Systemizing the Flow: Urban Water Supply in America

The rapid expansion of American cities made clear the necessity for sufficient quantities of high-quality water starting early in the nineteenth century. Local sources of sufficient potable water, already stressed in the late eighteenth century, soon proved inadequate in the face of rapidly expanding populations in the nation’s largest cities. In addition, water quality was compromised due to increasing levels of both ground- and surface-water pollution from citizens and industry alike. Urban and cultural historian Carl Smith and environmental historian David Soll have written two quite revealing histories of modern urban water supply—Smith for Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago in the nineteenth century, and Soll for New York in the twentieth. Neither book is a technological history of water systems per se, although both authors provide necessary and sufficient detail to understand their chosen systems; rather, the focus is on the intellectual and political underpinnings that reveal how urban Americans, at least in these four cities, viewed the relationship between their natural and built environments. What Smith calls the “infrastructure of ideas” is the focus of his examination of the thinking behind and language undergirding the development of early waterworks systems in his chosen cities. Soll, leaping over the generally well-known nineteenth-century formation of New York’s Croton system, analyzes the geographic and political expansion of the city’s network of water supply well out into its Catskill hinterland over the course of the twentieth century. Despite the different foci, there are a number of interesting points of intersection for anyone seeking to understand the centrality of urban water supply systems in modern industrial America.

Smith sets the stage by summarizing the building of Philadelphia’s Schuykill River–sourced Centre Square and Fairmount pumped waterworks in the 1790s to the early 1820s; Boston’s gravity-fed, aqueduct system drawing from Long Pond (Lake Cochituate, located in today’s western suburbs) in the mid-1820s to 1850; and Chicago’s Lake Michigan water supply, which developed in stages from the 1840s through the late 1860s. Chicago relied on a combination of lengthy intake pipe (later via a tunnel under the lake-bed) and a steam-pumped reservoir and gravity distribution network that was eventually replaced by higher powered pumps. Smith’s ear for telling interesting stories of early steam engine experimentation, poetry-inspired public referenda, and juvenile fish that worked their way through pipes and faucets into Chicagoans’ kitchens makes for entertaining and historically revealing reading.

Smith’s intellectual analysis is organized around four central questions:

1. 1. How did people living in these cities understand citizenship at the time of unprecedented urban growth and change?

2. 2. How did urban Americans compartmentalize the cityscape they were building and inhabiting in relation to the natural world it was displacing?

3. 3. How did people living in these three cities perceive the relationship between their physical well-being and that of the city?

4. 4. Where did city people locate contemporary city life in the flow of time and history?

Each of Smith’s three cities was unique, but with sufficient similarities that he can offer an overarching narrative. At certain points, he makes reference to the contemporaneous water system development in New York City, which provides an additional link to the second volume under review here. Soll also addresses some of the same intellectual issues for that city’s twentieth-century water system expansion.

Large-scale water supply “demanded collective solutions,” but understanding water as a “public good” revealed “the tension between self-interest and the needs of everyone” (pp. 53–54). Whether waterworks should be privately or publically owned was a key question everywhere, but most large cities, including the three...