View of the High Bridge and Harlem River, by William James Bennett, 1844
By the start of the 19th century New York’s citizens were already living with a polluted and insufficient water supply when the city’s population growth began to accelerate. “Adding further to water demand was the patenting of the flush toilet in 1819, which greatly increased water consumption per capita as waterborne sewerage gradually replaced on-site privies and night soil collection.”(Weidner, 1974, p. 55).
Continual fires and cholera outbreaks finally drove the city leaders to commission a plan for bringing fresh water from upstate. Their engineer, Colonel DeWitt Clinton, Jr., proposed to tap the Croton River in Westchester County and carry its water to Manhattan with a tremendous aqueduct system “unprecedented since the Roman Empire.”
Many parts of this system, begun in 1837, are still standing today. In this post we see one of the most spectacular structures, the High Bridge, which carries the aqueduct across the Harlem River from the mainland into Manhattan island. Is there any doubt the designers used the Roman aqueducts as their model?
In 1928 the High Bridge was modified in order to open up a wider navigation channel on the Harlem River by demolishing five of the stone masonry arches and replacing them with a single steel arch, shown below.
The High Bridge continued to carry Croton River water into the city until 1949, when modern underground pipes replaced the old masonry aqueduct.
In coming posts we’ll look at more parts of this historic water system…