Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  To the west, the canal and steam railroad booms similarly vaulted Chicago on Lake Michigan to regional metropolitan leadership. From a population of only 350 in 1833, Chicago grew rapidly on grain and raw materials freight connecting to the Erie Canal, then even faster after the 1848 opening of the 96-mile Illinois and Michigan Canal linking Chicago with the Mississippi. By 1850 it had 30,000 inhabitants. The city’s destiny as the key midwestern transit point for the crops, livestock and raw materials of America’s interior was solidified from the 1850s when Chicago became the central hub for the steam railroads. Travel time to New York fell from three weeks by boat to three days by train. Slaughterhouses, meat-packing enterprises, and transit by refrigerated railway cars soon followed. By 1890 Chicago was the nation’s second largest city.

  Rapid urbanization evoked a sanitary awakening in America, as it had in Europe. New York led the way. Manhattan island, surrounded by undrinkable, brackish rivers and possessing only one wholesome freshwater source on its low-lying, settled southern tip, entered the era as one of the most parched cities in the country. Reflecting its rise in status, by the 1880s it had built the world’s most abundant urban water supply system providing each of its over 1 million inhabitants with a lavish 100 gallons of water per day—a modern urban incarnation of ancient Rome in its glory days.

  From the colonial era through the early decades of the American republic, New York City’s public water had been so notoriously bad that residents seldom drank it untreated. Instead they consumed it for breakfast as warm beer, in disinfecting alcoholic drinks at the city’s many taverns, or boiled in hot chocolate or tea. Well water, often briny and hard tasting, was rarely consumed. Lower Manhattan’s single freshwater pond, called the Collect, by the early nineteenth century had become such a dumping ground of sewage, excrement, dead animals, and occasional human corpses that the only available wholesome water came from a lone, pumped spring. Known as the Tea Water Pump because its purity favored its use for making tea, it was sold throughout the city in water carts by “tea men” for a handsome premium that only the well-to-do could regularly afford. By the time New York’s population began to swell from the Erie Canal’s influence, the water system was already at the breaking point.

  Catastrophic epidemics and fire finally broke through the political and business intrigues that for decades had stymied the clamoring for water reform. Yellow fever had killed 2,000 in 1798 and various plagues had visited the city periodically before the disastrous global cholera epidemic struck New York in 1832. The horrible dehydration and rupturing capillaries of the bacteria killed 3,500 New Yorkers—almost 2 percent of the population—and sent 100,000 people, or nearly half the city, fleeing to the greener suburbs north of 42nd street and beyond. The lack of a good water system also had left New York vulnerable to the great fire of 1776 and numerous other successive blazes. In December 1835, with residents barely recovered from the cholera epidemic, a terrible fire, fanned by high winds, destroyed some one-third of the city, including much of its commercial and shipping businesses in lower Manhattan. The blaze exhausted the resources of the city’s new fire reservoir, while cisterns froze and river water turned to ice in the pipes of volunteer firemen’s hand pump carts.

  The disasters of the 1830s finally galvanized the city’s resolve to build the 42-mile-long Croton Aqueduct system. Its chief engineer, John Jervis, had learned his trade on the Erie Canal. The aqueduct system included a dam, reservoirs, arched bridges, and tunnels and brought water from the Croton River north of the city to a showy distributing reservoir on Murray Hill at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue at the site later conspicuously occupied by New York’s central public library. Designed to look like an Egyptian temple, the reservoir’s completion in October 1842 was wildly celebrated with fountains being turned on at City Hall and Union Square, cannons firing from the Battery, church bells ringing, the singing of a specially written “Croton Ode,” and a seven-mile parade attended by some quarter of a million people. The mood was captured in the journal entry of a future New York mayor, Philip Hone: “Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants and hose…It is astonishing how popular the introduction of water is among all classes of our citizens, and how cheerfully they acquiesce in the enormous expense which will burden them and their posterity with taxes to the latest generation. Water! water! Is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.” During the 1850s a sewerage system was begun. Bathrooms became a common feature of New York life. Never again was New York plagued by terrible cholera epidemics and great fires. As in London following its sanitary reforms, childhood mortality plunged and average life spans leaped from historic trend lines.

  The Croton water supply had been expected to last for sixty years. Within a decade, however, it became evident that additional supply would be needed to meet the growing population and the surge in per capita consumption that accompanied the sudden availability of freshwater. By 1884 engineers began work on a second Croton aqueduct system with three times the capacity of the original. Even before the New Croton system was completed in 1911, groundbreaking had begun a still larger, new municipal water supply project. The Catskill aqueduct system brought water some 100 miles from the mountains west of the Hudson River to satisfy the thirst of New York’s over 3.5 million inhabitants. Completed in 1927, the Catskill system featured a water tunnel 1,114 feet under the Hudson riverbed. Reflective of the era’s prevailing Go-Go culture, authorities used high-handed land appropriations to displace entire rural towns and citizens to make way for the system’s massive reservoirs.

