Colonial Context

Proximity to water sources determined the location of colonial settlements on Indigenous People’s land. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony originally settled in Charlestown in the 1600s, but they then moved across the Charles River to build the city of Boston. Before his visit in 1682, William Penn had already selected the land between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill River as the site for the metropolitan center of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In his will and upon his death in 1790, Benjamin Franklin allocated an endowment of 1,000 pounds sterling to both Boston and Philadelphia to be made as loans to young craftsmen. Franklin intended that this original endowment plus the interest earned from the loans would generate additional funds, which were to be used to build water systems in each city (Smith, 2013).

Colonial settlements in the Northeast did not provide for the arrival of fresh, clean drinking water or the removal of sewage and garbage from homes and streets. Rather, supplying drinking water and removing waste were, for the most part, left to private companies and individuals. During the colonial period, residents drew water for domestic uses from local ponds, rivers, and ground water sources and collected rainwater in rooftop cisterns. In these early settlements, procuring water was a daily activity that was linked to economic class, gender, and race (Goldman, 1997; Koeppel, 2000).

The pollution of nearby water sources, the inability to enforce sanitary regulations, and the problems caused by granting charters to private water companies were three patterns that began in Dutch New Amsterdam in 1626 and continued in English New York after 1664 (McCully, 2014). Residents of New Amsterdam relied on a 48-acre freshwater pond called Kalch-Hook in Dutch, later known by the English as the Collect (Weidner, 1974). After 1664, workers in New York dug public wells, but local officials struggled to implement sanitation practices. The streets, dubbed “nasty & unregarded” (Koeppel, 2000, p. 21) by a physician visiting from Boston in 1697, were overrun with rubbish, manure, and refuse of all sorts (Koeppel, 2000).

Water supply was a public–private partnership between the Common Council, which was New York’s governing body, and local homeowners. In 1686, when the Common Council ordered that nine more public wells be built, it stipulated that, “one halfe of the Charge of them to be borne by the inhabitants of every Streete proportionately and the other halfe by the Citty” (Hall, 1993, p. 18). If residents wanted a well or a sewer built in their neighborhood, they had to help pay for it. This system meant that poor neighborhoods remained underserved.

New Yorkers drew water from wells sourced by the Collect. Water from the Collect was initially renowned for its good quality and for making tea. The construction of the Tea Water Pump in the 1730s provided greater access to “tea water”, water ideal for making tea, for those who could afford to pay for it. Households subscribed by paying an annual flat fee for the water (Koeppel, 2000). Patrons could also buy this tea water from private sellers, called Tea Water Men, who sold it throughout the city by transporting it in buckets on carts (Hall, 1993; Koeppel, 2000). At the Tea Water Pump, the entrepreneurs filled their “130-gallon hogsheads with water at a cost of six cents and peddled it by the bucketful in the city for about one cent a gallon” (Weidner, 1974, p. 16). While water was not a stand-alone beverage until the mid to late 19th century, water for making tea became a commodity for purchase during the 18th century.

Procuring water daily for domestic use was the work of poor and working class women, servants, and enslaved people. As historian Leslie Harris has shown, whereas in New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company owned the majority of the enslaved people, in British New York, slave ownership was widely spread among White residents (Harris, 2002 ). After 1664, many wealthy White New Yorkers ordered enslaved people to draw water from a private well located near Wall Street and to carry it back to the houses. Their well of choice, known for its high-quality water, called Comfort’s Tea Water, was run by a White man named Gerardus Comfort, who owned at least one enslaved Black man, referred to as Jack, who managed the well. In 1740, rumors spread through New York that enslaved Black men were plotting to poison the public wells. After 10 fires burned in February of 1741, some White New Yorkers panicked about an unconfirmed uprising, which became called “the Great Negro Plot” (Koeppel, 2000, p. 29; Lepore, 2006). Almost 200 enslaved people were suspected of plotting arson and planning the murders of White people. There were arrests and trials during the summer of 1741, and afterward four White people and 30 Black people were put to death. This was a higher death count than that of the witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, when 20 people were killed. It remains unclear in the historical record whether enslaved people conspired in 1741 in New York (Lepore, 2006). In 1742, however, the city passed a law that mandated that enslaved people draw water from the nearest neighborhood well (Koeppel, 2000).

