Truth Weirder-Looking Than Fiction

I said that I’d be talking more about the 1843 picture book about the original Croton water system, and here we are. The picture above shows the Distribution Reservoir, on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets. The name pretty much explains its use: it was there to create water pressure and connect to the various mains feeding the city to the south. (As I mentioned in the last post on this topic, in 1843, nearly the entire built-up portion of the city was south of 42nd Street.) Improvements to the water-supply system as a whole made the reservoir redundant, and it was torn down by 1900, and the site reused for the main building of the New York Public Library.

The drawing above, despite the little carriages and horses, fails to convey the size of the reservoir or the bizarre-looking (to modern tastes) Egyptian-revival architectural style. Some of the other surviving pictures have other issues. For instance, there’s this early engraving, which suggests that midtown Manhattan is an oasis in a non-tropical desert. Also, as a structural engineer, the fact that the woman in the foreground has a waist more narrow than her neck seems unsettlingly unstable. Her daughter seems to have the same medical condition.

I think the next one is a drawing based on photographs taken from other angles. The quiet residential street on the left is Fifth Avenue, looking south.

The next photograph is Reservoir Square, the original park on the west half of the double block partially occupied by the reservoir. This was where the New York Crystal Palace was built in 1853 and burned down in 1858. It still exists, greatly remodeled, as Bryant Park. The west face of the reservoir is visible on the far right; the odd ziggurat in the middle of the north side of 42nd Street was a Presbyterian Church.

The last is my favorite because it gives, in one semi-panoramic shot, the reservoir, Fifth Avenue (on the left), 42nd Street (on the right) and the low-rise surrounding streetscape. The reservoir appears to be empty, and this was probably shortly before its demolition. The walls are covered with ivy, almost certainly enabled by leaks through the masonry walls. The odd door inside the reservoir, near the center of the photo as a whole and on the far-side wall, is a water intake.