Waterways for NY Archive Magazine_draft 031611

8/6/2019 Waterways for NY Archive Magazine_draft 031611

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Steve Duncan

[email protected]

646.734.7067

INTRO/SAWMILL

About 1646, long before Yonkers was established as a city and even before

New York became New York, a Dutch landowner named Adriaen van der Donck

built a water‐powered sawmill on Nepperhan Creek near the Hudson River. That sawmill became the center of a town that was later to become known as Yonkers

(incorporated as a village in 1855, and officially recognized as a city in 1872). Thesawmill that Van der Donck built also gave a new name to Nepperhan Creek, which

has been known as the Sawmill River ever since.

The Sawmill River, 23 miles long, is the longest tributary of the Hudson. It flows into the Hudson at Yonkers, just north of the Bronx. The river powered water‐

mills in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Over time, however, the section that passesthrough downtown Yonkers was slowly covered over—first with individual bridges

and then by a few industrial bridges that spanned the stream in the quest for more

space, until finally the city built concrete tunnels around what little of the river

remained exposed. Now, the river travels a winding and invisible path under streets,

parking lots, and buildings. It still flows out into the Hudson, although it’s only a

shadow of the river it once was—much of its watershed is now urbanized, and

storm drains and sewers carry away much of the water that once fed it.

The story of Yonkers and the Sawmill River is hardly unique. From the

seventeenth century on, the history of New York’s cities has been a history of waterways. But while the larger rivers—the Hudson, the Mohawk, or the Niagara,

for example, remain obvious on the landscape today, many of the smaller

watercourses that once ran through the state’s cities seem, at first glance, to havedisappeared.

In fact, in the early days of a town or village, it was often the smallerwatercourses that were the most vital. These manageable streams provided not only

transportation routes, but also water‐power for grain mills and sawmills, fish for

food, and drinking water—something particularly important for the many towns on

the saline estuarial regions of the lower Hudson. These myriad streams also

supplied a ready source for water‐intensive industries in the 18th and 19th centuries,

ranging from the breweries of Bushwick, Brooklyn to the leather tanneries of FultonCounty, where cities like Johnstown and Gloversville became the “glove‐making

capital of the world.”1 In many cases it was these smaller watercourse that were the

original reason for a city’s existence at a particular location, as in the case of Yonkers

and Van der Donck’s sawmill on the Nepperhan.

1 “Glovers and Tanners” online at http://www.gloversandtanners.com/

& Trebay, Guy. "Heir to a Glove Town’s Legacy." The New York Times, October 21, 2009. Online at

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22GLOVERSVILLE.html?_r=2&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all



As towns in New York grew into cities, however, many of these small, central

streams became inadequate for the larger populations, and instead of supplying

freshwater they became polluted nuisances. As modern industrialization developed

in 19th century, water‐power also became far less vital to industry. Railroad lines

eclipsed waterways as transportation routes, and first steam and then electrical

power replaced the water‐power of earlier days.Successful cities constantly build over there history, and over time many of

the original streams and rivers that ran through today’s urban areas were covered

over. In some cases, as with the Sawmill River, putting the river underground was

merely a way to create more buildable land above. In other cases, the streams that once supplied drinking water or fish were put underground to serve cities in new

ways: as sewers and drains. Today, the lineage many of the major sewer lines incities like New York City, Yonkers, Rochester, and Buffalo can be followed back to

streams and rivers that flowed unfettered for centuries and even millennia before

towns grew up around them.

SAWMILL RIVER

The Sawmill River in Yonkers was my first foray into an underground

waterway. Finding the inlet was simple enough, as I traced the route of the old

stream along present‐day city maps and found where the line of above‐ground

water disappeared. I climbed down into the streambed near Nepperhan Road—

named after the original name for the river, of course—and found myself about

fifteen feet below street level, kneedeep in a fast‐flowing stream with a rocky

bottom. A few feet further it disappeared into darkness, and I followed.

In the light of my headlamp, the tunnel around the stream was a cutaway

view of Yonkers’ development during the modern period. The 20th‐century brick and concrete culvert abuts older buildings that were built over the river in the late

19th century, and these in turn are alongside old bridge constructions in which

rough‐hewn beams still support rough stone and mortar. Occasionally I saw ancient cellar windows, that had once looked out onto daylight before the stream had been

put into its underground culvert; these were buildings that had pre‐dated thecovering of the Sawmill in the early 20th century. The water in the stream was low

enough for me to wade through, but heavy debris lodged in corners where the

tunnel turned—shopping carts, wooden beams, even entire tree‐trunks—and

showed that the water still sometimes became a powerful torrent when spring rains

brought the level higher.

Eventually, the rough and varied tunnel gave way to an arched culvert of brick with a smooth concrete floor, and I knew that I was near the outlet into the

Hudson. On that first trip, I was so fascinated by what I saw around me that I didn’t

pay enough attention to my feet, and when the bottom disappeared I suddenly

found myself falling into deep water—in very cold, very dark water. My head was

only underwater for a moment but it was disorienting, and I feared for my camera,loosely tucked into a drybag in my backpack. As I came to the surface I could feel

nothing solid under my feet; the current was still pulling me out, and I realized that I



was being sucked further and further from the relative safety of the shallow water

behind me. I frantically paddled against the current, and after what seemed like an

eternity—but was probably only ten seconds—I finally felt the lip of the concrete

under my boots once again.

