New York City: Canal Street Sewer “the past is never dead… it’s not even past.

New York City’s

Canal Street very first enclosed Left: Canal Street about
1811, when bridges still
sewer is also a
Sewer remnant of the crossed the open ditch.
freshwater 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.
In the early days of New Amsterdam, there
was a meandering and marshy waterway along this
Right: Much of the Canal
route that drained the overflow from the Fresh
Water or Collect Pond, the primary fresh-water Street Sewer is still the
supply for New Amsterdam through the 18th century original stone channel and
(it was located at the site of what is now Columbus brick arch.
Park in Chinatown). When the water was high, this
stream was enough to float a canoe. Native
Americans living in the area brought catches of Water from a
oysters in through this route, and over the years the natural
discarded oyster shells added to the hill next to the underground
Fresh Water Pond. The Dutch settlers called this hill spring flows into
beside the pond Kalch Hoek, translated as Shell the Canal Street
Point, and the name evolved phonetically until it
Sewer, likely the
became the “Collect,” which became the name for
the Fresh Water Pond as well as the hill beside it. same spring that
The marshy area was almost unusable; gave Spring Street
good grazing pasture was mixed in with the its name.
swamps, but cattle set out in these fields were
sometimes lost in the “pestilential quagmires”
around them. One writer told of a man, lost in the
dark after a night at a tavern, who drowned in the
deep water of a marsh at what is now the
intersection of Grand and Greene Streets, in the
middle of SoHo.
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 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 and the refuse from slaughterhouses,
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. Around 1819 it was
replaced with a covered, brick-arched tunnel, which
was buried beneath the street to become the city’s This 18th-century drainage ditch through Lispenard’s
first enclosed sewer. Meadows became the route of Canal Street today.