  To carry water throughout the growing metropolis, New York also built its first deep, high-pressure subterranean conduit—City Tunnel Number 1, some 18 miles long—in 1917. Working at perilous atmospheric pressures requiring careful bodily acclimation, workers nicknamed “sandhogs” bore through the solid bedrock under the city and its rivers and harbor at a depth of some 750 feet, or the equivalent of an inverted skyscraper. In 1936 City Tunnel Number 2 added another 20 miles of water distribution capacity far below the city’s streets, subways, and buried electrical and gas service pipelines. Work on Tunnel Number 3, one of the world’s most monumental engineering projects at the turn of the twenty-first century, started in 1970 and was still being done at the end of the century’s first decade.

  As the population of New York City climbed toward 8 million in the 1950s, still more water supply was needed. Between 1937 and 1965, the city built its largest aqueduct system with water from the Delaware River that flowed between New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Construction of the Delaware system proceeded only after a 1931 Supreme Court ruling, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, rejecting downstream New Jersey’s effort to stop the project. Holmes’s opinion established the guiding water-sharing principle of “equitable apportionment without quibbling over formulas” because “a river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.”

  In the early twenty-first century, the water system that keeps New York City running is still an engineering marvel. Although leaky and in a dire race to modernize several critical components ahead of a catastrophic collapse, it delivers, almost entirely by gravity, some 1.3 billion gallons to 9 million people each day—enough for over 140 gallons per person—through three primary aqueducts drawing from 19 reservoirs and three managed lakes across a 2,000-square-mile watershed. Its sewerage counterpart of about 6,500 miles of pipes carries away an equal amount of wastewater each day to 14 treatment plants, 89 wastewater pump stations, and other facilities. History had once again repeated itself: as in ancient Rome and other leading civilizations of the past, the water infrastructure of the foremost center of the greatest power of the age was both a bellwether and a key contributor of its preeminence.

  By the late nineteenth century, while New York’s water system was being rapidly exp
anded, America had begun to assert its status as the world’s awakening industrial giant. Pivotal to its transformation of the 1900s into the American Century was the nation’s response to the challenge of harnessing the untapped resources of its remaining two frontiers—its arid Far West, and its seascape alongside the Earth’s two largest oceans. The clarion call west had been sounded on January 24, 1848, when workers erecting Swiss émigré Johann Sutter’s new waterwheel-powered sawmill on the south fork of the American River near modern Sacramento, California, found 1.5 ounces of gold dust and nuggets in the millrace. On May 4 news of the gold strike spread wildly through the small town of San Francisco. The following year, word reached the larger world. The California Gold Rush was on. By land and sea, “forty-niners” flocked to California to prospect. By 1853 more than 100,000 had arrived, including 25,000 Frenchmen and 20,000 Chinese. Hundreds of thousands more followed. Within a matter of months, San Francisco swelled into a booming city of over 20,000.

  Prospectors panned streams and dug shafts into hillsides. But most effectively, they rigged old Roman hydraulic methods to shear away the rocky skin and foliage of the foothills with high-pressure water jets to expose the underlying gold veins. Water was lifted by wooden waterwheels—called hurdy-gurdy wheels by the miners who improvised them—and funneled through pipelines to fill tanks and dams several hundred feet above the mining site. It was then released in torrents through piping and small diameter metal nozzles to generate pressures up to 30,000 gallons per minute. Hillsides everywhere were stripped bare by the environmental carnage. The residue of smashed rocks and topsoil from neighboring farms washed away toward San Francisco Bay. Farmer pressure finally outlawed the practice in 1884. But by that time the gold had been mostly plundered from the hills and the miners had moved on to the next strike. Johann Sutter, meanwhile, died in Pennsylvania in 1880, at the age of seventy-seven, a man ruined by the unstoppable invasion of squatters and lawless theft of his stores and property.

  One of the lasting imprints of the Gold Rush on America’s western destiny was the blazing of two main transportation routes linking the East with the nation’s western frontier. The parched, overland trails across the Far Western deserts and high mountains drew 300,000 to California by 1860, many of whom later settled down as early farmers and merchants. California’s precocious development, in turn, hastened the building of the transcontinental steam railroad. When the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were linked up in in 1869, travelers could cross the country in comfort from New York to San Francisco in only ten days.

