Nineteen Reservoirs

Nineteen Reservoirs PDF Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615198652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
By the author of Low Life, the now-classic history of NYC's outlaw underbelly--a meticulously researched, evocatively illustrated, profoundly meditative account of the city's upstate reservoirs Without the upstate reservoir system that brings fresh water to New York City, the city would have faded into insignificance. But this engineering triumph had a cost: From 1907 to 1967, twenty-six upstate villages, farms, forests, and other natural areas were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, then submerged to create the Catskills and Delaware watershed systems. Compelled to understand "the air of permanent mourning" in their vicinity, Lucy Sante marshals the same gifts that made Low Life a now-classic of NYC history: a meticulously detailed accounting of their creation, a trove of rarely seen visual history, and a master of literary nonfiction's sensibility for the essential paradox at the heart of this story: the triumph NYC's nineteen-reservoir system represents, and the tragedy of its creation.

Nineteen Reservoirs

Nineteen Reservoirs PDF Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615198652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
By the author of Low Life, the now-classic history of NYC's outlaw underbelly--a meticulously researched, evocatively illustrated, profoundly meditative account of the city's upstate reservoirs Without the upstate reservoir system that brings fresh water to New York City, the city would have faded into insignificance. But this engineering triumph had a cost: From 1907 to 1967, twenty-six upstate villages, farms, forests, and other natural areas were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, then submerged to create the Catskills and Delaware watershed systems. Compelled to understand "the air of permanent mourning" in their vicinity, Lucy Sante marshals the same gifts that made Low Life a now-classic of NYC history: a meticulously detailed accounting of their creation, a trove of rarely seen visual history, and a master of literary nonfiction's sensibility for the essential paradox at the heart of this story: the triumph NYC's nineteen-reservoir system represents, and the tragedy of its creation.

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City PDF Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615198660
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Without the nineteen upstate reservoirs that supply its water, New York City as we know it would not exist today. “[Sante] is an endlessly curious writer with a sharp wit and an elegant prose style . . . As a physical object, the book is a stunner, loaded with maps, archival stills of the construction process, vintage postcards, and ads warning New Yorkers to check their plumbing and ‘stop that leak!’”—The Wall Street Journal From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and submerged, profoundly altering ecosystems in ways we will never fully appreciate. This paradox of victory and loss is at the heart of Nineteen Reservoirs, Lucy Sante’s meticulous account of how New York City secured its seemingly limitless fresh water supply, and why it cannot be taken for granted. In inimitable form, Sante plumbs the historical record to surface forgotten archives and images, bringing lost places back to life on the page. Her immaculately calibrated sensitivity honors both perspectives on New York City’s reservoir system and helps us understand the full import of its creation. An essential history of the New York City region that will reverberate far beyond it, Nineteen Reservoirs examines universal divisions in our resources and priorities—between urban and rural, rich and poor, human needs and animal habitats. This is an unmissable account of triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences. With 29 present-day photographs by Tim Davis

Liquid Assets

Liquid Assets PDF Author: Diane Galusha
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781930098435
Category : Water-supply
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"In Liquid Assets, author Diane Galusha traces for the first time between the covers of a single volume the development of the amazing water system that altered landscapes, transformed lives, and made possible New York's preeminence among the world's great cities."--Back cover.

Waterworks

Waterworks PDF Author: Stanley Greenberg
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 1568983883
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
A collection of photographs which profile the aqueducts, reservoirs, tunnels, gatehouses, and tanks of New York's water system.

Low Life

Low Life PDF Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466895632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
The classic social history of corruption and vice in nineteenth-century NYC: “A cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves” (John Vernon, Los Angeles Times Book Review). Lucy Sante’s Low Life is a portrait of America’s greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city’s slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era’s opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn’t work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city’s tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life is one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York’s past but about the present and future of all cities.

The Factory of Facts

The Factory of Facts PDF Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307815587
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Lucy Sante transformed herself from a pious, timid Belgian child into a boisterous American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about--and why it remained incomplete--The Factory of Facts combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.

The Other Paris

The Other Paris PDF Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429944587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
A trip through Paris as it will never be again-dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Lucy Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world. Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses-from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps-Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of her narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city. A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.

Water-works

Water-works PDF Author: Kevin Bone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The fresh, clean taste of New York's water is legendary. Less well known is the story of the program of exploration and construction to achieve such purity. The story is told in Water-Works and illustrated with an archive of drawings and photographs documenting the design and construction of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and tunnels.

Empire of Water

Empire of Water PDF Author: David Soll
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146806X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Supplying water to millions is not simply an engineering and logistical challenge. As David Soll shows in his finely observed history of the nation’s largest municipal water system, the task of providing water to New Yorkers transformed the natural and built environment of the city, its suburbs, and distant rural watersheds. Almost as soon as New York City completed its first municipal water system in 1842, it began to expand the network, eventually reaching far into the Catskill Mountains, more than one hundred miles from the city. Empire of Water explores the history of New York City’s water system from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, focusing on the geographical, environmental, and political repercussions of the city’s search for more water. Soll vividly recounts the profound environmental implications for both city and countryside. Some of the region’s most prominent landmarks, such as the High Bridge across the Harlem River, Central Park’s Great Lawn, and the Ashokan Reservoir in Ulster County, have their origins in the city’s water system. By tracing the evolution of the city’s water conservation efforts and watershed management regime, Soll reveals the tremendous shifts in environmental practices and consciousness that occurred during the twentieth century. Few episodes better capture the long-standing upstate-downstate divide in New York than the story of how mountain water came to flow from spigots in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Soll concludes by focusing on the landmark watershed protection agreement signed in 1997 between the city, watershed residents, environmental organizations, and the state and federal governments. After decades of rancor between the city and Catskill residents, the two sides set aside their differences to forge a new model of environmental stewardship. His account of this unlikely environmental success story offers a behind the scenes perspective on the nation’s most ambitious and wide-ranging watershed protection program.

The Quarry Fox

The Quarry Fox PDF Author: Leslie T. Sharpe
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468315307
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
“A lyrical celebration . . . This engaging portrait of the Catskill wilderness will appeal to nature enthusiasts of all stripes.” —Library Journal (starred review) A red fox stands poised at the edge of a woodchuck den, his ears perked for danger as two pudgy fox cubs frolic nearby. A mother black bear and her cubs hibernate beneath a felled tree. A barred owl snags a hapless cottontail from a meadow with its precise talons. In The Quarry Fox and Other Tales of the Wild Catskills, Leslie T. Sharpe trains her keen eye and narrative gifts on these and other New York wildlife through her tales of close observations as a naturalist living in the Great Western Catskills. The Quarry Fox is the first in-depth study of Catskill wildlife since John Burroughs invented the genre of nature writing, in which Sharpe weaves her experiences of the seasons, plants, and creatures with the natural history of each organism, revealing their sensitivity to and resilience against the splendor and cruelty of Nature. Sharpe's frank, scientific observations join with her deeply felt connection to these creatures to instill an appreciation of the undaunted and variegated beauty of the Catskills and camaraderie with its animals. From contemplating the importance of milkweed for monarchs to lay their eggs to reveling in the first steps of a wobbly fawn, The Quarry Fox is a celebration of the natural world and our place in it. “A poignant and modern reminder of untamed creatures so close to home.” —The New York Times