A Photographer Brings New York City’s Water System to the Floor

New York City is outlined in some ways by its iconic infrastructure, from our parks to the hovering towers of the Brooklyn and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges, and even the controversial roadways of Robert Moses, which displaced many communities of colour, leaving a legacy we nonetheless really feel immediately. But for one of many metropolis’s most awe-inspiring items of infrastructure, there’s a stunning lack of public data or mythology: our water system. The names of the individuals concerned are usually not tossed round at dinner events. The bodily buildings, which sit largely out of view, are maybe finest recognized to these residing or mountaineering close to the reservoirs removed from Manhattan’s grid. And but, we New Yorkers are the beneficiaries of a number of the cleanest and best-tasting faucet water on this planet, which hydrates not solely thousands and thousands of individuals residing and dealing within the 5 boroughs, but in addition greater than one million individuals residing in Westchester, Putnam, Orange, and Ulster counties.

Photographer Stanley Greenberg has spent a long time endeavoring to each reply the query of how water arrives in our faucets and bogs and construct curiosity on this huge and spectacular system. His black and white pictures typically really feel epic in scope, at the same time as some depict quiet road scenes and out of the best way corners that solely trace in any respect that’s occurring under the floor. Now his ebook Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York, initially revealed in 2003, has been re-issued and expanded.

A local New Yorker, Greenberg grew up in Flatlands, a Brooklyn neighborhood southeast of Flatbush. After attending highschool in Manhattan, he went on to pursue levels in artwork historical past and public administration, ultimately touchdown jobs in metropolis authorities. It was throughout his time on the Department of Cultural Affairs within the Eighties that he realized the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the company that manages the town’s water, had an archive, elements of which have been uncared for or being thrown away. Along with one other artist and a gaggle of Cooper Union college students, Greenberg helped to catalog that important file. The expertise of going via these drawings and images is what impressed him to broaden his present image-making apply to incorporate the town’s huge water system. A photographer from a younger age, Greenberg has exhibited extensively, and revealed numerous books, together with one other that touches particularly on water sources in New York City: Springs and Wells, Manhattan and the Bronx (2021).

On a cool, grey morning in late May, I biked to fulfill him on the nook of State Street and Nevins in downtown Brooklyn to see a few of what fascinates him. After biking to a couple different spots close by, we decamped to his studio in Gowanus to talk additional concerning the undertaking. This interview has been edited for size and readability.

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Hyperallergic: It’s a bit of laborious to fathom simply how a lot is happening beneath our ft in New York City: The water system, steam and gasoline pipes, subway tunnels, electrical and fiber optic cables, sewers and storm drains, tree roots, rat tunnels, cemeteries and graves.

Stanley Greenberg: And springs!

H: How do all these methods work together with one another? For occasion, one of many additions to this new model of the ebook is the digester eggs up in Greenpoint [part of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant]. How does including that assist inform individuals’s understanding of our water system?

SG: The first water therapy crops have been in-built Coney Island as a result of that’s the place individuals swam and the air pollution can be on the market. The cause the oysters disappeared is due to water air pollution, as a result of we simply dumped all the pieces. New York City had a bunch of water air pollution controls, however the [1972] Clean Water Act required much more and rather a lot higher. That’s when North River was constructed, and Newtown Creek and Owl’s Head have been upgraded, and the Red Hook Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility was constructed, which is within the Navy Yard.

H: That touches on one thing that feels painfully related immediately. With the federal authorities and workforce being dismantled, and protecting laws and monitoring applications being undermined, a ebook like yours is a reminder of why we’d like a functioning and accountable authorities. Your entry to {photograph} the water system has been restricted since September 11, 2001, with safety threats being the explanation given. The DEP additionally limits public entry, not readily revealing what many of those websites are. You expressed some issues about that strategy. If you had an opportunity to sit down down with the town’s subsequent DEP commissioner, what would you say?

SG: I’d attempt to persuade them to permit extra public entry to the system in order that persons are extra related to the water provide and wastewater therapy methods. I believe it’s simpler to ask for the general public’s assist in caring for the system once they perceive higher that it’s a public useful resource that they collectively personal.

I’d additionally ask for entry to {photograph} Tunnel No. 1 when it’s shut down [for the first time ever] for upkeep when Tunnel No. 3 is absolutely operational [the largest construction project in NYC history, which began in 1970 and is still underway], together with a number of the different websites I wasn’t allowed to {photograph}.

H: You just lately began taking a DIY strategy to sharing data with the general public?

SG: I began to place up the photographs and texts from the Springs and Wells ebook within the places the place they have been initially photographed, and realized that I ought to do the identical factor for the water system. Along with the ebook and the map included, there’s additionally a Google map to make use of as a area information. One of my targets is to make individuals extra conscious of water infrastructure and the city panorama round them. 

H: After studying via the ebook, I began being attentive to the upkeep, or manhole, covers I used to be strolling over. So I sit up for encountering a few of these indicators.

SG: Good. If you begin to see the town otherwise then I’ve carried out my job.

Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York by Stanley Greenberg (2025) is revealed in a restricted version by Kris Graves Projects and is on the market on-line.