong opinions about the reservoir site: “Turn it into a playground, by all means. We in this section need a big playground. If you don’t believe it, just drive through the side streets in the neighborhood of West 125th st. [sic] at any evening around 6 and see.” ⁷⁵ The paper mocked the argument made by Great Lawn supporters that the city should look elsewhere for sites on which to build new fields and playgrounds: “Where, short of the woods north of Washington Heights, can any more play space be found, except in this very place where the old reservoir was?” ⁷⁶

The Daily News lost the battle for the lower reservoir in 1934, but by the 1950s, it had won the larger war to claim the reservoir site for recreation. Seeking to curry favor with the Times, Robert Moses endorsed the landscape architects’ Great Lawn plan with minor modifications. By 1937, thanks to WPA laborers, the Great Lawn became a reality. The bucolic vision of Central Park that provided the intellectual foundation for the Great Lawn plan lost its political appeal in the postwar era. Despite the massive expansion of recreational facilities during the New Deal, New Yorkers still lacked adequate play space. In 1950, Moses ordered the installation of baseball backstops on the lawn. ⁷⁷ In the 1980s, ballplayers vied with activists and concertgoers for lawn space. Simon and Garfunkel packed the lawn in 1981 for their historic reunion concert. The following year, the Great Lawn played host to a large antinuclear rally. The New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera regularly entertained tens of thousands on the lawn. With the Sheep Meadow closed for restoration, the Great Lawn, “one of the few great, dramatic open plains in New York,” became the city’s outdoor living room. ⁷⁸

Participants in the redevelopment of the city’s defunct water structure in the 1930s generally perceived these projects through the narrow aperture of local politics. Debate turned on the appearance and features of the rehabilitated site. Few New Yorkers appreciated the reason for the availability of these sites: expansion of the water network in the Catskill Mountains and the improved water supply, water pressure, and delivery system that stemmed from these rural construction projects. Building new reservoirs and aqueducts outside the city enabled municipal authorities to convert urban real estate formerly devoted to water infrastructure into desperately needed recreational facilities. Attending to one vital public need—an ample supply of high-quality water—enabled municipal officials to substantially improve another important public service, the provision of recreational space for New York City’s teeming millions.

The connection between water infrastructure and the development of cultural and recreational resources was not limited to New York. Philadelphia offers another excellent example of the role that urban waterworks played in providing resources and space for other urban needs. Although Philadelphia elected not to go outside its borders to obtain a water supply, it recycled much of its early water infrastructure. The city acquired extensive acreage along the Schuylkill River to reduce pollution entering the river. These lands formed the core of Fairmount Park, the city’s largest park. Just as the parapet of the Croton Reservoir was a favorite destination, visitors and natives enjoyed touring the Fairmount Water Works, which was considered a modern marvel. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, perched on a hill overlooking the Schuylkill, was once a city reservoir, and City Hall occupies a former pump house and distributing reservoir. ⁷⁹

Beginning in the 1980s, the overhaul of public infrastructure led to the creation of significant recreational spaces in urban America. Cities built new parks on capped landfills and rehabilitated industrial waterfronts. ⁸⁰ In 2004, Boston finally razed the major freeway running through the city and replaced it with a tunnel, stirring dreams of a ribbon of parks running through the urban core. The rebuilding of the urban built environment was often closely tied to regional developments. In the case of Boston, the growth of the metropolitan region and the ensuing increase in traffic spurred the move to submerge the freeway. In 1990s New York City, rural sources of water supply once again played a critical role in reshaping both the country and the city. ⁸¹

Health, Welfare, and Water

New York spent much of the twentieth century developing a water system in the Catskill Mountains. With the completion of the reservoir system in 1967, the water network fell to the bottom of the urban agenda. City officials paid relatively little attention to the potential for degradation of the water supply posed by commercial development in the Catskills. The promulgation of more stringent federal water quality standards in the late 1980s was a powerful wake-up call to city officials. Just as it had in the 1930s, the regional character of the city’s water system would have a direct and substantial impact on the urban built environment. The recurrence of this pattern suggests the value of viewing urban development through the lens of regional change. The remainder of this essay traces amendments to federal drinking water statutes and the connection between these regulatory changes and the rebuilding of important recreational spaces within New York City. ⁸²

