Brooklyn Waterworks

The Brooklyn Waterworks enabled Brooklyn to develop into one of the nation’s largest cities and manufacturing centers and made innovative use of driven wells to supplement the surface water supply.

In the mid-nineteenth century, inadequate and contaminated water supplies led Brooklyn to look beyond its municipal boundaries for a new source of clean water. Then an independent city and separate from New York, Brooklyn constructed a water supply system that utilized a series of ponds and streams located along the south shore of Long Island. The island’s flat topography necessitated pumping stations for water to flow westward through an aqueduct. This water was ultimately pumped 170 feet above sea level to the Ridgewood Reservoir and distributed by gravity throughout Brooklyn.

Scottish-born, James P. Kirkwood, later the second president of the newly-formed ASCE, was involved with the early design of this system and the design of the third, and larger, pumping engine for the Ridgewood Reservoir.  His studies and reports also brought attention to poisoning by lead water pipes. 

The new water supply system facilitated Brooklyn’s growth, which tripled in population between 1860 and 1890 and also turned the city into one of the nation’s leading manufacturing centers. With this growth also came a demand for even more water. Two industries that required significant amounts of water were sugar refining and beer brewing. By 1887, Brooklyn was processing over two thirds of the country’s imported raw sugar. The city also evolved to become the nation’s center for brewing at the turn of the century and was home to 48 breweries in 1893.

By the 1880s Brooklyn was outgrowing the capacity of its new water supply system and faced the threat of a water famine. To solve this problem, civil engineers considered extending the water supply system to eastern Long Island or constructing an aqueduct to a new watershed north of the city. Any of these options would have been a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Instead, an innovative approach was taken that utilized driven wells to increase capacity at only a fraction of the cost. Driven wells consisted of an array of vertical metal pipes that were driven into sandy soil and were attached to pumps to draw up water to the surface. In 1900, Brooklyn derived 45 to 50 million gallons of water per day—about one half of its total consumption—from driven wells.

Brooklyn’s continued demand for water was one of the reasons that led to its consolidation into New York City in 1898. With the completion of the Catskill Aqueduct and City Water Tunnel No. 1 in 1917, Brooklyn was connected to New York City water supply system, which brought water from watersheds located north of the city. Brooklyn’s original water system, also known as the Ridgewood System, was still used to supplement water from upstate during the first half of the twentieth century, but the eventual development of additional upstate reservoirs and City Water Tunnel No. 2 eliminated the need for the Ridgewood System. The Ridgewood Reservoir later served as a backup water supply from 1959 until 1989 and was decommissioned the following year.