In 1774, concerned about the economic disparity in access to water, Christopher Colles, an Irish engineer and inventor, proposed a plan for the city’s first public water system, the New-York Water Works. It would include a reservoir near the Collect and a pump house. Water would be distributed through wooden pipes underground. The Common Council, after 3 months of deliberation, approved Colles’s plan and funded it with promissory notes, an early example of city financing for water supply in the United States. Construction began, only to be interrupted by the events of the American Revolution in 1776, wherein the British destroyed the reservoir and Colles fled the city. That was the untimely end of the New-York Water Works (Bone et al., 2006; Hall, 1993; Popper, 2005). Public water would not be attempted again in earnest in New York until the 1830s. Boston’s and Philadelphia’s early attempts at public water would yield greater success than New York’s initial trial with Colles’s plan.

The First Public Water System in the Northeast

In the yellow fever outbreak of 1793 in Philadelphia, one in 12 residents died. In 1797, yellow fever struck Philadelphia again, killing 3,000 people, and in 1798, the fever made another deadly appearance in the city. These yellow fever outbreaks forced public officials toward creating a public water system. Although the cause of the fever was unknown, there was consensus that street cleaning, removal of filth, and a more abundant supply of fresh drinking water would mitigate the spread of the disease. Since a private water company had been building a canal for transportation that would connect the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers, the city asked if the company could build an additional canal to supply water to the city center. Before an agreement could be reached, the private canal company went bankrupt. The municipal corporation attempted negotiations again with another private company in 1797, but to no avail (Warner, 1987).

English architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe visited Philadelphia in 1799. The purpose of his trip was to establish the Bank of Pennsylvania, but when Latrobe learned of the city’s plan to build a public waterworks system of canals and dams, he suggested a shortcut that would involve steam pumps and a culvert from the Schuylkill River to the city center. Latrobe quickly published a pamphlet to this effect. Water would be distributed through wooden pipes and at street hydrants, where it would be available free of charge to the poor. The waterworks would be paid for by water rents charged to residences and businesses that were connected to the system (Warner, 1987). Latrobe’s plan became the blueprint for the public water system of Philadelphia, although as historian Sam Bass Warner has shown, the city did not maintain Latrobe’s commitment to raise “the level of living of the poor” (Warner, 1987, p. 109). The elites of the Watering Committee and the city councils took it upon themselves to raise funds, and they built the system along Latrobe’s plans without any financial aid from the state. When funding ran short as the construction progressed, the elites contributed money from their own pockets. The new system came on line in 1801. It soon required several adjustments, including repairing pumps, replacing wooden pipes, and managing the hydrants. Latrobe’s plan to pay for the works with water rents also did not come to fruition. In 1811, only 2,127 Philadelphians had subscribed to pay for water, leaving 54,000 residents dependent on private wells and street hydrants. In 1819, the City Council approved the funding and plans for building a dam across the Schuylkill that would use water-powered pumps to send the water to Fairmount Hill, where reservoirs would be built to service a gravity-fed system. By using water-powered pumps, the works would have the benefit of being less expensive than the steam pumps. Yet, financial challenges continued throughout the 1830s. Since few residences and businesses subscribed to pay for water, this first public water system operated at a deficit for 30 years. Unsurprisingly, at this time, many cities chose not to follow Philadelphia’s example due to fiscal concerns (Rawson, 2010; Warner, 1987).