New York is one of a handful of major American cities that does not filter its water supply. Amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act passed in 1986 mandated the filtration of virtually all surface water supplies, reflecting an emerging scientific consensus that new types of pathogens posed an enormous public health risk. In 1993, four years after the Environmental Protection Agency released its filtration regulations, an outbreak of cryptosporidium in Milwaukee’s water supply killed more than 100 people and sickened hundreds of thousands. Federal regulations did provide unfiltered water supplies an escape hatch: cities that met strict water quality standards were eligible to apply for an exemption from the filtration requirement. ⁸³

Seeking to avoid the $4 billion to $8 billion expense of building a new filtration plant (roughly a third of the city’s budget at the time), municipal officials embraced an aggressive watershed protection strategy in the Catskills that prioritized major upgrades to watershed sewage treatment plants and extensive land acquisition by the city. New York hoped that cleaning up the watershed would enable it to meet the strict water quality standards required to obtain a waiver from the filtration requirement. ⁸⁴ Source protection represented a sharp departure from the narrow, technological approach to public health fostered by germ theory and the rise of toxicology. As historian Linda Nash has observed, the emphasis on measuring the exposure of individuals to specific contaminants divorced human health from that of ecosystems and landscapes in postwar America. Prompted by the untenable cost of building a filtration plant, New York City reverted to an earlier model of public health that emphasized the relationship between human bodies and the landscapes they inhabited. City officials insisted that the most effective means of protecting human health was to protect the watershed. ⁸⁵

This strategy exposed the stark differences between the two watersheds that supplied the city. Source protection posed significant political obstacles in the Catskills because it would require much stricter land use regulations, but the region’s relatively low level of industrial development and small year-round population made watershed management a reasonable strategy for complying with federal water quality standards. Source protection was not a viable option in the Croton region, where suburban growth had engulfed large portions of the watershed. The density of population and commercial activity in Westchester and Putnam counties meant that even an aggressive watershed protection program would not enable Croton water to consistently meet federal standards. In 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered New York City to construct a filtration plant for its Croton supply. The Croton system provides only 10 percent of the city’s water supply, but in a city the size of New York this translates to more than a hundred million gallons a day. Purifying this volume of water would require the construction of a massive filtration plant. ⁸⁶

Predictably, given the size and duration of the project, the question of where to construct the facility proved enormously controversial. Thwarted by fierce local resistance in their efforts to construct the plant at the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx, city environmental officials eyed Van Cortlandt Park, also in the Bronx, as an alternative. In 2003, a decade after federal law called for the plant to be operational, the Bloomberg administration dangled a tantalizing carrot before the state legislators, whose support was required to advance the project: in exchange for the right to construct the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park, New York would devote $200 million over five years to upgrading Bronx parks—triple the normal appropriation. The lure of money proved irresistible. The state passed the required legislation, and New York finally began work on the filtration plant, which is slated for completion in 2012. ⁸⁷

The infusion of cash into the park system represented a welcome departure from the more conventional narrative of the Bronx environment. For decades the borough had been home to scores of polluting facilities and enormous volumes of truck traffic. The intense concentration of pollution in the South Bronx spawned one of the nation’s most vigorous environmental justice movements. Activists argued that truck exhaust and emissions from other industrial facilities explained the high asthma rates and poor health of many Bronx residents. The density of industrial activity in the Bronx effectively underwrote cleaner and greener spaces in other boroughs and in areas outside the city. It was a regional center for the grimy underside of modern existence. ⁸⁸

Like other New Yorkers, Bronx residents enjoyed access to high-quality water, yet this hardly compensated for the severe environmental degradation of many parts of the borough. The deterioration of Bronx parks symbolized the slide into urban decay; green spaces gave way to gray, degraded shells. The dilapidated parks held little appeal for residents, and many parents were leery of letting their children play in them. The lack of safe, accessible recreational space compounded the health problems of Bronx residents. ⁸⁹

By 2008, many parks in the Bronx were unrecognizable. South Bronx parks were among the first beneficiaries of the rehabilitation program. New play equipment, spray showers, basketball courts, seating, and landscaping turned shuttered neighborhood parks into prized community amenities. Before the renovations, Story Playground was a playground in name only: the basketball court lacked baskets, and grass sprouted through the cracks that riddled the court. With the benefit of Croton mitigation funds, Story was reborn; its shiny new ball courts and play facilities made it one of the city’s most attractive neighborhood playgrounds (see figure 3). ⁹⁰ A Bronx community newspaper expressed the enthusiasm of the borough’s residents for the park upgrades: “This unprecedented funding is a real boost for the neighborhood. Many of these parks and playgrounds have been in dire need of renovation for years.” ⁹¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Note: Story Playground, the Bronx: before and after. Croton mitigation funds transformed the appearance of Story Playground and many other parks in the Bronx.

