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INTRO/SAWMILL
About 1646, long before Yonkers was established as a city and even before
New York became New York, a Dutch landowner named Adriaen van der Donck
built a water‐powered sawmill on Nepperhan Creek near the Hudson River. That
sawmill became the center of a town that was later to become known as Yonkers
(incorporated as a village in 1855, and officially recognized as a city in 1872). The
sawmill that Van der Donck built also gave a new name to Nepperhan Creek, which
has been known as the Sawmill River ever since.
The Sawmill River, 23 miles long, is the longest tributary of the Hudson. It
flows into the Hudson at Yonkers, just north of the Bronx. The river powered water‐
mills in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Over time, however, the section that passes
through downtown Yonkers was slowly covered over—first with individual bridges
and then by a few industrial bridges that spanned the stream in the quest for more
space, until finally the city built concrete tunnels around what little of the river
remained exposed. Now, the river travels a winding and invisible path under streets,
parking lots, and buildings. It still flows out into the Hudson, although it’s only a
shadow of the river it once was—much of its watershed is now urbanized, and
storm drains and sewers carry away much of the water that once fed it.
The story of Yonkers and the Sawmill River is hardly unique. From the
seventeenth century on, the history of New York’s cities has been a history of
waterways. But while the larger rivers—the Hudson, the Mohawk, or the Niagara,
for example, remain obvious on the landscape today, many of the smaller
watercourses that once ran through the state’s cities seem, at first glance, to have
disappeared.
In fact, in the early days of a town or village, it was often the smaller
watercourses that were the most vital. These manageable streams provided not only
transportation routes, but also water‐power for grain mills and sawmills, fish for
food, and drinking water—something particularly important for the many towns on
the saline estuarial regions of the lower Hudson. These myriad streams also
supplied a ready source for water‐intensive industries in the 18th and 19th centuries,
ranging from the breweries of Bushwick, Brooklyn to the leather tanneries of Fulton
County, where cities like Johnstown and Gloversville became the “glove‐making
capital of the world.”1 In many cases it was these smaller watercourse that were the
original reason for a city’s existence at a particular location, as in the case of Yonkers
and Van der Donck’s sawmill on the Nepperhan.
1 “Glovers and Tanners” online at http://www.gloversandtanners.com/
& Trebay, Guy. "Heir to a Glove Town’s Legacy." The New York Times, October 21, 2009. Online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22GLOVERSVILLE.html?_r=2&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
As towns in New York grew into cities, however, many of these small, central
streams became inadequate for the larger populations, and instead of supplying
freshwater they became polluted nuisances. As modern industrialization developed
in 19th century, water‐power also became far less vital to industry. Railroad lines
eclipsed waterways as transportation routes, and first steam and then electrical
power replaced the water‐power of earlier days.
Successful cities constantly build over there history, and over time many of
the original streams and rivers that ran through today’s urban areas were covered
over. In some cases, as with the Sawmill River, putting the river underground was
merely a way to create more buildable land above. In other cases, the streams that
once supplied drinking water or fish were put underground to serve cities in new
ways: as sewers and drains. Today, the lineage many of the major sewer lines in
cities like New York City, Yonkers, Rochester, and Buffalo can be followed back to
streams and rivers that flowed unfettered for centuries and even millennia before
towns grew up around them.
SAWMILL RIVER
The Sawmill River in Yonkers was my first foray into an underground
waterway. Finding the inlet was simple enough, as I traced the route of the old
stream along present‐day city maps and found where the line of above‐ground
water disappeared. I climbed down into the streambed near Nepperhan Road—
named after the original name for the river, of course—and found myself about
fifteen feet below street level, kneedeep in a fast‐flowing stream with a rocky
bottom. A few feet further it disappeared into darkness, and I followed.
In the light of my headlamp, the tunnel around the stream was a cutaway
view of Yonkers’ development during the modern period. The 20th‐century brick
and concrete culvert abuts older buildings that were built over the river in the late
19th century, and these in turn are alongside old bridge constructions in which
rough‐hewn beams still support rough stone and mortar. Occasionally I saw ancient
cellar windows, that had once looked out onto daylight before the stream had been
put into its underground culvert; these were buildings that had pre‐dated the
covering of the Sawmill in the early 20th century. The water in the stream was low
enough for me to wade through, but heavy debris lodged in corners where the
tunnel turned—shopping carts, wooden beams, even entire tree‐trunks—and
showed that the water still sometimes became a powerful torrent when spring rains
brought the level higher.
