Indian Spring & Tiemann's Fountain, Manhattan

In his book Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx (New-York Historical Society, 1938; written in 1916), James Ruel Smith documented several springs in the area near Broadway and 125th St which were still flowing at the time-- between 1890 and 1915. The Tiemann drinking fountain, Smith says, "was one stop that nearly every driver of the old Broadway stages and trolleys might be counted upon to make several times during the day..." (p. 59). The source was a large spring; a Mr. Daniel Tiemann, 73rd Mayor of NYC, had built a color works/dye factory on the site in the mid-19th century, and the water from this spring was used in the factory. The nearby "Indian Spring" was noted for its quantity and purity of water, though it was not built into a drinking fountain but remained in a bed of rocks, covered with a wooden grating. As of 1897, Smith said that the spring "is used only for drinking purposes, and the requirements of the rough shanty accomodations for several truckman's horses that are grouped about it a few yards to the south." As of 1898, the Board of Health condemned the spring as too polluted to be potable (p. 55).
Some of Smith's plates below, with their captions giving locations:













Below are images of the same area from Viele's water map.



 
Though it's hard to be sure which original watercourse from pre-urban times became a specific spring seen in the 19th or 20th century, I believe that the small pond outlined below, on 124th St just west of Amsterdam Ave, is the site of Ruel Smith's Indian Spring.

 


Prentis Hall, a Columbia University building on the south side of 125th St just west of Broadway, has seen the modern incarnation of one of these springs flowing through its basement for many years. The story i've heard is that after the building was constructed, the basement kept flooding, until eventually a tunnel was dug in a basement wall and the water now flows into a channel in the basement and out through a pipe that connects it with a sewer along 125th. The photo below is this basement river in 2006. (photo by steve duncan).



 


See other posts about the Indian Spring & Tiemann's Fountain area

Canal Street Drainage/Sewer, Manhattan

From Old Wells and Watercourses of the Island of Manhattan, by George Everett Hill and George E. Waring, Jr. in Historic New York: the First Series of the Half Moon Papers (New York, 1899):

    The western outlet of the Collect was a small stream which left the pond at its northern end and flowed, nearly on the line of the present Canal Street, to the Hudson. ....there spread the broad pasture land, swamps, and salt marshes of Lispenard Meadows, which extended to the shore line (just beyond Greenwich Street) and from Duane Street on the south to Spring Street on the north. Through these meadows the stream from the Collect flowed sluggishly, spreading out over the low land, but maintaining enough of a channel to permit the passage of small boats from the river to the pond. A little brook, draining another swampy valley whcih lay at the foot of the western slope of the Kalch Hoek, followed, substantially, the line of West Broadway from Reade Street, and entered the larger stream nearly at a right angle. On the northern side a tiny rivulet trickled down from a fine spring whcih gave the name Spring Street to the road which passed it, leading to Broadway.

    The Canal Street stream was apparently large enough that prior to the european settlements, the natives of the region could canoe (at least at high tide) from the Hudson river, along the stream, and into the Collect Pond, carrying deliveries of oysters that would be opened and dried for winter food. According to Old Wells and Watercourses..., this helped create the huge mounds of shells that the Dutch found around the Collect pond. This led to it being called "Kalch Hoek," meaning Shell Point, which was probably corrupted into "Collect" later.

A 1766 map showing the line of the drainage canal and the surrounding marsh (close-up view first; second image is entire map):

Posts about the Canal Street Drainage/Sewer

Broad Street Canal/Heere Graft, Manhattan

From Old Wells and Watercourses of the Island of Manhattan, by George Everett Hill and George E. Waring, Jr. in Historic New York: the First Series of the Half Moon Papers (New York, 1899):

[During the early Dutch settlement] an inlet of the bay, which could be made to do duty as a canal, extended inland for about a quarter of a mile on the line of the present Broad Street. This ditch was the natural outlet for a marshy section of considerable size lying above what soon came to be known as The Beaver Path, now Beaver Street. A brook tricked through this marsh, from the common lying north of it, called the Shaape Waytie, or Sheep Pasture, and recieved the flow of a small stream which ran through the Company's Valley, as that portion of the The Beaver Path was named whcih lay between Heer Straat (Broadway) and the junction of these two rivulets. From the latter point, the Heere Gracht-- or Heere Graft as it was soon called, stretched its odorous length to the bay.
    Around this ditch gathered much of the social and business life of the new community....

