Empire of Water: An Environmental and Political History of the New York City Water Supply by David Soll (review)

New York City’s water dilemma has long been whether to develop and protect upstate reservoir headwaters or build filtration plants to utilize Hudson River water. For over a century the former has continuously, if precariously, won. The creation and management of New York City’s water supply during the twentieth century (and a bit of the nineteenth and twenty-first) are the focus of David Soll’s Empire of Water. Unlike previous works on the NYC public water supply, this effort combines political ecology with a regional perspective, considering the full geographic and temporal extent of the metropolis’s hydraulic networks.

The Big Apple’s “hydrological commons” are large, long, and intricately constructed. New York first tapped the Croton watershed, and then the Catskill/Delaware watersheds, both within the state but north of the city. The first half of the book explores the construction of these reservoirs and conduits, including interstate disputes over Delaware water, up to the construction of the last mountain reservoir in the 1960s. Then the author covers the period from the 1970s onward: faced with a crumbling water network, the city grappled with building new networks or filtration stations, incorporating changed environmental governance and ecological concerns, and installing water meters, fixing major leaks, and replacing toilets. The end result was the unique 1997 Watershed Memorandum of Understanding.

Rural landscapes were remade by huge reservoirs, but the connected water infrastructure and networks—tunnels, aqueducts, urban reservoirs, etc.—also reconfigured urban and suburban cultural and recreational landscapes within New York City. For example, around the time of World War I, much of the water infrastructure in NYC was “recycled”: Central Park’s Great Lawn and the New York Public Library had been built on former reservoir sites. Robert Moses’s early development forays on Long Island and Manhattan were made possible by watershed land surrendered when NYC brought water from upstate. Though Soll effectively uncovers the spatial relationships at play, more maps at various scales would have been most welcome.

Soll convincingly shows how bureaucracies such as the city’s Board of Water Supply (BWS) made technological decisions, and deftly uncovers the ways that technological and institutional momentum, as well as inertia, operated in practice. To oversimplify, but not by much, BWS engineers preferred to build dams and tunnels, not water filtration stations. This commitment to hiding modern solutions, and to avoiding water metering and conservation, was further revealed by NYC’s post–World War II attempt at drought mitigation by cloud-seeding with dry ice.

The author argues that the city often practiced “democratic resource imperialism” (p. 38), but he also suggests that there were compromises between rural and urban interests as well as between nature and technology. Though the subtitle indicates that this book is not intended to be an explicit exercise in technological history, the author does make a number of claims about the technological aspects and significance of his subject. Yet he forgoes chances to make a more significant contribution to the literature and theory on the history of hydraulic engineering, envirotech, STS, and history of technology.

To illustrate, the Ashokan Reservoir is labeled a “seamless blending” of man and nature, and “organic machine” references are made, yet there is strangely no discussion of recent work on hybrid envirotechnical systems (p. 42). Only perfunctory connections with the extensive history of water and hydraulic literature in North America are provided. Studies from outside of the continent are ignored, and deeper comparisons with other American cities and water networks would have been useful. An obvious juxtaposition is Chicago, not only because of the similarities to its Sanitary and Ship Canal, but also because New York’s hydraulic city-periphery entanglement bears some strong resemblances to the Midwest metropolis’s railway metropolitan-hinterland relationships.

More fine-grained detail about technological aspects would have been appreciated, but this desire for a longer...