From 1900, a photo of the future site of the New York Public Library and the past site of the Croton Distributing Reservoir. The photo is labelled at the NYPL as “The Croton Reservoir ruins, looking north,” which means the photographer was on or near 40th Street and Fifth Avenue is just out of the frame to the right.
The reservoir was, in form, a big masonry box to hold water. Here it was, drained of water and no longer needed, ten years earlier, looking south with Fifth Avenue on the left:
Note the wall in the center, dividing the reservoir into east and west halves. One of the jobs of a distribution reservoir is to keep up water pressure in the mains by maintaining a head elevation, so it makes sense to divide the storage this way. One half could be kept full if there was a temporary shortage – the New York area, in general, gets a lot of rain, so extended droughts are extremely rare – to keep the pressure up. Also, note the gates for water where the center wall meets the far (40th Street) outside wall. They hint at what the first picture is showing us: that there was an infrastructure of plumbing hidden under the walls. That’s why there was so much stuff exposed when the main walls were taken down.
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