The rehabilitation of Bronx parks highlights the connections among city, suburb, and region and also those among the diverse practitioners of regional history. Understanding the concentration of industrial activity that characterizes the Bronx is at the heart of economic geography. For environmental and suburban historians, the unlikely rebirth of public recreation in the Bronx demonstrates the importance of analyzing suburban and urban development from a regional perspective. The use of Croton mitigation funds to finance recent upgrades to the Aqueduct Lands (a linear park along the route of the Old Croton Aqueduct) and the Williamsbridge Oval—two Bronx parks whose origins can be traced directly to waterworks expansion—powerfully underscores the water system’s longstanding, intimate connection to New York City’s recreational landscape. Suburban development in Westchester and Putnam counties, the driving force behind construction of the Croton filtration plant, bequeathed a green legacy to the Bronx.

It is important to recognize that both city and countryside are ecotechnological environments. New York invested hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize Catskill wastewater treatment plants to protect the quality of water that flows into city reservoirs. The city also purchased tens of thousands of acres in upstate watersheds to forestall additional commercial and residential development. Within the city, the infusion of Croton mitigation funds greened the gray streetscape of the borough. In this case, the effort to safeguard the watershed and the health of those who consume its end product spilled over into the urban setting. In a rare instance of poetic political justice, the grassroots struggle to create a healthier urban landscape benefited from the effort to enhance the quality of the suburban water that sustains the city.

Conclusion

The influence of suburban aesthetics and economic patterns on the urban built environment has become pronounced in recent decades. Even casual observers of cities have noted (and frequently lamented) the suburbanization of urban space. The movement of “big box” stores into cities and the sanitization of the urban streetscape have disgusted many who prize the serendipity and grit of cities. Historian Jon Teaford pointed to Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and the Harborplace in Baltimore as prominent examples of urban redevelopment aimed at a suburban audience. But he also observed that it is precisely the urban character of such spaces—the mixing of crowds and the vibrant street life—that attracts suburban residents, whose communities often lack these qualities. Developers, he observed, “were marketing charm and festivity in a metropolitan world of parking lots and chain stores.” ⁹²

The architectural interchange between cities and suburbs is not a recent phenomenon. In one of the foundational studies of the new suburban history, Richard Harris demonstrated that in the early twentieth century, Toronto’s working class took advantage of the lack of local building regulations in outlying areas to build their own homes by hand. ⁹³ The more stringent urban regulatory climate played a critical role in shaping the development and aesthetics of the suburbs. The urban-suburban dynamic is only one relationship in a complex matrix of regional interconnections. ⁹⁴ Cities and suburbs have long relied on rural areas for recreation and critical resources such as water, food, and fiber. In many parts of the developed world, rural areas abandoned resource extraction in the twentieth century, relying on tourism from urban and suburban residents to sustain themselves. These relationships had significant visual and spatial implications. Rural business owners often consciously cultivated an old-fashioned aesthetic to appeal to the nostalgia of urban dwellers. The movement of manufacturing to the suburbs in the post–World War II era in the United States encouraged the conversion of urban commercial real estate into residential lofts. And the mechanization of agricultural production spurred migration to cities, leading to dense settlement patterns and more vertical living arrangements.

The familiarity of these examples suggests that the region has, in effect, been hiding in plain sight. Like transnationalism, regionalism challenges historians to adopt a wider frame of reference for their analysis. In particular, a regional approach highlights the interdependence of disparate spaces and places. This interdependence suggests that urban historians, indeed all historians, must work on multiple scales to gain a more complete understanding of their subjects. Economic geographers, suburban historians, and urban environmental historians have enriched our knowledge of economic development and the natural and built environment by tracing the regional dimensions of their chosen topics. Their work is an excellent guide for urban historians to follow. Simply asking “What used to be in this spot?” can reveal the dense network of connections that ties cities to their suburbs and region. As the example of the New York City water supply demonstrates, tapping into this most basic historical instinct can lead in surprising and rewarding directions.