  The search for a faster, cheap sea route to California, meanwhile, spurred the epic quest to build a transoceanic canal passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Until the building of the Panama Canal, the voyage required 15,000 miles and sailing around South America’s treacherous Cape Horn. In a single month in 1850, 33 sailing ships arrived in San Francisco after an average 159 days at sea. Speedier, full-rigged clippers later reduced travel time to about 97 days. Before the Gold Rush, in 1840, President James Polk, inspired by America’s growing continental ambitions, had already recognized the sovereignty of Colombia over the Isthmus of Panama in exchange for right of American rail passage through it. If the acquisition of California after the 1846–1848 war with Mexico heightened momentum for a canal, the Gold Rush gave it urgency. By 1855 the Panama railway bridging to the oceans was completed with American capital. In the next decade, 400,000 people crossed its tracks, including an army of California-bound miners. To compete with the Panama railway, “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, notorious baron of Hudson River steamboats (and later railroads), ran steamers across the large lake at Nicaragua that connected to the Pacific coast by mule and schemed of his own interoceanic canal at Nicaragua; in 1855 one of Vanderbilt’s hired associates, William Walker, managed to set himself up as Nicaragua’s president. For the rest of the century, powerful interests in the United States and Europe took sides in the mounting high-stakes, multilateral battle to make either Panama or Nicaragua the chosen route for the interoceanic canal that would shape world power in the twentieth century.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Canal to America’s Century

  As the 1869 Suez Canal made transparent the supremacy of the steam-and-iron age British Empire, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 signaled a reordering of the world’s power in favor of the fast-rising leader of the mass production technology era, the United States. The interoceanic canal at the Panamanian isthmus created a highway across the central Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, integrating Europe, the Americas, and the Far East into a tighter, global web of political, economic, and military relations. No nation was better placed to benefit commercially and strategically from its transformative impact than America, in whose backyard it was and which controlled access to it. Nor was any other nation as capable and so audacious to take on the gargantuan technical, organizational, and political challenges of building it. Its successful completion was a tangible declaration of America’s industrial economic superiority and its growing ambition to take its place among the world’s great powers. The fast and inexpensive water passage between the two oceans also had a major, catalytic impact upon America’s internal growth. At last, the nation became capable of fully exploiting the advantages of its extensive maritime position. By transforming the Caribbean from a dead end into a transportation shortcut across the continent it created fresh synergy from the intermingling of the Far West’s potential mineral and agricultural wealth with the prolific industry and markets of the Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes, and the eastern seaboard. Not least, too, the canal combined America’s Atlantic and Pacific fleets into a single, great power upon the high seas.

  The very creation of the canal had been closely interconnected with the evolution of American naval power. As a nation surrounded by oceans on three sides, maritime power and commerce had always played a primary role in American history. Although its fledgling navy was overwhelmingly outclassed by the British fleet during the War of Independence, John Paul Jones’s heroic sea victories and marauding of England’s coast had instilled national pride and the hope that American prowess as naval warriors could augment the natural moat of the Atlantic to defend the young country’s vital interests. From 1794, a small, but effective military fleet was built to safeguard American merchant shipping and diplomatic neutrality amid boiling war tensions between France and England. When the three-year Quasi-War with France erupted in 1798, the U.S. Navy earned the respect of all great European powers by prevailing in several Caribbean engagements against top French warships. The navy won further plaudits for liberating America from the onerous tolls and prisoner ransoms charged by the Islamic states of North Africa in the little-remembered Barbary Wars of 1801–1806. By Jefferson’s presidency, some $2 million, or one-fifth of America’s annual government revenue, had been paid to Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco to allow U.S. merchant ships to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar and trade unaccosted in Mediterranean waters. When Tripoli, greedy for larger tribute and underestimating American naval power, declared war on the United States in 1801, Jefferson sent the navy. The resulting bombardments and audacious marine raids on Tripoli created new naval heroes, swelled patriotic fervor at home and steeled American resolve to pay for defense but never again for tribute or ransom.

  It was in the War of 1812 that the navy finally established its permanence as America’s indispensable military branch. Despite its small size and poorly maintained state at the start of the badly prepared war, the fleet, led by the USS Constitution (aka Old Ironsides due to its many protective layers to defend against broadsides), stunned Englishmen and thrilled Americans by winning a series of sea skirmishes against overconfident British warship commanders reveling in England’s recent triumphs over French fleets at the Nile and Trafalgar. Most important, U.S. naval freshwater commanders played crucial roles in foiling the concerted British invasion of America in 1814 by winning inland battles on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie. By g
aining control of the strategic northern and Great Lakes for America, these victories ultimately convinced England to give up its long-term designs on the Mississippi Valley and instead settle its remaining border disputes with the United States in order to secure the vulnerable borders of British Canada.

  After the war, naval power was deployed in America’s pursuit of its Manifest Destiny to expand its continental territory to the Pacific Ocean. In 1823, growing confidence in its naval power emboldened the United States to assert its defining Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers not to intervene in the newly independent republics of Latin America because the hemisphere was America’s special sphere of influence. In the Mexican War of 1846–1848, American vessels blockaded Mexican ports and in March 1847 gave crucial landing and bombardment support to the U.S. Army’s decisive march on Mexico City from Veracruz. With the 1848 treaty transferring nearly half Mexico’s territory to the United States—including most of the Southwest, California on the eve of the Gold Rush, and Mexico dropping its claims to Texas—America’s continental expansion was nearly complete.