Nineteen Reservoirs

Thirty years ago, Low Life appeared to universal acclaim and secured Luc Sante's status as the author of that cult classic of alternative New York City history. Now, he returns with another sidelong NYC history-here, the making of the upstate reservoir system that reliably supplies one of the world's greatest metropolises with its fresh water, and without which the city would almost certainly have faded into insignificance.
The Croton, the city's earliest upstate reservoir, was created in Westchester County in the late 1830s. But Sante's focus here is the sixty-year period, from 1907 to 1967, when twenty-six villages and countless farms, forest lands, orchards, quarries, and more on the west side of the Hudson River were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and then submerged-some of them within living memory-to create the Catskills reservoirs. The regional ecosystem was profoundly altered, including in ways we will never be able fully to appreciate.This meticulously detailed book is both an immersive history and a meditation on the significance of these willed-from-nature bodies of water to the city-past, present, and future.