Eventually, the rough and varied tunnel gave way to an arched culvert of
brick with a smooth concrete floor, and I knew that I was near the outlet into the
Hudson. On that first trip, I was so fascinated by what I saw around me that I didn’t
pay enough attention to my feet, and when the bottom disappeared I suddenly
found myself falling into deep water—in very cold, very dark water. My head was
only underwater for a moment but it was disorienting, and I feared for my camera,
loosely tucked into a drybag in my backpack. As I came to the surface I could feel
nothing solid under my feet; the current was still pulling me out, and I realized that I
was being sucked further and further from the relative safety of the shallow water
behind me. I frantically paddled against the current, and after what seemed like an
eternity—but was probably only ten seconds—I finally felt the lip of the concrete
under my boots once again.
It was a while before I ventured back into that tunnel, but eventually I did
return—with a friend, and with inflatable inner tubes to use as a raft so that we
could float out the final portion into the Hudson. In the meantime I found out more
about the Sawmill’s history.
Near where I’d fallen, there had once been a natural cove at the Sawmill’s
mouth. When Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in 1609, he found a native
community living in bark huts at the same spot. This was the settlement of
Nappeckemack, a name that referenced the rapid water at the river’s mouth.
European settlers widened the natural cove that Hudson had seen at the
mouth of the river, and in the 17th century single‐masted sloops sailed into the
river’s mouth to load up on lumber or unload passengers. By 1830, this had become
a regular twice‐weekly service to New York City; the dock was the center of town
and along its edge were a hotel, post office, and general store. The sloops were the
primary transport in and out of the city until the 1840s, when the first railroad
along the Hudson connected the bucolic riverside town to New York City, spurring
rapid growth.
Since the time of Van Der Donck’s first mill in 1646, the river had also been
altered with small dams that created mill‐ponds. In the 19th century, there were at
least five such mill‐ponds active. One the largest of these served an extensive
complex of sawmills built by mahogany importer John Copcutt near the mouth of
the Sawmill in 1845. Copcutt’s large mill‐pond covered a full block that is now
Warburton Avenue between Main Street and Dock Street.2 A one‐block alley called
“Mill Street” serves as reminder of the location of one of these ponds.
These mill ponds were all filled in during the late 19th century, having
become stagnant and stinking eyesores to the growing city. The last dam, holding
one of John Copcutt’s mill ponds, was destroyed with dynamite in 1893.3 The land
exposed by the draining of these lakes was quickly built upon, and some of the new
buildings were built over the river channel itself—some of the only open space
remaining in the thriving town. By 1914, a reporter wrote that “bulky buildings now
hem [the Sawmill River] in, and it is not until you trace it into the open country
further north that you will find it as the Mohicans once knew it, free and sparkling,
open to the sun and winds of the summer world.”4 Finally, between 1917 and 1922
the remaining open‐air sections of the river in downtown Yonkers were enclosed in
a tunnel known as a culvert; this was the smooth, brick‐arched section of the tunnel
near its end.5
MINETTA BROOK
2 http://www.yonkershistory.org/his2.html
3 New York Times: Great Joy In Yonkers: Removal of the Condemned Dams on the Nepperhan. April 7, 1893
4 NYT: On Old Sawmill River Road. July 19, 1914
5 http://www.sawmillrivercoalition.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=69
Although it runs underground in its final section, the Sawmill River actually
remains an essentially natural creek—fed by rain and runoff throughout a broad
watershed that encompasses both urbanized and non‐urban areas. Other streams in
denser urban areas, however, have been changed even more over time. In
Manhattan, for example, the Minetta Brook that once ran through Greenwich Village
has almost completely disappeared into a maze of sewer pipes laid out as the city
expanded north along the 1811 grid plan that formed the pattern of New York City’s
streets and avenues north of Houston street. In the 20th century, the only traces of
the original natural waterway are the underground springs that still unexpectedly
bubbled to the surface and flooded basements of buildings built along the brook’s
old route. In 1901, for example, during the construction of the Simpson, Crawford &
Simpson Department Store Building at 641 Sixth Avenue near one of the original
sources of the brook, the contractor encountered a heavy flow estimated at the time
at 1,750 gallons per minute when digging for the foundation at 27 feet below street
level.6 Another smaller flow is visible today in a sub‐basement of the NYU Law
School Library at the south‐west corner of Washington Square Park, where the
builders had to install a sump that pumps the flow from an underground spring—
just a few gallons per minute—into a nearby sewer.
