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. In 1833 Major Douglass estimated that the total power furnished by Macomb's Dam would suffice to thus raise but 5,000,000 gallons daily, which, even in the then existing conditions of the city, would not be enough for its safe supply -- an estimate that brought dismay to the Bronx advocates, and doubtless caused them to most heartily objurgate the foolish Harlem River, that misplaced, misshapen, ridiculous stream -- a mere spew of Ilellgate, -- worthless for navigation, a hindrance to commerce, and now found unqualified to generate the required volume of power. This circumstance that the Bronx scheme involved, as one of its essential features, the conversion of the Harlem River into a mere producer of water power -- and that in perpetuity -- strikingly illustrates how contemptuously the Harlem and Spuyten Duyvil waterway was rated. When it became certain, in 1831, that the water-supply problem was to find its solution in a continuous aqueduct from the Croton -- such a continuous aqueduct being practicable in this case because of the Croton's sufficiently lofty elevation above tide, -- il was proposed to carry the aqueduct across the Harlem River by a low siphon bridge, as the least expensive work.