| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Water for Gotham: A History. By Gerard T. Koeppel. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xvi, 355 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-01139-7.)

Gerard T. Koeppel's study of New York's first public waterworks is detailed and well written, but this is not an academic book. Koeppel tells the story of New York's water from private wells to the Croton Aqueduct. This story—complete with partisan dispute, corporate intrigue, and triumphant public enterprise—makes a fine tale, but it could have been much more. 1

Koeppel begins Water for Gotham with a brief history of the city of New York. He traces the use and degradation of New York's wells, the city's flirtations with private water schemes, the dangers posed by fire and disease, and finally the completion of the Croton Aqueduct. The Manhattan Company, founded in 1799 by Aaron Burr and other prominent New Yorkers, is central to Koeppel's tale. For forty years, this organization showed far more interest in banking than in waterworks but nevertheless blocked all competing water proposals. Only an investigation of the Manhattan Company's irregular bookkeeping weakened the company enough to allow the city to build a public waterworks. Koeppel ends his book with a quick description of the water projects that followed Croton, including the expansion of the distribution system and the construction of the Catskill reservoirs. . . .

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