From http://www.oldstreets.com/index.asp?letter=C:

By the late 1640s the canals were
lined with sheet piling to stabilize both their banks and the narrow
streets on either side. The largest canal was the Heere Gracht, which
is now Broad Street from Pearl to Beaver Streets. Its narrower
continuation, from Beaver Street to a point just south of Exchange
Place, was called the Prinzen Gracht. Both were named, perhaps in jest,
after two elegant canals that had recently been built in Amsterdam. The
Bever Gracht was a branch canal along what is now Beaver Street from
Broadway west to about the present New Street. A drawback of the canals
was that they also served as open sewers and stank terribly. The
British filled them up in 1676.

A mid-19th century map showing the original lots of the Dutch settlement in the 17th century shows both the marsh and the Broad St Canal (first image is entire map, second image is close-up). Note how close Broadway ("The Great Highway") is to the Hudson ("The North River"); almost all the land west of Broadway at the south end of Manhattan is landfill.

Viele's Water Map shows both the Broad Street Canal and the Maiden Lane stream:

By 1766, in this view from a British map, the ditch is filled in and only the "wet dock" remains at the East River end.

See posts on the Broad Street Canal

Spuyten Duyvil Creek, Manhattan/Bronx

A
1776 map showing the northern tip of Manhattan and Spuyten Duyvil
Creek, which is crossed by both Kingsbridge and Dyckman's Bridge.
(Taken from map image linked below).

   
Upper Manhattan and the Bronx were seperated by only a narrow tidal
strait until the end of the 19th century. This narrow, meandering, but
fast-flowing strait was the Spuyten Duyvil Creek (various alternative
spellings are also valid). New York's waterfront sees about a five-foot
variation between low tide and high tide, and as the tide came in and
out there was often a difference in water level between the Hudson
River and the East River, which is affected by the slow and massive
tidal movements of Long Island Sound. This differential created
dangerous currents.
    In his (fictional) book The Knickerbocker History of New York,
Washington Irving tells an apocryphal story of how the strait got its
name, and how violent the water could be. (The character in this
passage is Antony Corlear, a trumpeter sent by 17th-century governor of
New Amsterdam Peter Stuyvesant to warn residents that the British were
coming.)

It was a dark and stormy night when the good Antony arrived at the creek

(sagely denominated Haerlem river) which separates the island of

Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements were in an

uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of

brass across the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient

ghost upon the brink, and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his

errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously

that he would swim across in spite of the devil (spyt den duyvel), and

daringly plunged into the stream. Luckless Antony! scarce had he buffeted

half-way over when he was observed to struggle violently, as if battling

with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively he put his trumpet to his

mouth, and giving a vehement blast sank for ever to the bottom.



The clangor of his trumpet, like that of the ivory horn of the renowned

Paladin Orlando, when expiring in the glorious field of Roncesvalles, rang

far and wide through the country, alarming the neighbors round, who

hurried in amazement to the spot. Here an old Dutch burgher, famed for his

veracity, and who had been a witness of the fact, related to them the

melancholy affair; with the fearful addition (to which I am slow of giving

belief) that he saw the duyvel, in the shape of a huge mossbonker, seize

the sturdy Antony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves. Certain it

is, the place, with the adjoining promontory, which projects into the

Hudson, has been called Spyt den Duyvel ever since; the ghost of the

unfortunate Antony still haunts the surrounding solitudes, and his trumpet

has often been heard by the neighbors of a stormy night, mingling with the

howling of the blast.



Nobody ever attempts to swim across the creek after dark; on the contrary,

a bridge has been built to guard against such melancholy accidents in the

future; and as to moss-bonkers, they are held in such abhorrence that no

true Dutchman will admit them to his table who loves good fish and hates

the devil.