CANAL STREET DITCH
New York City’s very first enclosed sewer is also a remnant of water sources
that were once fundamental to the city’s origins. This is the old Canal Street sewer,
running underneath Canal Street to the Hudson River. This was originally a
meandering and marshy waterway that drained the overflow from the Collect Pond,
the primary fresh‐water supply for New Amsterdam in the 18th century (located at
the site of what is now Columbus Park in Chinatown).7 When the water was high,
this stream was enough to float a canoe. Native Americans living in the area brought
catches of oysters in through this route, and over the years the discarded oyster
shells added to the hill next to the Fresh Water Pond. The Dutch settlers called this
hill beside the pond Kalch Hoek, translated as Shell Point, and the name evolved
phonetically until it became the “Collect,” which became the name of the Fresh
Water Pond as well as the hill beside it.8
The marshy area was almost unusable; good grazing pasture was mixed in
with the swamps, but cattle set out in these fields were sometimes lost in the
“pestilential quagmires” around them. One 19th‐century writer told of a man, lost in
the dark, who drowned in deep water at what is now the intersection of Grand and
Greene Streets, in the middle of SoHo.9
In the 1730s, Anthony Rutgers became the owner of the marshes and
meadows through a royal grant, and over the next decades he and his son‐in‐law
6 “Minetta Brook’s Course.” New York Times, March 27, 1901.
7 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):
8 “Old New‐York Exposed.” New York Times, August 26, 1888.
9 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). Page 328.
Leonard Lispenard dug a ditch to speed the drainage route along the present‐day
Canal street.
By the end of the 18th century, however, the fast‐growing city had polluted
the Collect Pond to the point that the water was unusable—a fetid stew of sewage,
dead animals, and the refuse from tanneries and breweries. Outbreaks of cholera
forced the city to take action. The original Collect Pond was filled in, but the
underground springs that supplied it still continued to flow. In about 1811, the city
enlarged Rutgers’ ditch and lined it—first with planks, and later with stone—to
better drain the area. This was effectively an open sewer, and the slow‐moving
water stank, and in 1819 the ditch was capped with a brick arch and buried beneath
the street.
Getting into a major sewer under one of New York City’s busiest streets is no
easy task, and wading through sewage is a nasty business at best. But I’ve been
driven to visit such places because I love by the insight into how cities have
developed over time. The infrastructure itself—the sewers or culverts that enclose
old waterways, or the remnants of buildings constructed when the streams still ran
above‐ground—are fascinating historical relics in their own right, and more than
just relics because they still are functional structures that carry away the water or
the sewage that would otherwise flood city streets. Even more fascinating than the
stones of the tunnels themselves, however, is the water itself. Amidst the foulness of
the Canal Street sewer, there are side drains from which flow the clear water of
underground springs—springs such as the one that supplied the Manhattan
Company’s wells in the late 18th century, when that company (under Aaron Burr)
reiceved the city’s first contract to supply the burgeoning city with drinking water.
Underneath Yonkers, I know that the water rushing around my ankles was the same
flow that had powered the sawmills and grist mills around which the city grew.
Although none of the actual drops of water flowing by are the same as the
drops of water from centuries before—and although stones lining these streams
have changed over time, and even the original route of the waterways may have
been diverted—the flow of the water continues, and provides a connection to the
past. The same is true for streams like the Scajaqueda Creek, flowing through a four‐
mile tunnel underneath Buffalo from the 1920s; the old Patroon creek, running for
two miles in culverts beneath Albany; Sunswick creek, now a mainline sewer
underneath Queens, NYC; Tibbett’s Brook in the Bronx, enclosed in a perfectly round
brick tunnel built in the late 19th century; and dozens or even hundreds of others
throughout the state. The more I research cities and peruse old maps, the more
forgotten watercourses I’ve found, and my list of tunnels to explore grows much
faster than my list of tunnels I’ve visited. These days, whenever I walk around old
cities, I notice the manholes—and wonder what history is hidden beneath them.