Philadelphia’s establishment of its public water system in 1801 marked the first time that an American municipality took full responsibility for building, managing, and financing a citywide municipal water system that was entirely city-run (Smith, 2013). It took an aggressive “merchant-led committee system of government” (Warner, 1987, p. 104) and some initial funding support from elites to establish public water in Philadelphia (Warner, 1987). Historian Carl Smith has shown that while there had been a long tradition of public wells and public pumps in Philadelphia, the notion of building and managing a massive water system to serve all the city’s residents was a radical undertaking on a much larger scale that would require the expansion of urban government. In City Water, City Life, Smith examined how water intersected with ideas of citizenship, the natural world, and the city as a body politic during urbanization from 1790 to 1870. He invoked an “infrastructure of ideas” and he argued that “cities are built out of ideas as much as they are of timber, bricks, and stone” (Smith, 2013, p. 2).

Unreliable Private Water Companies

During the 19th century, it was common practice to rely on private companies to provide goods and services, and private business was seen as integral to North American economic growth (Smith, 2013). City officials often engaged private water companies out of fears about the large initial expense and the continued fiduciary responsibility that managing a public water system would entail. However, the general unreliability of private water companies, combined with catastrophes, such as fire, drought, and disease outbreaks, prompted an increased demand for water and ultimately drove city officials to undertake the public management of water.

Private water companies, which were utilized in American cities throughout the 18th century and into the 19th century, developed modest water infrastructures and sold water to customers. States chartered these companies to provide water to the residents of their cities, and the practice continued well into the 19th century as the most frequent process for water supply. Yet, there were limitations on what types of services private companies were willing and able to provide. Since private water companies sought to make a profit, managers were reluctant to make significant financial investments in infrastructure. Furthermore, cities often required private companies to fix streets after pipes had been laid and to supply water for firefighting free of charge. Private companies resented these requirements (Rawson, 2004).

One argument supporting private water in the 19th century was that private companies could build water systems at a lower cost than municipalities could. Additionally, engaging multiple private companies to supply one city would create competition, which would result in lower costs for the water consumer. In the 19th century, American proponents of private water often cited London, England as an example, highlighting that London’s citizens depended solely on private water companies. However, in a system that created private company advantage, London’s eight private water companies each managed a distinct region of the city, creating, in effect, eight mini-monopolies competing with each other, instead of one unified system (Rawson, 2004). Despite this major shortcoming, London’s system established a strong precedent for chartering private water companies, although prices were high and water quality was often substandard (Smith, 2013).

From London to Boston to New York to Philadelphia, private water companies shared a common reputation for being unreliable. The private Boston Aqueduct Corporation, which drew water from Jamaica Pond in Roxbury, had been in the business of supplying water to parts of Boston since 1798. Complaints by customers indicated insufficient supply of water and a complete lack of water at times. The company did well by its stockholders, however, paying out annual dividends of 10%, after an upgrade of its infrastructure (Rawson, 2004). Sometimes private wells took on a public function, as was the case with the Waltham Company of Boston, which did not limit access to its water, often leaving its private wells open to the public, free of charge. Independent vendors sold water collected from country lakes door to door for a high price, and residents collected water in rooftop cisterns. Private water companies did not lay pipes in poor neighborhoods because managers feared that neither landlords nor tenants would be willing to pay for water (Rawson, 2010). Those who could afford water could purchase it, and everyone else had to depend on the insufficient supply from public wells.

Relying on one private company and a network of public wells and cisterns proved inadequate for Bostonians. A destructive fire in 1825 decimated 53 houses and stores. Firefighters struggled to control the fire and were forced to rely on saltwater, since the well water supply was insufficient. After the fire, Mayor Josiah Quincy advocated to the City Council that they locate a new source of water. The Council was hesitant due to concerns about the high cost of such a venture. The quality of well water was also substandard, and physicians insisted that a new, clean supply of water was essential for health and well-being. The poorest neighborhoods suffered the most from a severe lack of water supply. Landlords undertook no efforts to provide water, and local wells in poor areas offered low-quality water. During the 1830s, Boston was wrestling with the economic growth and social changes caused by the market revolution and the influx of immigrants, predominately from Ireland. A central pillar of the urban reform agenda in 19th-century Boston was public water (Rawson, 2004, 2010).

