Brooklyn, by far the biggest city or town on Long Island in the mid-1800s, had a water problem as severe as New York’s. The 1840s Croton aqueduct took care of New York’s need for fresh water with a supply from further north, up the Hudson River, while in the 1850s Brooklyn built a system supplied by streams and lakes on the island. Part of the system was a distributing reservoir in Queens, just past the border of Kings County, where Brooklyn is.
By 1914, that reservoir was abandoned, as the new Catskill and Delaware systems were enough for the entire combined city of Greater New York:
The thing is, no one ever really did anything with the old reservoir. The land around it was developed as Highland Park, while the reservoir itself gradually became a real wetland accidentally created from an artificial lake.
The state designated the reservoir as a protected wetland 8 years ago, and now the city has plans to undertake a wetlands preservation project, which is in some ways a wetlands creation project, since it will be restoring a wetland that did not develop naturally. As soon as I saw “giant snapping turtles” in the description, I knew this was important.
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