1

New York City:Tibbett’s Brook “the past is never dead… it’s not even past.”

Tibbetts Brook—also called

Tibbett’s Brook the Mosholu, a transliteration
of the Lenape name—still
Bronx, NY feeds the forests and
meadows of Van Cortlandt
Park in the Bronx. The stream originates in Yonkers, and flows
south into the park where it fills a series of small lakes. From the
southernmost of these lakes, it flows into a brick tunnel under the
park and then into an arched brick sewer tunnel underneath
Broadway in the Bronx. Originally, Tibbetts flowed into the
Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a tidal strait that connected the Harlem
River to the Hudson River, but in 1895, the Harlem River Ship
Canal was dug across the top of Manhattan to replace the
meandering, narrow strait; the re-channeled and sewerized
Tibbetts Brook, therefore, was extended well south of is original
mouth in order to flow into the Ship Canal. Today, along with the
sewage with which it is combined, the water of the Tibbetts is
diverted into a treatment plant before it is released back into the
rivers
Van Cortlandt Park and the northern Bronx, like
Yonkers, were granted to Adriaen van der Donck by the Dutch
Director-General Willem Kieft in 1646. The land passed to his
brother-in-law Elias Doughty, who sold tracts to both George
Tippett (in 1668), for whom the brook is now named, and to the This map from 1776 shows that the topography at the
father-in-law of Jacobus Van Cortlandt (in 1670), for whom the north end of Manhattan Island was originally much
park is named. Van Cortlandt dammed the brook in 1699 and different from today, and it was separated from the
installed both a saw mill and a grist mill. His mill-pond would mainland by the small Spuyten Duyvil tidal strait.
become Van Cortlandt Lake; his grist mill would continue to Tibbett’s Brook flowed south into the Spuyten Duyvil until
operate until 1889, when the city purchased the land. the Spuyten Duyvil Creek was replaced by the Harlem
Long before the Dutch or the English arrived, the area River Ship Canal in 1895.
had been home to the Wieckquaeskecks, Native Americans in the
Lenape tribe. Their name for the
brook, Mosholu, referred to the
small or smooth pebbles that lined
the riverbed. Until the 1890s, there
were cattail marshes along much of
the brook as well, and local
children found swimming holes
and gigged frogs.
Today, the brook is visible
in Van Cortlandt Park and further
north; Tibbetts Brook Park, for
example, located in Westchester
County, also has a lake formed by
the Brook. South of Van Cortlandt
Park, the brook is completely
underground. Its old course is,
however, memorialized by Tibbett
Avenue, which dead-ends at
approximately the point where the
original Tibbett’s Brook flowed
into the old Spuyten Duyvil Creek.