It was a while before I ventured back into that tunnel, but eventually I did

return—with a friend, and with inflatable inner tubes to use as a raft so that wecould float out the final portion into the Hudson. In the meantime I found out more

about the Sawmill’s history.

Near where I’d fallen, there had once been a natural cove at the Sawmill’s

mouth. When Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in 1609, he found a nativecommunity living in bark huts at the same spot. This was the settlement of

Nappeckemack, a name that referenced the rapid water at the river’s mouth.European settlers widened the natural cove that Hudson had seen at the

mouth of the river, and in the 17th century single‐masted sloops sailed into the

river’s mouth to load up on lumber or unload passengers. By 1830, this had becomea regular twice‐weekly service to New York City; the dock was the center of town

and along its edge were a hotel, post office, and general store. The sloops were theprimary transport in and out of the city until the 1840s, when the first railroad

along the Hudson connected the bucolic riverside town to New York City, spurring

rapid growth.

Since the time of Van Der Donck’s first mill in 1646, the river had also been

altered with small dams that created mill‐ponds. In the 19th century, there were at

least five such mill‐ponds active. One the largest of these served an extensive

complex of sawmills built by mahogany importer John Copcutt near the mouth of

the Sawmill in 1845. Copcutt’s large mill‐pond covered a full block that is now

Warburton Avenue between Main Street and Dock Street.2 A one‐block alley called

“Mill Street” serves as reminder of the location of one of these ponds.

These mill ponds were all filled in during the late 19th century, havingbecome stagnant and stinking eyesores to the growing city. The last dam, holding

one of John Copcutt’s mill ponds, was destroyed with dynamite in 1893.3 The land

exposed by the draining of these lakes was quickly built upon, and some of the newbuildings were built over the river channel itself—some of the only open space

remaining in the thriving town. By 1914, a reporter wrote that “bulky buildings nowhem [the Sawmill River] in, and it is not until you trace it into the open country

further north that you will find it as the Mohicans once knew it, free and sparkling,

open to the sun and winds of the summer world.”4 Finally, between 1917 and 1922

the remaining open‐air sections of the river in downtown Yonkers were enclosed in

a tunnel known as a culvert; this was the smooth, brick‐arched section of the tunnel

near its end.5

MINETTA BROOK

2 http://www.yonkershistory.org/his2.html3 New York Times: Great Joy In Yonkers: Removal of the Condemned Dams on the Nepperhan. April 7, 18934 NYT: On Old Sawmill River Road. July 19, 19145 http://www.sawmillrivercoalition.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=69



Although it runs underground in its final section, the Sawmill River actually

remains an essentially natural creek—fed by rain and runoff throughout a broad

watershed that encompasses both urbanized and non‐urban areas. Other streams in

denser urban areas, however, have been changed even more over time. In

Manhattan, for example, the Minetta Brook that once ran through Greenwich Village

has almost completely disappeared into a maze of sewer pipes laid out as the cityexpanded north along the 1811 grid plan that formed the pattern of New York City’s

streets and avenues north of Houston street. In the 20th century, the only traces of

the original natural waterway are the underground springs that still unexpectedly

bubbled to the surface and flooded basements of buildings built along the brook’sold route. In 1901, for example, during the construction of the Simpson, Crawford &

Simpson Department Store Building at 641 Sixth Avenue near one of the originalsources of the brook, the contractor encountered a heavy flow estimated at the time

at 1,750 gallons per minute when digging for the foundation at 27 feet below street

level.6 Another smaller flow is visible today in a sub‐basement of the NYU LawSchool Library at the south‐west corner of Washington Square Park, where the

builders had to install a sump that pumps the flow from an underground spring—just a few gallons per minute—into a nearby sewer.

CANAL STREET DITCH

New York City’s very first enclosed sewer is also a remnant of water sources

that were once fundamental to the city’s origins. This is the old Canal Street sewer,

running underneath Canal Street to the Hudson River. This was originally a

meandering and marshy waterway that drained the overflow from the Collect Pond,

the primary fresh‐water supply for New Amsterdam in the 18 th century (located at

the site of what is now Columbus Park in Chinatown).7 When the water was high,

this stream was enough to float a canoe. Native Americans living in the area brought catches of oysters in through this route, and over the years the discarded oyster

shells added to the hill next to the Fresh Water Pond. The Dutch settlers called this

hill beside the pond Kalch Hoek, translated as Shell Point, and the name evolvedphonetically until it became the “Collect,” which became the name of the Fresh

Water Pond as well as the hill beside it.8 The marshy area was almost unusable; good grazing pasture was mixed in

with the swamps, but cattle set out in these fields were sometimes lost in the

“pestilential quagmires” around them. One 19th‐century writer told of a man, lost in

the dark, who drowned in deep water at what is now the intersection of Grand and

Greene Streets, in the middle of SoHo.9

In the 1730s, Anthony Rutgers became the owner of the marshes andmeadows through a royal grant, and over the next decades he and his son‐in‐law

6 “Minetta Brook’s Course.” New York Times, March 27, 1901.7 Old Wells and Watercourses of the Island of Manhattan, by George Everett Hill and George E. Waring, Jr. in Historic New York:

the First Series of the Half Moon Papers (New York, 1899):8 “Old New‐York Exposed.” New York Times, August 26, 1888.9 Old Wells and Watercourses of the Island of Manhattan, by George Everett Hill and George E. Waring, Jr. in Historic New York:

the First Series of the Half Moon Papers (New York, 1899). Page 328.



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Waterways for NY Archive Magazine_draft 031611