During
the era of the drowned Van Corlear, the normal way across Spuyten
Duyivil Creek during high tide was a ferry, operated until 1673 by
Johannes Verveelen. (During low tide it was often possible to wade
across, whether for travelers on foot or farmers bringing livestock to
the city—probably the origin of the name “Fordham” in the Bronx). But
in 1693, Manhattan got its first bridge, a wooden toll-bridge structure
run by the Philippse family, and built over the old fording spot so
that those crossing the Spuyten Duyvil were forced to pay the toll. The
charter mandated that the king of England and his representatives,
British soldiers, could cross for free, and so it was known as the
King’s Bridge.
    Around 1713, the Philipse family replaced the
wooden span with a new, 24-foot-wide bridge with a wooden deck laid
over rough stone supports. It would remain the only bridge across the
Harlem River until about 1758, when locals built the aptly-named Free
Bridge to avoid tolls on Kingsbridge. Amazingly, the Kingsbridge
structure built in 1713 lasted until 1917—after which it was destroyed
and buried in the landfill around Marble Hill, over the protests of
local historians.  But with a lifetime of more than two centuries, this
humble stone-and-wood structure remains the longest-lasting bridge that
New York City has ever had.

    Spuyten Duyvil Creek was far too
shallow for larger boats or ships,
and ship traffic between the upper Hudson and Long Island Sound had to
take
a 25-mile detour around lower Manhattan. In 1895, the Harlem River Ship
Canal was opened after nine years of
work by the Army Corps of Engineers, connecting the Hudson and Harlem
Rivers with a navigable channel for ships across the very northern end
of Manhattan. At the opening ceremonies, it
was said that “the opening of the Harlem Ship Canal was a greater event
than the opening of the Erie Canal.” Spuyten Duyvil Creek was filled
in; the historic Kingsbridge was demolished and buried in the landfill.
Today the curves of Spuyten Duyvil creek are apparent in the curving
border of New York County (Manhattan), which extends around the Marble
Hill section of the Bronx-side mainland of the Ship Canal.

See posts related to Spuyten Duyvil Creek

Minetta Brook fountains

Famously, it's known that the water of Minetta Brook can be seen from the surface at a marble fountain in the inner lobby of #2 Fifth Avenue (which is just on the north side of the park-- where Fifth Avenue hits Washington Square North).

However, it seems likely that the fountain is no longer supplied by the historic stream, if it ever was. A 1930 NY Times article told about the exposure of the brook in this fountain, but I suspect whatever supplied it has been replaced by standard NYC water supply water (if it ever was Minetta water, and not just a publicity stunt.)

According to the Native's Guide to New York by Richard Laermer (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), for example, Minetta Brook "dried up in the mid-1800s" and the 2 Fifth Ave fountain merely "symbolizes" Minetta Brook. (Although the plaque on the fountain says that "A brook winds its erratic way beneath this site," and explains that over time Minetta Brook-- sometimes referred to by its nickname 'Devil's Water'-- "has settled underground.")

Despite the improbability, other walking tours and guidebooks still suggest that the fountain is truly Minetta Brook water. Does anyone know any more about this? Please email me if you know! Also if you have a snapshot of the fountain, I'd love to add that to this post-- email me at lostriversnyc@gmail.com. Thanks!

I've also been told the stream is visible in a fountain at at 33 Washington Square West, which is at the western edge of the park.

References:
Native's Guide to New York: Advice With Attitude for People Who Live Here--And Visitors We Like
By Richard Laermer
Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Washington Square Park

Minetta Brook originally flowed into a marshy region that is now Washington Square Park. (Some brief information on the Parks Department site at http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/washingtonsquarepark/).

A schematic of Washington Square Park from the parks department; this shows planned renovations, including moving the fountain slightly to bring it into line with the Arch, but is very close to the plan of the park as it exists today.