New Yorkers, like Philadelphians, were struck hard by the devastating yellow fever outbreak during the summer of 1798. By this time, water from the Collect was extremely polluted, unfit for drinking, and deemed “less and less wholesome everyday” (Koeppel, 2000, p. 64). In July of 1798, physician Joseph Browne proposed a plan to city officials to import water from the Bronx River and to charter a private company to construct and manage the system. The Common Council was strongly opposed to hiring a private water company. In an interesting twist of fate, the leader of the New York Assembly delegation at this time was Joseph Browne’s brother-in-law, Aaron Burr. (Burr, the long-time rival of statesman Alexander Hamilton, became a U.S. Senator and then Vice President to Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and famously killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804.) In 1799, Burr managed to convince key members of New York’s elite and merchant class, including Alexander Hamilton, that a private water company was the best choice for New York (Koeppel, 2000). On April 2, 1799, state lawmakers passed “An act for supplying the city of New-York with pure and wholesome water” (Koeppel, 2000, p. 85), and the act granted a perpetual charter to Burr’s Manhattan Company, giving it the exclusive right to transport water to the city. Then, without Hamilton’s or any lawmakers’ knowledge or approval, Burr proceeded to arrange the finances and the directorships of the Manhattan Company to benefit the company and shareholders financially and to limit any influence of city officials (Koeppel, 2000).

On September 1, 1799, Burr purchased a house at 40 Wall Street in order to open “an office of discount and deposit” (Hall, 1993, p. 48). Burr was more interested in building a banking business that would compete with the Federalist’s Bank of New York, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784, than on providing water to New York (Galusha, 2002). Under Burr’s direction, the Manhattan Company dug wells near the Collect, built a reservoir on Chambers Street that visually resembled a bank (with grand, classical columns and a statue of the god Oceanus at the top), and laid six miles of wooden pipes to convey water to 400 houses (Koeppel, 2000; McCully, 2014). Customers paid to connect to the system and also paid an annual fee for the water. By 1802, the Manhattan Company supplied only 2,000 families, out of a population of 60,000 people, through just 21 miles of pipe (McCully, 2014). As the years passed, the Manhattan Company became known for uneven distribution and low-quality water. Customers complained that the water was often shut off due to roots clogging the wooden pipes, and when the water was delivered, it was unfit for drinking (Galusha, 2002). The Manhattan Company did not import water from outside the city limits, as originally intended. Furthermore, the company was in violation of its charter, since it had not provided sufficient water. Burr was ousted from the company in 1802 and yellow fever struck in 1803, causing the company to shut down. In 1804, the city tried to buy the company’s waterworks from the bank. Mayor Dewitt Clinton appointed a committee to convince the Manhattan Company to cede its water supply rights to the city. Both efforts were unsuccessful. In 1808, the New York State Legislature renewed the company’s charter, allowing it to exist for 30 more years with a monopoly on the right to provide piped water services (Galusha, 2002; McCully, 2014). The Manhattan Company became an infamous example of private water company corruption, inadequacy, and unreliability.

Disease, Public Water, Sanitation, and Sewers

Consolidation of the Cities

As cities increased in size and population, supplying water to residents became a “continuous race with demand” (Smith, 2013, p. 230). In 1854, the entirety of Philadelphia County became part of the city of Philadelphia, thereby tripling the population to over 400,000 residents. What had been a settlement of 2.5 square miles became one of 140 square miles. This newly consolidated Philadelphia assumed central control for the many waterworks that had served the surrounding areas and also expanded the existing waterworks, including building a pumping station in West Philadelphia. Between 1870 and 1907, the city constructed four additional pumping stations, and in 1909, the Fairmount works were retired. At the start of the 21st century, the city relied on three pumping stations, the Belmont and the Queen Lane, which drew water from farther up the Schuylkill River (beyond where the Fairmount had been) and the Torresdale on the Delaware River (Smith, 2013).

