Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude
Review By Gerard Koeppel
New York City is a place some people love to hate and many of the same people hate to love. Most of these people are outsiders. And most of those who become New Yorkers eventually become ex-New Yorkers. They come, they see, they are conquered, they leave, back to where they first escaped from or to different places, where their disconnection from New York grows terminal. For the people, like me, who were born here and find themselves writing about it from time to time, the city is hard to hate and love absolutely, like the difficult aging parent of a grown child harrowed in youth. The city takes a lot. But it gives a lot back, too, if you’re receptive.
Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City
By Lucy Sante
Experiment Publishing
August 2022, 208 pp.
This is true of the actual city as well as the abstract city. Not for centuries has it fed itself. It is mostly all built-up, and the animal and vegetable farmland is long gone. So the food comes from elsewhere. The same is true of its cooking and heating energy. The forests were cut down quickly, and then coal, gas, oil, and other supplies arrived by ship or pipe.
Water, for cooking, cleaning, and fire suppression, was relatively late to be outsourced, largely because it mostly flows underground. The utility of surface water — ponds, streams, springs — diminished quickly as the population increased. But subterranean sources, accessed with wells of varying types and complexity, remained adequate until overuse and pollution (industrial, animal, and human) finally compelled the search for a remote fresh water supply in the early 1830s.
The Croton Aqueduct allowed New York to remain a viable place to live, to work and, for some time, to industrially produce. The relatively few people in the region of northern Westchester where the Croton River was dammed, and through which the aqueduct first began flowing in 1842, protested the intrusion (and advent) of the extraterritorial city. But most of them understood: if the city had no life-sustaining water, the region would have no market-making city. For better or worse, humans have sought to improve their lives by transitioning, through aggression and concession, from forest to field to asphalt.
The city’s gain is the exurb’s loss, only if one considers the exurb Edenic. It’s not. There is practically no one who lives within the orbit of New York City’s current water sources, stretching for well over a century now two score leagues into the mainland watersheds northwest of Manhattan, who honestly believes their life is sustainable without a proximate city. Whether it’s recognized as the region’s pumping heart or the countryside’s ravaging monster, the city is not going away until all organized life goes away. So it makes sense to most to make the best of it.
Lucy Sante’s Nineteen Reservoirs is an odd little book. “I would like simply to give an account of the human costs,” she concludes the Introduction, “an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.” Presented with such limited ambition, the knowledgeable reader can’t expect much. And in less than 200 pages, just half of it text, that expectation is fully met.
Readers uninitiated in the history of New York’s water supply and watershed-dweller psychosis will find a useful if derivative primer. There is little original here, just the latest retelling of the story, this time by a Belgian who lived in the city happily drinking its offered waters for many years but eventually fled to the wounded watershed, looking back at the evil city with salt-rimmed crocodile tears.
If you have a passing knowledge of this history, there is not much to learn from the book. If you know nothing, you probably will enjoy it — i.e. sympathize with the stories of drowned towns, displaced people, and reburied remains. With nearly 100 pages of archival and contemporary photographs and maps, it probably should have been formatted as a coffee-table book. Instead, it’s a hardcover in a softcover-sized body: a tea-table book, perhaps.
Beyond the attractive color prints of watershed scenery and people by keen-eyed Tim Davis, there is little contemporary about the text, which but for repeated discussion of water meters could have been written in the 1960s. Important developments go unmentioned: the landmark pacific Watershed Agreement of 1997, sensitively engineered by Al Appleton, then the head of the city’s water supply bureaucracy; the troubled Gilboa Dam struggling in this century to hold back the waters of the Schoharie Reservoir; and the leaking Delaware Aqueduct which carries half of the city’s daily water from the four newest reservoirs. These absences diminish the book’s relevancy.
