An Air of Permanent Mourning
The polarization between city and country is an old story, but now it is entrenched in the upstate communities that were sacrificed to provide water to the downstate metropolis.
Luc Sante
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This is the third installment in a four-part series on the reservoirs of upstate New York. Constructed to supply water to New York City, these feats of engineering exemplify the social compact that undergirds ambitious public infrastructures even as they intensify divisions between city and country, wealth and poverty.
Angler at Pepacton Reservoir, 2020. [Tim Davis]
New York City, its population ever expanding through the decades, continually needed more drinking water, having exhausted its local supply by the early 19th century. Between the 1830s and the end of that century, the Board of Water Supply built the Croton System of twelve reservoirs in Westchester County just north of the city, but construction barely kept pace with demand. As the 20th century dawned, the municipality set its sights farther north, and west of the Hudson River. The Catskill Mountain watershed was vast, pure, and barely tapped by the sparse local population; surely it could serve the city for many decades to come. Beginning in 1905, the Board began construction of the Ashokan Reservoir and its attendant pipeline. That meant flooding the middle section of the Esopus Creek valley, in the process seizing and razing eleven villages. The city employed its power of eminent domain to acquire properties, so that residents of the valley could not refuse. They had to be compensated, but municipal authorities paid them as little as possible, usually about a third of the estimated value of their holdings, and would not even consider damages to livelihood until ordered to by the state Supreme Court.