Boston also faced increased demand for water. In 1862, the Cochituate Water Board called for a new reservoir to be built in Chestnut Hill, but the Civil War delayed construction, and the reservoir was not completed until 1870. Boston annexed Charlestown in 1870 and assumed responsibility for its Mystic Lakes system, but expanding Boston’s territory and increasing its population placed further strain on the water supply. Boston added several new reservoirs and a new aqueduct drawing on the Sudbury River in 1878. When these additions failed to quench the city’s thirst, administrative expansion was the next step forward, driving Boston and twelve nearby towns to unite to establish the Metropolitan Water Board in 1895. Chartered by the state legislature, the new water board oversaw two major expansions of the overall water system. The Wachusett Reservoir in Clinton, completed in 1905, preceded the much larger Quabbin Reservoir, located 80 miles to the west of Boston. The building of the massive Quabbin Reservoir reshaped the rural Massachusetts landscape in profound ways because it transformed the hinterland. Two dams were built at Quabbin beginning in 1936. It took from 1939 to 1946 to fill the 400,000,000,000-gallon Quabbin Reservoir. The system serves 2,500,000 people and more than 5,000 industries. The Cochituate Reservoir closed in 1951 (Smith, 2013).

Like Boston, New York required a larger water supply in the 1860s. In 1861, the city added a larger main to the High Bridge in order to provide additional gallons of water per day for New Yorkers (Galusha, 2002). In 1862, the city welcomed a new reservoir in Central Park that was called by three names—Lake Manahatta, the New Reservoir, and the Grand Reservoir (Hall, 1993). The interconnectedness of consolidation and water supply was perhaps more far-reaching in New York, than in Philadelphia or Boston. For example, before consolidation, Brooklyn’s water came mainly from the aquifers of Long Island. Brooklynites’ reliance on this underground source meant that water levels were drawn so low that they required extensive pumping, which resulted in lower water tables, often contaminated with seawater (Bone et al., 2006). The promise of access to fresh water sources, to new water infrastructure in the present and the future, and to the funding to pay for it played a persuasive role in the independent city of Brooklyn’s motivation to join Greater New York through consolidation in 1898 (Soll, 2013).

On December 31, 1897, New Yorkers celebrated the unification of their city with a dramatic fireworks display, a cannon salute, and a grand parade of wheelmen, soldiers, and firemen (“The New City Ushered In,” 1898). The next day, January 1, 1898, after a 10-year effort, the City of New York was officially consolidated into one urban area comprised of the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Richmond. Consolidation meant forging one government, placing the mayor at the top of city government, and granting the mayor an increasingly large role in public works. Elected for a 4-year term, the mayor had the executive power to appoint all departments heads, except for the comptroller. Consolidation brought in the borough president system and a citywide Board of Public Improvements to manage the Departments of Bridges, Buildings, Lighting, Sewers, Street Cleaning, and Water Supply as well as the unification of the Department of Water Supply (DWS). Section 457 of the Greater New York Charter provided for the merger of existing water agencies from Manhattan (the Bureau of the Chief Engineer of the Croton Aqueduct and the Bureau of the Water Register), from Brooklyn (the Department of City Works), and from Queens and Richmond, as well as any public property related to water supply to create one united DWS. Manhattan and the Bronx had shared a water system since 1873. After consolidation, all five boroughs were under the same umbrella water system, which was publicly managed (DWS, 1899).

Before New York could expand the water supply taken from upstate, it needed to consolidate power and government downstate. In Empire of Water, historian David Soll emphasized how the increased demand for water reflected demographic and political changes. Consolidation into Greater New York practically doubled the city’s population, further taxing the water supply. Manhattan inherited the waterworks of the communities that became the five boroughs and found they were unable to meet the insatiable demand for water. The city had to find new sources of water in order to fulfill its commitment to Brooklyn and other communities that were now part of Greater New York. A major expansion of New York’s water system in the 20th century followed (Soll, 2013). Soll examined this period of “urban dominance” (Soll, 2013, p. 5) from 1905 to the 1960s when the city continued to expand the water network. In 1905, New York State granted New York City permission to divert streams in the Catskills to build the massive Catskills water system. In the 1960s, New York finished building the final reservoir in the Catskills. While the efforts to expand the watersheds upstate were monitored by the state and federal government, often the “scales of power were rigged in favor of New York City” (Soll, 2013, p. 5).

