Photographer Explores New York’s Huge, Complicated, and Invisible Water System

Waterworks by Stanley Greenberg is a sweeping photographic portrait of New York City’s water system, that includes 362 black and white photos made between 1992 and 2024.

Over three many years within the making, the book traces the often-invisible infrastructure that brings water into and out of town: reservoirs, aqueducts, tunnels, gatehouses, pumping stations, water tanks, wastewater therapy crops, stormwater services, and upkeep covers. A fold-out map charts greater than 400 places from upstate to the outer boroughs, grounding the work in geography and scale.

While working on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Greenberg noticed town’s water techniques up shut and later returned to assist catalog the company’s long-neglected archives — an in depth assortment of 10,000 images and drawings courting again to 1840. Around that point, he started engaged on Invisible New York, a ebook that featured among the metropolis’s hid water buildings. Greenberg requested repeatedly for permission to {photograph} town’s water system however was denied for years. Access was lastly granted in 1997, and he accomplished the work in 2001 — simply months earlier than the 9/11 assaults shut down entry to City infrastructure for good. Waterworks was first printed in 2003. DEP tried to dam its launch however later bought 200 copies.

Though Waterworks was printed in 2003, Greenberg’s exploration of the system didn’t finish there. After publishing a number of different books he returned to photographing water infrastructure across the metropolis, in search of above-ground indicators of the water system hidden in plain sight; invisible to the informal observer. Studying metropolis planning paperwork, property data, previous and new maps, he walked the routes of the three water distribution tunnels and biked among the upstate aqueducts.

The images themselves are a mammoth endeavor — an endeavor that matches the size of the system they depict. Rendered in crisp, large-format black and white, the pictures reveal the majesty of monumental websites just like the Croton Dam, High Bridge Tower, Neversink Stilling Basin, and Shandaken Tunnel, alongside hovering conduits, huge chambers, and the elegant geometry of large pipes. Greenberg’s type is without delay rigorous and reverent, providing a visible language that honors the ambition and sweetness of those man-made buildings.

Accompanying the ebook is a printed map, designed by Larry Buchanan, that charts greater than 400 websites throughout town and upstate. A extra detailed version is available online, serving as a free, public discipline information to the system. While the printed map affords refined design and visible readability, the net map contains larger location element. Together, they mirror Greenberg’s decades-long effort to doc the total attain of New York’s water infrastructure — just like the water system itself, it’s a work in progress.

“New York City’s water system is vast and complex,” Greenberg writes, “But it can be divided into just a few functions: collection, conveyance and distribution, and treatment.”

The water collects in 18 reservoirs from rain and snowmelt, travels to town via aqueducts, and is saved in three giant reservoirs earlier than reaching town. There, it’s distributed through three tunnels to water mains, smaller pipes, and finally into each metropolis constructing. Wastewater, together with rainwater, travels via sewers to therapy crops, after which reenters the waterways across the metropolis, evaporating again into the ambiance.

New York City’s ingesting water is collected in two upstate techniques: the smaller Croton system, begun in 1837 and positioned in Westchester and Putnam Counties. This water is filtered at an underground facility in Van Cortlandt Park. The a lot bigger Catskill/Delaware system is unfiltered and usually thought of to be of very top quality. Many cities and valleys have been flooded to create the reservoirs, and town continues to be typically thought to be a bully to the individuals who reside within the watershed.

What flows in should additionally stream out. The metropolis’s mixed sewer system carries each sewage and stormwater runoff, a design more and more challenged by local weather change. When rainfall overwhelms the system, mixed sewers typically overflow into the waterways, bypassing wastewater therapy crops (WWTPs). In response, town has began constructing rain gardens and enormous underground storage tanks to retain stormwater, alongside extra ecologically built-in options just like the Bluebelt in Staten Island, which manages runoff naturally whereas preserving important habitat.

Though rooted in documentary follow, Waterworks additionally affords a meditation on entry, labor, and the often-hidden techniques that undergird civic life. Greenberg invitations us to see infrastructure not simply as a bodily system, however as a mirrored image of political will, public funding, and collective reminiscence. The ebook is a report of a system and a metropolis, each in fixed flux.

Waterwork is published by KGP.