Receiving Reservoir in Central Park. Click to enlarge. The Distributing Reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Click to enlarge. Scientific American , 1887 The cover of the June 4, 1887 issue of Scientific American featured a bird’s eye view…

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…

looking south, from the Putnam County border to New York City and beyond. The accompanying article said the map “clearly presents the course of the Croton River, the location of Muscoot, Croton, and the proposed Quaker Bridge dams, and in…

article about three-dimensional maps of New York City, the website Codex 99 calls this map “the first true attempt at a perspective map of the city . . . [The] four-sheet engraving, published by Galt & Hoy, attempted to label all roads…

Bridge and the High Bridge Water Tower The Receiving Reservoir in Central Park The Distributing Reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, now the site of the New York Public Library High Bridge and the High Bridge Water Tower. Click…

structure of its kind in the world,” the Quaker Bridge Dam. The City of New York. Will L. Taylor, chief draughtsman. New York, Galt & Hoy, 1879. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Click to enlarge. Taylor’s 1879 New York…

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…

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…

This 1906 plan of the downstream elevation, prepared by the New York City Aqueduct Commission, comes from the Historic American Engineering Record collection of the Library of Congress. The collection includes a large number of photographs and plans

…Tower, Illustrations of the Croton Aqueduct , New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1843. Stereoview by H. Rofes & Co., circa 1865, showing the Arcade File Works (erroneously called “Arcade Tile Works” on the paper label on the

Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848 , compiled by Charles Francis Adams. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1876. Volume 11. ↩ The current Wikipedia article for the Croton Aqueduct states “Among those present were

Supply—Present Condition of Work on the Great Croton River Dam.” Christopher Tompkins, author of The Croton Dams and Aqueduct , said this image is “especially noteworthy for its accuracy in depicting the excavation.” Below is the top section of the

Whitson’s Mill, located to the east of the aqueduct arch. Shortly after this was painted a wooden bridge was erected under the arch to cross the Kill. The original painting is in the collection of the Ossining Historical Society…

great prison cell of a city, and made to drink of its brackish springs, can estimate the blessings of the Croton Aqueduct? Clean, sweet, abundant water! Well might they bring it thirty miles under-ground, and usher it into the…

…A key part of what we now call the Old Croton Aqueduct, the

then-President of the United States John Tyler, former presidents John Quincy Adams and Martin van Buren, and Governor of New York William H. Seward.” See here . ↩ A memoir of the construction, cost, and capacity of the Croton Aqueduct . . . together

of John Kraljevich Americana. See this letter by Lovett to Thomas Jefferson and The Croton Aqueduct Completion Medal by Dave Baldwin. Token and Medal Society Journal , September/October 2013, vol. 53, no. 5. ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window)

Aqueduct. During a visit last week, curator Norm MacDonald showed us some recently donated material that included two rare photographs of blacksmiths at the New Croton Dam taken in September, 1895. Although there are probably thousands of photographs

documenting the New Croton Dam and the Aqueduct. The record for this specific item is here . Click the images to enlarge them. Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window…

Of all the people who recorded the unbridled joy New Yorkers felt when the Croton Aqueduct opened in October 1842, few captured it as eloquently as Maria Lydia Child, whose poem Thanksgiving Day , was set to music and is known…

This is an often photographed view of the New Croton Dam, but this particular image from 1912 captured an automobile driving along the road which once ran across what is now the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail. For an equally romantic…

original Croton Dam, the New Croton Dam and the entire aqueduct system. 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…

even published the letters of regret from all four men in his book, A memoir of the construction, cost, and capacity of the Croton Aqueduct . . . together with an account of the civic celebration of the fourteenth October, 1842 . . . 3 The…

As we noted in a previous post , the poet and social activist Lydia Maria Child recorded the unbridled joy New Yorkers felt when the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842. The arrival of the “clean, sweet, abundant water” also inspired her…

…The firm took the name Arcade from the aqueduct arch spanning the valley.

…Here’s a fine example of the medal produced for the Croton Water Celebration, when what we now call the Old Croton Aqueduct opened to public use on October

views The David Rumsey Map Collection Bridges NYC Carl Oechsner and Marc Cheshire Click on any image to enlarge it! Detail from an 1868 map of Sing Sing with the Aqueduct Arch marked in red. Note the location of the…

…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

gauged the entire Croton River and his data—particularly his calculation that twenty million gallons of water a day flowed in the river near Pines Bridge—was later used in planning the Croton Aqueduct. 2 The Westchester County Clerk Historical…

Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct, and Carl Oechsner, Croton Friends of History, for their help in analyzing these photographs. ↩︎ The text labels in the photos were added to the negatives in the darkroom so they would appear on every…