Politics, Corruption, and Municipal Finance

Politics cannot be erased from water history; the two are interwoven. Furthermore, efforts to root out financial corruption, in both private water companies and municipal operations, spanned from the 19th into the 20th centuries. When the New York State Legislature passed the Laws of 1870, it created the DPW, which subsumed the Croton Aqueduct Department and the Street Improvements Department. The DPW became a larger, city-run bureaucracy possessing more comprehensive powers than its predecessors (Gandy, 2002; Wegmann, 1896). In an unfortunate move, Mayor A. Oakley Hall appointed Boss William M. Tweed as the first commissioner of the DPW, and Tweed set to work embezzling funds, accepting kickbacks from contractors, and proposing legislation that would grant him unlimited powers to purchase land upstate as part of the water system. Commissioner Tweed’s term was short-lived, since he was convicted of embezzlement in 1874, and he died in jail in 1878 (Galusha, 2002). In this case, political corruption and graft undermined early municipal authority in public water management in New York during the Gilded Age. Political machines often made it difficult to initiate and manage large-scale and expensive water projects. In addition to the corruption of the Tweed Ring in New York, graft also occurred in Philadelphia in the 1870s, when the Republican machine diverted for its own use funds from the water department intended for maintenance and expansion of waterworks (Melosi, 2008).

Sometimes the financial interests of political machines and private water companies intersected. New York had eliminated the corrupt Manhattan Company in the 19th century, but it underwent another confrontation with another private water company in the early 20th century before pulling the plug on private water once and for all. In 1899, the city’s Comptroller, Bird Coler, found himself embroiled in a struggle to maintain public operation of water. In this multiyear struggle, in 1895 the state legislature had granted broad powers of eminent domain to the private Ramapo Water Company. In 1899, some Republicans in the state legislature and some Tammany Hall Democrats in the city government joined forces to try to convince the city to sign an expensive 40-year contract with the Ramapo company (Weidner, 1974). The Commissioner of Water Supply, William Dalton, and the President of the Board of Public Improvements, Francis Holahan, each stood to become very rich men, due to an elaborate scheme that provided kickbacks and company stock in exchange for Yes votes on pro-Ramapo legislation. As the scheme began to unravel due to Coler’s demands for more time and more information, the top officials of the two political machines, Republican Thomas C. Platt and Democrat Richard Croker, were exposed as the masterminds behind what came to be called “the Ramapo job” or “the Ramapo scheme” (Stradling, 2010 ; Weidner, 1974). Coler and his allies, both government officials and progressive reformers, halted the Ramapo takeover. The drama of this political scandal, which was covered thoroughly in the local newspapers, alerted the people to the need for vigilance around public water and allowed the city and state to solidify the power to manage water during the Progressive Era.

The mid-19th century witnessed important shifts in municipal finance. One of the central issues for cities was the ability to incur debt in order to pay for the construction of water infrastructure.

Once waterworks were built, their operation and management were financed by property taxes and user fees. New York, for instance, repaid “water bonds with revenue derived from water rates” (Soll, 2013, p. 90). Although formal federal income taxes did not exist until the early 20th century, collecting property tax became essential to city finances. Cities would also issue special assessments to pay for public works projects, but funds levied in this way were rarely sufficient. Throughout the 19th century, cities turned toward increasing the municipal debt. By 1870, city officials used the popular referendum to garner public support to issue municipal bonds. The patterns of municipal finance established by 1870 were foundational to city budgets for more than a century (Melosi, 2008).

