Weekend, April 23-24, 2022 – Finding the hidden ponds and streams of Manhattan

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FROM THE ARCHIVES


WEEKEND, APRIL 23-24,  2022

THE  657th  EDITION


FINDING THE HIDDEN PONDS
AND

STREAMS  IN MANHATTAN

New York Post

Finding the hidden ponds and streams of Manhattan

March 13, 2016 6:25am

Our concrete jungle is a city built on water. If one searches carefully, one can hear sounds of secret streams churning beneath manholes and see traces of them in street names that recall a watery past.

In his new book, “Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs” (The Countryman Press), author Sergey Kadinsky dives into these lost waterways. Here’s a taste, with the ponds and canals of Lower Manhattan that were filled to create the downtown we know today.

An illustration of Broad Street, New York City in the 17th Century.Broad Street (Heere Gracht)Near the southern tip of Manhattan, Broad Street is situated atop a buried inlet of the East River.The first Dutch settlers arrived in Lower Manhattan in 1625 and quickly set about building a colonial outpost reminiscent of their home country. Broad Street’s name is a reminder of the navigable canal, Heere Gracht, named after a canal in Amsterdam.The canals were accessible only to small watercraft and quickly took on a less romantic role as a dumping ground for refuse. In 1664, New Amsterdam was acquired by England and renamed New York. The new masters of the colony did not care for restoring the city’s canals and had all of them buried in 1676.On today’s maps, the only physical reminder of the Heere Gracht is Bridge Street, a two-block road that intersects with Broad Street. Prior to 1676, the intersection was a bridge spanning the canal.

Maiden LaneLess than a half-mile north of Broad Street, a brook flowed into the East River, its path marked today by Maiden Lane. The stream had its origins at Nassau Street and its mouth at Pearl Street. In colonial times, it was known as Maagde Paatje, Dutch for “a footpath used by lovers along a rippling brook,” according to “The WPA Guide to New York City.” Other historians have a less romantic theory for Maiden Lane’s name: that the river that ran there was used for washing sheets. As the city crept north, the stream was buried and covered with a paved road in 1698.

Collect Pond near new York City.  Wikimedia Commons

Collect Pond

The best-documented hidden waterway in Lower Manhattan is Collect Pond, which supplied drinking water to colonial settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Its center and deepest point — 70 feet — was at the present-day intersection of Leonard and Centre streets. The pond occupied 48 acres in an outline that includes present-day Foley Square, Manhattan Criminal Court, the city Department of Health and the Manhattan Supreme Court. At Worth Street, a neck of land jutted into the pond, separating Little Collect from the larger section of the pond.

When the Dutch colonists arrived in 1625, they noted shells lining the shore and named the pond Kalck Hoek, or “lime point,” as the shells resembled lime. Some say this name was later corrupted into the pond’s English name, Collect Pond, though this theory is far from definitive.

To the east of the pond, at the present-day intersection of Baxter and Mulberry streets, the Tea Water Pump supplied water used for brewing tea. This pump was popular enough to be used as a reference marker on 18th-century maps, and carts delivered the pump’s water in barrels to eager customers. There were so many of these vendors that in 1757, the Common Council passed a law limiting their number. The same legislative body declared the pump a nuisance in 1797 and ordered it closed.

In 1788, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the future designer of Washington, DC, proposed a park that would follow a canal from the Hudson to East rivers through the Collect Pond.

But New York leaders had other plans for the pond. As the water became more polluted from nearby tanneries, they decided to bury the pond. By 1819, the work was done, and a new neighborhood would rise atop the former pond, optimistically named Paradise Square.

Inside, it would become a notorious slum — Five Points.

In recent years, the pond has enjoyed a revival in the city’s consciousness, with a reflecting pool as the centerpiece of a redesigned city park that opened in 2014.

Canal StreetThe canal that Canal Street was named after existed only for a short time. It was built in 1807 to drain the Collect Pond into the Hudson River. The pond and the canal were both buried by 1819, but Canal Street kept its name for eternity.

Old Wreck BrookThis creek drained from the Collect Pond into the East River, winding through Wolfert’s Marsh, where the Brooklyn Bridge was later constructed. It dried up after the pond was emptied.

Minetta Brook

Greenwich Village is perhaps the most storied of all the residential neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. Through the heart of this urban village flows an underground street — one that occasionally reappears in flooded basements, flowing beneath alleys that carry its name.

Minetta Brook originated from two tributaries, the main one having its source near what is now Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, and a secondary one at Sixth Avenue and 16th Street. The streams merged at a point just west of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 11th Street.

The stream continued into what became Washington Square Park, turning southwest toward the Hudson River. One of the curves of the stream was immortalized in the form of Minetta Street, a one-block alley in the heart of Greenwich Village. At its northern end, this street intersects with Minetta Lane.

The stream’s name is a variation of a commonly used Algonquin term: manitou or “spirit.” Local historians believe Minetta translated as “evil spirit” or “snake water.”

The land that would become Washington Square Park was used to grow tobacco until 1797, when the farms were repurposed as cemeteries. The number of dead increased dramatically in the series of yellow fever epidemics that swept across the city between 1797 and 1803. The graveyard filled up, and the city purchased land for a second cemetery on the site of the future Bryant Park.

When the potter’s field was rezoned as parkland in 1826, most of the bodies were removed; but on occasion, during construction in Washington Square Park, coffins may still be found. This happened most recently in 2009 — a tombstone dating to 1799 and attributed to 28-year-old Irish immigrant James Jackson, victim of yellow fever.

In the 1820s, what remained of Minetta Brook on the surface was buried by leveling the Sand Hills to its east.

Residents still see glimpses of Minetta Brook in their damp basements. Across the street from Washington Square’s Roman-style triumphal arch is Two Fifth Avenue, a massive apartment building that, in its lobby, has a glass cylinder pipe sticking out of the floor. A plaque on the wall says that, occasionally, silted water from Minetta Brook can be seen rising up inside the pipe.

WEEKEND PHOTO

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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

The vent shaft structure fence is receiving a mosaic
artpiece. The mosaic has been installed and now covered “temporarily” until the project is finished later this year.  Stay tuned for details.
Aron Eisenpreiss, Andy Sparberg, Ed Litcher all got it right.

   

SOURCES

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
NEW YORK POST

Funding Provided by:
Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds
Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD
Text by Judith Berd

Edited by Deborah Dorff
ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C)
PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS

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