Apprehension having been harbored by the citizens of Westchester County that disorder and malicious destruction of property would result from the employment of the thousands of laborers, the contractors were required not to " give or sell any ardent spirits to their workmen," or to permit any such spirits to be given or sold, or even brought, upon the line; and that any trespasses committed by workmen should be punishable by the dismissal of the offenders. The line was divided into four divisions, the first extending from the Croton ten and one-half miles to below Sing Sing, the second ten miles farther to Hastings, the third ten miles to Fordham Church, and the fourth ten and one-half miles to the distributing reservoir in the city. By the 1st of December, 1837, 2,455 feet of the aqueduct had been completed, and during the next year the whole of the work in West-

GENERAL

COUNTY

HISTORY

Chester County, thirty-three miles in length, had either been finished or placed under contract. The means of crossing the Harlem River had become at this stage the most serious problem to be dealt with. At the time of the inauguration of the enterprise there was a general disposition on the part of the people of New York City to regard the Harlem River with but scant consideration -- as a waterway upon which people might ply boats to suit an idle or at best purely local convenience, bur forever incapable of continuous navigation for any practical uses in conjunction with the shallow projection of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Macomb's Dam was then still in existence, blocking all passage beyond the present Central Bridge. The old plan to bring the Bronx water into New York had been hampered by the fact that the Bronx River did not have a sufficient elevation at any point of its lower course to admit through the process of natural flow of the reception of its water in New York at a height suitable for distribution to the upper sections of the city; and to overcome this difficulty it had been coolly proposed to build pumping works on the Westchester side of the Harlem, just above Macomb's Dam, and, from the power afforded by the dam, raise the waiting stream to a satisfactory height and so pass it over to Manhattan Island.