In order for water to remain a public entity in New York, changes in municipal finance and a more centralized bureaucracy for overseeing water management were required. Urbanization, immigration, and innovations in engineering drove the shift from relying on local water sources to building more complex water supply systems. Although newly constructed public aqueducts were heralded as major achievements, access to clean water supplies remained uneven, with the poorer segments of the population left undersupplied, even by municipal systems. In New York, even as city government started to take control of water provision, many private companies remained in operation. Although New York welcomed public water from Croton in 1842, it took much longer, in fact until the Progressive Era, to secure the public management of water and to eliminate all of the many smaller private water companies operating in the boroughs. The values of the Progressive Era, such as a stronger state, belief in expert knowledge, and anti-monopolism, helped to ensure the permanence of public water in New York. Mayor George McClellan, a Tammany Hall Democrat, took office in 1904. On January 3, 1905, the mayor introduced the McClellan Act in the state legislature. This act established the centralized Board of Water Supply (BWS) and granted powers to the city to access water in several upstate counties. A second bill established the State Water Supply Commission (SWSC) to oversee how much water was taken from upstate counties. Both bills passed on May 4, 1905. These acts created a more complex and more powerful water bureaucracy (“Move to Beat Mayor’s City Water Measure,” 1905).

In addition to the new centralized water board, more flexible funding was needed. A major change in municipal finance that took place in the early 20th century was the exemption of water from the debt ceiling. On November 8, 1904, New Yorkers voted to ratify a constitutional amendment exempting bonds for water supply from the debt limit, allowing the city to borrow $200,000,000 for building the Catskills waterworks (Weidner, 1974). Although some bonds were issued in 1837 for the Old Croton Aqueduct, this was not common practice at that time. The Panic of 1873 brought about default in municipal bonds, whereas in the Panic of 1893, municipal governments fared better due to the relative security of municipal bonds. By 1905, waterworks represented the largest line item in municipal debt across the nation. In the 1920s, 70% of American waterworks were publicly owned, up from 43% in 1890 (Cutler & Miller, 2006). With regard to financing the Delaware system in the 1940s, historian David Soll has shown that bonds represented the “path of minimal financial resistance” (Soll, 2013, p. 124). Because bonds for water supply were exempt from a state regulation “limiting a city’s indebtedness to 10 percent of its real estate valuation,” (Soll, 2013, p. 124), issuing millions of dollars in bonds for waterworks posed “no immediate opportunity cost to the city” (Soll, 2013, p. 124).

The Urban and the Rural

The provision of public water to cities had a profound impact on the surrounding areas. Rural watersheds became battlegrounds between public and private interests. City government officials seized private lands owned by rural residents to build reservoirs that would furnish urbanites with public water. Scholars, most notably William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, have demonstrated how the history of the city cannot be told without including that of the countryside, and vice versa (Cronon, 1982). In the context of California, historian Norris Hundley Jr. argued that a new urban imperialism (Hundley, 2001, p. 121) surfaced around water management. Government entities, fueled by specific legislative powers and funds from the public treasury, drove the urban imperialism, which sought to control both local water sources and water reserves that were located increasingly far away from the cities (Hundley, 2001).

In New York, one vivid example of urban/rural tensions around water is found in the cholera prevention efforts of 1892. In 1892, cholera struck Hamburg, Germany. New York prepared to defend itself from the outbreak by instituting quarantines of recently arrived ships from Europe. In September 1892, the City Board of Estimate allocated monies to the Metropolitan Board of Health to fund Dr. Hermann Biggs’ laboratory. The new laboratory aimed to contain cholera in New York and was intended to be a permanent entity rather than a temporary one. At this time, New York had two boards of health, the city-run Metropolitan Board of Health established in 1866 and the State Board of Health created in 1880. The 1892 cholera outbreak prompted the New York State Legislature to pass the Webster Act in 1893 to protect the Croton watershed from pollution (Weidner, 1974).

