This draft report is intended to raise awareness of the beauty, significance and history of the Jerome Park Reservoir, and to support the Jerome Park Conservancy's call for the reservoir to be landmarked and preserved. While the reservoir is well known and has received much publicity in recent years, its history is relatively obscure. A considerable amount of primary research was necessary. Documentation included a survey of the basin, when the reservoir was drained for maintenance, in order to photograph the magnificent stone structures that are normally submerged, and whose images have never been published. While much additional research remains to be performed, I believe that this report provides a new perspective on the history of the Croton system and its relation to the development of New York City.

When I was selected to be the Chairman of the Preservation Committee of the Jerome Park Conservancy, I was generally familiar with the Croton Aqueduct System, but knew little about the Jerome Park Reservoir. I thought of the reservoir as somewhat historic, not terribly significant, and not that old -- probably a common view. What sparked my interest was a bus tour, on a rainy day in 1995, led by Gail Wittwer and Anne Marie Garti. The world that I saw from the bus window looked like a forgotten Frederick Law Olmsted landscape, and I vowed to myself that I would discover what I was looking at, why it was there, and who designed it.

What I subsequently learned, in my search for the history of the Jerome Park Reservoir, was nothing short of a revelation about the reservoir, the Croton Waterworks, and the history of New York City itself. The historic and architectural significance of the Jerome Park Reservoir has been grossly underestimated, and its prominence in the history of the Croton Aqueduct system has not been acknowledged. Originally planned in 1875, and designed and constructed over the following thirty years, it was one of the major works of the Croton Aqueduct system, located at the confluence of the Old and New Croton Aqueducts. It is the largest and most significant body of water in the Borough of the Bronx.

There was a longstanding reluctance on the part of the city to build the Jerome Park Reservoir, and a residual hostility whose vestiges are still reflected in the proposal for converting the reservoir into an industrial water treatment plant. Remarkably, this hostility appears to have had its roots in the friction between the engineers of the Croton Aqueduct Department and the Tweed Ring that took it over in 1870. In fact, the Aqueduct Commissioners, who designed the reservoir, were formed in the 1880's largely to take control of the design and construction of the New Croton Aqueduct away from the corrupt Department of Public Works.

I also learned that Frederick Law Olmsted designed a comprehensive city plan for the west Bronx, that most of the streets surrounding the Jerome Park Reservoir were constructed exactly as designed by Olmsted, and that he may well have had a role in the design of the reservoir itself. Olmsted fought with corrupt city officials who he felt were undermining his plan for the annexed territory that was to become the Bronx. He was dismissed in 1878.

The title for a local history might be The Bronx at 100: a Century of Broken Dreams. The west Bronx, with the finest natural landscape in the city, and a street plan and park system founded by Olmsted, remains beautiful despite its legacy of misrule and misuse. An alternate title might be Olmsted's Bronx: Forgotten but not Gone.

The plan to convert Jerome Park Reservoir into a water treatment plant is a direct product of the mid-twentieth century planning mentality that led to the Cross Bronx Expressway and other destructive mega-projects. In the mid-1980's, the low point of Bronx history, the Department of Environmental Protection began construction of a new dividing wall for the now-defunct filtration plant scheme in the north basin. Part of this project was the needless demolition of an 1890's-vintage arched stone bridge in the reservoir. Plans also called for demolishing all of the stone gate houses and portions of the Old Croton Aqueduct, a National Historic Landmark. It is ironic in an era when we are witnessing a masterful restoration of Grand Central Station and the rebirth of Central Park, that attitudes towards Jerome Park remain in the mind-set that led to the destruction of Penn Station.

The historical, architectural and cultural significance of the Jerome Park Reservoir and the surrounding parks and communities is indisputable. No form of mitigation could offset the devastating impact of the proposed water treatment plant on the historic resources of the reservoir and the surrounding community. In this centennial of the city's consolidation, New Yorkers should finally recognize this neglected masterpiece: designate the Jerome Park Reservoir a landmark, and drop it from consideration as the site for a water treatment plant. I hope that future generations will be able to enjoy the Jerome Park Reservoir along with the High Bridge and the New Croton Dam, the other great landmarks of the Croton Waterworks system along Old Croton Aqueduct Trailway.

 

Robert J. Kornfeld, Jr. AIA
Chairman, Preservation Committee
Jerome Park Conservancy

 

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