Water: Overview: Solutions of the Twentieth Century and Beyond

In New York the turn of the twentieth century brought the greatest immigration surge in American history, taxing the water supply to its limit. The city undertook the most massive urban public water project in history, to create a secondary series of reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains northwest of the city. By 1917, 571 square miles of mountainous land were designated a “watershed” region, protected as a system of collection basins for New York’s water supply. The construction of dams along the Esopus Creek and aqueducts forming the Ashokan Reservoir guaranteed a supply of at least 500 to 600 million gallons per day, even in times of drought.