Commissioner of Public Works Michael T. Daly then launched massive and extreme efforts to protect the watershed, which included burning privies, moving homes, and disinterring bodies from cemeteries adjacent to water sources (Galusha, 2002). Known as “Daly’s raids,” these decisive actions (some executed with brute force) fueled tensions about water supply and sanitation between upstate and downstate. In this instance, the effort to protect the quality of public water destined for the city centers resulted in the confiscation of private property outside the city. Urban imperialism facilitated both the continuous expansion of water supply systems and the effort to protect the quality of remote drinking water sources before the water was transported to the homes and businesses of city residents.

Some scholars have pushed back against the notion of empire within the context of water by claiming that it is not nuanced enough to argue that the urban conquered the rural. In Making Mountains: New York and the Catskills, David Stradling parsed how the history of the Catskills is interwoven with New York City history. While Stradling confirmed a clear power differential in the relationship between New York City and the Catskills, he was not willing to fully support the imperial model, claiming that it omits the nuances of the history. City elites and capitalist profit alone did not carve up the countryside, and it may be an oversimplification to reduce the key players to locals versus urbanites, since many people crossed back and forth. While New York City did transform the Catskills in many ways, a blend of influences, urban and rural, shaped the landscape and communities of the Catskills over 200 years. The building of the reservoirs in the Catskills was the “greatest imposition of the city in the mountains” (Stradling, 2010, p. 16), and there were many “conflicts, imbalances, and even injustices” (Stradling, 2010, p. 16) in that relationship between city and country. Built between 1907 and 1924, the reservoirs and aqueducts of the Catskills supplied New York City with 90% of its water by the middle of the 20th century. By the end of the 20th century, the upstate reservoirs were no longer seen merely as causes of dislocation. Rather, these “naturalized lakes” had become key elements of the rural landscape and were considered “worthy of local pride” (Stradling, 2010, p. 16).

Conclusion

The water history of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York traces a trajectory from relying on small, local water sources to pursuing an expanding search for external water supplies, with water being transported into the city from further and further afield. The overall trend throughout the 19th century was one of an increasing role of the city and state in managing water and disease prevention, along with a burgeoning idea of public health. An understanding of germ theory took a long time to reach the general public and the idea of miasma persisted. During the late 19th century, the city and state gained more power to implement sanitation practices, and the public sector began to take a more active role in managing disease prevention. In New York, protecting the watershed upstate for consumers downstate required increased city and state power and a more forceful role in sanitation practices for city officials.

Historians have argued that the growth of the state was a reaction to the excesses of the private markets. They argue that, under the weak state of the Gilded Age, public officials turned a blind eye to the machinations of private markets. During the Progressive Era that followed, the argument continues, the public sector sought to regulate the private marketplace as a corrective effort. Historian Joshua Salzmann showed that there is some truth to this narrative, illustrating how the state did grow larger following the Industrial Revolution and that the state did regulate private markets. But he added that the state promoted economic development well before the Progressive Era, and he argued for a new understanding of the complexity of the state’s role in fostering the market economy and industrial capitalism (Salzmann, 2017). Private water companies were gradually replaced by public water systems during the 19th century, and, in most cases, water provision required state intervention well before the Progressive Era. Whereas Philadelphia and Boston transitioned to public water in 1801 and 1848, respectively, and did not change course, New York made a move toward public water in 1842, but the city later required the reforms of the Progressive Era to ensure that there would be no return to private water management.

Water was the first public utility in American cities, and the history of public water highlights urban change (Melosi, 2011). Public water advocates supported the idea of water as a right, whereas those in favor of private water believed water to be a privilege. The two schools of thought coexisted (Rawson, 2010), and “water has long been a commodity—a resource—to be bought and sold” (Melosi, 2011, p. xii). In New York, water became a public issue because neither government nor private entities were solving the problem of water shortages and poor water quality. As the case of New York City illustrates, the idea of public water often preceded the necessary bureaucracy, finances, infrastructure, and legal authority to make it a permanent reality.