1793 view of Collect Pond in lower Manhattan. Note the water pump landmarked on the right side of the map, and the two tanning fields at the pond’s edge at Pearl Street and Anthony Streets. (image and caption from www.public-water.com)
Reading the history of New York City’s water system, we find Dutch colonists in the 1600s using local streams and groundwater wells to obtain water. Their well water was undrinkably salty because Manhattan Island is surrounded by salt-water and the briny estuary of the Hudson. Their ponds gradually got polluted as well. After the city was turned over to the British, during the 1700s New Yorkers began bringing freshwater in barrels from Brooklyn ground wells – imagine what a laborious process!
Private enterprise stepped forward to provide a solution. Mary Mattingly writes in her great website on the watershed (http://public-water.com/): “These were led by two State Assemblymen, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Burr convinced city officials that public funds would be inadequate to develop a suitable reservoir and aqueduct. He created the Manhattan Company (later to become Chase Bank) to serve the public as the sole supplier of water and took control of the city’s water system in 1799.”
But this effort degenerated into financial corruption and a technically ineffective system of wooden piping prone to blockage by tree roots. By the early 1800s the city’s residents were looking for a better way!