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🏘️ Croton Local History
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extensive planning—including test borings, cost estimates and structural plans. The site was eventually abandoned in favor of one further up-river, but in 1887 Quaker Bridge was the favored location. For Crotonites the detail showing the bridge is
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particularly interesting because it depicts a covered wooden bridge. The current metal Quaker Bridge—one of the oldest bridges in Westchester County—wasn’t built until 1894. Detail of the area from the Old Croton Dam to the Hudson River. Scientific
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American , 1887. Click to enlarge. For a before-and-after bird’s eye view of the flooding of the Croton River Valley after construction of the New Croton Dam see this previous post . A high resolution image of the Taylor map is available at the
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Library of Congress website . ↩ The tunnel was opened in 1890 and construction of the New Croton Dam began in 1892. ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new
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window) Facebook Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Tagged Quaker Bridge
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Scientific American Published August 31, 2013 August 31, 2013
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Colton’s 1836 map of the sparsely populated area around Central Park. The satellite image in the middle shows the location of what was the Croton Aqueduct Receiving Reservoir (the six yellow dots—probably baseball fields). The large building in the
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lower right of the satellite image is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click to enlarge . Here’s the perfect follow-up to our recent post on bird’s eye view maps of the Croton Aqueduct—an interactive mashup of an 1836 map of Manhattan, georeferenced
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with satellite images of the city today. 1 Using a “spyglass” map viewer you can switch back and forth between the two maps and explore 177 years of growth and change from the tip of the island to Spuyten Duyvil. The interactive map is a
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collaboration between the David Rumsey Map Collection ( one of the greatest resources of the internet ), ESRI's story maps , and the online Smithsonian Magazine . The three organizations have partnered to create “urban history time viewers showing
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changes in the growth of six American cities.” Swapping the images we see Manhattan 177 years later, with Colton’s 1836 map in the middle Click to enlarge . Here’s the link to the New York City map: This Interactive Map Compares the New York City of
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1836 to Today The Distributing Reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, now the site of the New York Public Library. Click to enlarge. Here are links to the other interactive maps: What Did Chicago Look Like Before the Great Fire? When Real Estate
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Plotters Planned Out Denver Before There Could Be a Los Angeles, There Had to be Water When the Lincoln Memorial was Underwater What Did San Francisco Look Like in the Mid-1800s? For information on georeferencing, see this Wikipedia article . ↩ Share
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this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest Share on Tumblr (Opens
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in new window) Tumblr Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Published September 2, 2013
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Click the image to enlarge. Here’s a nice Colortone postcard of the New Croton Dam. This card was published by the Ruben Publishing Co. in Newburgh, N.Y. and printed by “C.T. Art” (Curt Teich Art). The code number in the lower right corner dates this
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card to 1939. 1 For a guide to dating Curt Teich cards, see here . ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on X (Opens in new window)
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X Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Tagged Post card Published October 9, 2013
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The front page of the Dollar Weekly , October 22, 1842. Click image to enlarge. This month is the 171st anniversary of the “greatest jubilee that New York or America has ever boasted—a jubilee in commemoration of the greatest blessing that a city
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like New York could receive—the introduction of an abundant supply of pure and wholesome water.” 1 The jubilee took place on October 14, 1842 and the quote is from the coverage a week later in the October 22 issue of the Dollar Weekly , a short-lived
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newspaper that the publishers, Herrick & Ropes, modestly proclaimed was “The cheapest paper ever published! The miracle of the age! One dollar a year, with two hundred original engravings!” In a way they were right to call their paper “the miracle of
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the age” because they published the kind of engravings that made Harper’s Weekly famous when it was started fifteen year later. The highlight of this issue is the 16-inch wide engraving across the front page that illustrates the “great procession
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celebrating the introduction of the Croton water into the city of New York.” Photography was not in widespread use in 1842 so there are very few images depicting the jubilee parade and none of them are quite like this wonderful panorama. If they left
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us nothing else, we could remember Herrick & Ropes as innovative publishers who paved the way for the great illustrated weekly newspapers. But at the same time they were publishing two other papers—another weekly, The Atlas , and a daily paper, The
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Aurora . On March 28, 1842 Herrick & Ropes announced in the Aurora that they had “secured the services” of a “bold, energetic and original writer as their leading editor” who would “carry out their original design of establishing a sound, fearless
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and independent daily paper.” His name was Walter Whitman, but we know him today as the poet, Walt Whitman. 2 Click the images below to see all the Aqueduct-related images published in the October 22 issue. The 16-inch long woodcut of the parade was
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engraved in three sections and bolted together. A detail from the parade woodcut. A detail from the parade woodcut. A detail from the parade woodcut. A woodcut showing what became known as High Bridge, which was then under construction, A view of
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what is now called the Old Croton Dam. The Distributing Reservoir was located where the New York Public Library and Bryant Park are today. The fountain in Central Park, which was then under construction. Dollar Weekly , October 22, 1842. ↩ Whitman’s
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relationship with the publishers did not end well. By May 1842 he was no longer associated with the paper, which referred to him as “the laziest fellow who ever undertook to edit a city paper.” That summer Whitman used his new position at a different
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newspaper to exact revenge. “There is in this city,” he wrote, “a trashy, scurrilous, and obscene daily paper, under the charge of two dirty fellows, as ever were able by the force of brass, ignorance of their own ignorance, and a coarse manner of