One has the feeling that the effort, though, is not to write a relevant book — that is, one with political or emotional ramifications — but for Sante to somehow to prove her watershed cred with her newish neighbors. The title makes this clear. Nineteen Reservoirs is not about the water supply system as a remarkable whole. It’s about the system’s storage component. The city people who use the water have no idea where it comes from. The people who live where it comes from could care less where it goes. An interesting book on the reservoir region would present ways for the two groups to care more about each other. Surely, after all these decades, there must be some who desire wisdom and peace.
The beige subtitle, On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City, reinforces the notion that there is nothing too controversial inside, although it suggests we might get some moral battling. Whose promise was it? And was it broken? Why, by whom, and how? But without a modifier — bitter? wretched? — we have a sense the author will not challenge anyone’s sensibilities too much. It feels like a book written to placate Sante’s stewing watershed neighbors, without taking up their complaints in any decisive or palliative way.
As a general rule, it’s not morally challenging to write history. Your human subjects are long dead, so you can praise or condemn at will. To write about the current effects of historical events on living people is harder. You’re no longer merely a historian, you’re now a social commentator. And your comments are expected to be pungent. This book’s commentary is dilute.
Really, Sante, or anyone trying to write urgently today about the people of the watershed, has an impossible task. Urge the townsfolk to tear down these reservoir walls and you will be arrested (by the watershed police or the feds). Counsel caution to the hinterland and you will become unwelcome in its diners.
If the watershed communities can take any solace from their situation, it’s that it will not get any worse, for them or anyone else. The city’s population pretty much peaked in the 1950s, with varying incremental additions and subtractions since. In that time, water conservation strategies, institutional and individual, have reduced average daily consumption from upwards of a billion and a half gallons a day to just over a billion, a remarkable achievement (though worrisome to those who think a city has to grow or die).
As to whether New York has abused these communities, every city abuses everyone to support its existence. New York has been making people pay for water, in one way or another, from the get-go. City residents had to pay for the digging and maintenance of public street wells in the 1670s whether or not they had a perfectly adequate supply from their own yard, or preferred alcohol instead. As settlement expanded and local sources were polluted it was inevitable that new sources would have a cost. The city’s spreading water infrastructure was mostly paid for with municipal bonds. Maintenance and more is mostly paid for by direct and indirect taxes on water users. The city’s abundant population funds roads, schools, social programs, and other government benefits throughout the state, including the watershed communities. I haven’t seen the numbers but it seems highly likely that they are net to the good, getting more in benefits than they pay in taxes.
As a locus of development by outsiders, the watershed is not a landscape ravaged, like other rural areas, by strip mines or fracking and their enormous, toxic waste. Water is the cleanest of resources. Portions of a few valleys were flooded to make the reservoirs west of the Hudson, but they serve the local community as green-belted lakes open to fishing, boating, and swimming. During college, I spent a summer at Oxford University, a landlocked sailor searching for a boat. I found the Oxford Sailing Club outside of town, a healthy walk. As I approached, great masonry walls rose out of the flat countryside: the vast reservoir of the Oxford water supply, on which the locals, deprived of some farmland, gratefully raced Lasers and other fast dinghies. Lemons into lemonade. New York’s reservoir dwellers, Sante now included, would do well to see their big water glasses at least half-full (generally 90% or so).
Nineteen Reservoirs is disingenuous. Thirteen of New York City’s reservoirs are part of the older Croton water supply, east of the Hudson, which is not at all the focus of the book. Only six are west of the Hudson, the area that is the focus of lingering regional angst. A more accurate title would be Six Reservoirs or A Half-Dozen Reservoirs. But those lose more than two-thirds of the gravitas.
The shifty title presumably is the creation of an editor, who thought it an improvement on the title of Sante’s four-part essay series, from which the book was assembled: “Reservoir: Nature, Culture, Infrastructure” (published online in 2020). If that contemplative sensibility had been preserved and thoughtfully expanded on with a probing text, as the skilled writer Sante certainly can do, we might have a worthy addition to the long shelf of substantial New York water works. Instead, we have a slender work of regional interest.
Gerard Koeppel is the author of Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton, 2000) and other works.