Washington Square Park does not have any obvious signs of the old watercourse. Between the development of the park and the real estate development around it in the 19th century, it's been changed many times from its original form. However the water still has to go somewhere, and today there are three parallel combined sewers (carrying both drainage water and sewage) running east to west: one on the north side of the park (Waverly Place/Washington Square North), in a pipe 4'2" by 4"; another on the south side of the park (West 4th St), 4' by 3'; and one through the middle of the park, with a diameter of 54" (4.5 feet). These are shown on the sewer diagram below; probably all three are brick tunnels, from mid- to late-nineteenth century construction. Which, if any of these, carries the remnants of the Minetta Brook?

Collect Pond's Name

From the excellent site http://www.oldstreets.com:

Collect Pond: A large freshwater pond, irregular in shape, in the area roughly
bounded by today's Duane, Centre, Walker, Canal and Mulberry Streets,
and Cardinal Hayes Place. The name derives from the Dutch Kalck,
meaning chalk or lime, and probably refers to the piles of shells left
by Indians who had harvested oysters nearby. The name is also found
spelled Kolck, Kalk, etc. The pond was an important source of drinking
water in colonial times but became progressively more polluted. It was
filled in between 1802 and 1813. See also Five Points.

Minetta Brook, Manhattan

From the Viele Water Map:

More information on Minetta Brook:

http://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/minetta-brook-beneath-the-village/

From the New York Times, March 27 1901:

 

From the New York Times, December 4 1930:

See posts about the Minetta Brook

Collect Pond, Manhattan

The Collect Pond was essentially at the site of today's Columbus Park, just south of Canal Street, and it supplied the city's water until it became horribly polluted by the growing city in the 18th century. It's outlet had always been a marshy streamlet that ran west to the Hudson River, created a swampy area in the area now occupied by the western end of Canal Street, but the channel was dug out and straightened and became the namesake for Canal Street.

The Collect Pond in 1755, and below that the larger view of the map that this image was taken from:

The pond in 1766 (to the left is the triangle of City Hall Park):

And again in 1766, showing the line of the drainage canal and the surrounding marsh:

Posts about the Collect Pond

Sunfish Creek, Manhattan

The watercourse that fed the Sunfish Pond along 32nd Street and then flowed on to the East River along the route of 34th Street was one of the most prominent features of the area until the 19th century. The stream's outlet to the East River was a cove called Kip's Bay, after an early Dutch landowner whose farm had been just south of the stream; Murray Hill, today's name for the neighborhood, came from the estate of Robert Murray, whose house was built on a hill at Park Avenue and 36th Street, overlooking Sunfish Pond. (For more, see Barry Popik's excellent site.)

Many revolutionary war battles could be pointed to as pivotal moments in the formation of the young United States, but Kips Bay played host to a particularly memorable moment of the war. British troops had been massing on the shore of Queens, preparing a multitude of boats to bring about 4,000 troops across the East River for what would later be called "The Battle of Manhattan." Crossing the river and borne southward on the tide, they mostly landed around the Kips Bay area, where they promptly routed the Americans, who fled to northern Manhattan-- to the consternation of George Washington, who is said to have thrown his hat to the ground in a fit of impotent anger at the flight. (In their defense, the American milita were vastly outnumbered.

A 1931 article (found here) eulogizing the old 34th Street location of the Waldorf Astoria hotel gave a more poetic account of the battle, and of Mrs. Murray's apocryphal role:

Rich in historical associations was
this farmland site of the Waldorf. Once a lively battle of the
Revolutionary War took place there. In fact, Historian Albert Ullman
claims that America came near to losing the Revolution within the
Thirty-fourth Street district of Manhattan. That was when the British
succeeded in landing their army at Kips Bay Farm, at the foot of
Thirty-fourth Street on September 15, 1776, after the disastrous battle
of Long Island.

It was at this time that stray shots
began to fall in the present Fifth Avenue in what became known as the
"battle of the cornfield." Washington had rushed down from his
headquarters in the Jumel mansion, which still stands in 160th Street.
He took up his position on a knoll about where the New York Public
Library stands today. His army was in rout, running toward him. There
was every indication the British would break through, cross the Sunfish
Creek and trap 3,500 troops still in the city at the tip of Manhattan
Island. In the letters of his aide-de-camp it is told how Washington
"laid his cane over many of the officers who shewed their men the
example of running.,.

Reinforced with more troops a rally was
staged and General Putnam was sent down Sunfish Creek and Bloomingdale
Road to rescue and direct the 3,500 men out of the city. The battle was
fought on the famous Murray Farm, from which Murray Hill was named.

In the Murray house, which stood in the
bed of Park Avenue at Thirty-seventh Street, Mrs. Murray "saved the
army." Deliberately she dined and wined the red-coated British officers
so well that Putnam was able to slip past the Waldorf block with his
army and join Washington in the retirement to Harlem Heights.

Sunfish Creek seems to have completely disappeared, in terms of any recognizible remnants, although I'd still like to find the route that drains the springs that were part of its sources. One spring seems to have been essentially in the middle of Times Square-- very close to 46th Street and 7th Avenue.

Below is a section of Viele's water map showing the stream. I have never run accross any name for the second stream, further north, that also outlets into Kip's bay.

See posts about Sunfish Creek

106th St/McGown's Pass

A very wide stream ran into the East River between 106th Street and 107th Street, according to Viele's Water Map. One source of the stream came from the west side of Manhattan, and the water flowed to the east side near McGowan's (or McGowns) Pass, which was the pass used by the Kingsbridge Road to cross the low rocky cliffs that rose above 106th St at the time.

The images below show the stream as it was in 1776, as seen by the British. The first image is the whole map for context, and then the next is just a small cropped section to see the detail of the stream itself. The bottom of the map is at about 110th Street. (This was an area of Manhattan that saw a great deal of fighting during the first part of the Revolutionary War; the official title of this map is "A map of part of New-York Island showing a plan of Fort Washington, now call'd Ft. Kniphausen with the rebels lines on the south part, from which they were driven on the 16th of November 1776 by the troupes under the orders of the Earl of Percy. Survey'd the same day by order of His Lordship by C. J. Sauthier.")

Near the bottom of the map, "McGowan's Pass" is marked. This was a key passageway for Revolutionary War troops, and George Washington's men kept a lookout for the British from the higher ground north of 106th Street. The Parks Department has more information on McGowan's Pass on one of their excellent historical signs.

I am having a hard time corrolating the British views with Viele's Water Map of the same area; is the watercourse shown on the British map merely the northern extension
of what is shown on the Viele map? If so, then it must have hooked East just past the bottom of the British map. The southern extension of the stream, which connects to other sources and flows to the East River, will be for a seperate post.

I have seen no traces of these streams on the surface of the modern city. There is also little trace of the challenging McGowan's Pass Road, which was described as late as 1893 as "wild and precipitous." However, there is a 5-foot diameter sewer underneath 106th Street east of Central Park, and there is an 8-foot by 12-foot sewer underneath East 110th St, both of which were built in the 1870s; was the stream re-routed through one of these sewers?

Sunfish Pond, Manhattan

Sunfish Pond was located between Madison and Lexington Avenues, and covered what is now Park Avenue, between 31st and 32nd Streets.

....a little lake called Sunfish Pond, which extended to Fourth Avenue and covered the site of the present car-stables. Sunfish Pond, Mines tells us, was famous for its eels, as well as sunfish and flounders. He adds that the brook which fed it was almost dry in summer, but in times of freshet overflowed its banks and spread from the northern line of the present Madison Square to Murray Hill, more than once compelling those who lived along its lower course to resort to boats as the only means of reaching the avenue. (From New York: Old & New: Its Story, Streets, and Landmarks; By Rufus Rockwell Wilson; J.B. Lippincott company, 1902)

Viele shows the pond in his famous water map, along with the stream that supplied it. The pond is approximately in the center of this crop.
























A tighter crop of the area of the pond from Viele's map. I haven't been able to find any trace of this pond in the present New York-- is it completely gone?












See posts related to Sunswick Pond