Drinking Water (9 page)

I have no doubt that one cause of the numerous stomach affections so common in this city is the impure, I may say poisonous nature of the pernicious Manhattan water which thousands of us daily and constantly use. It is true the unpalatableness of this abominable fluid prevents almost every person from using it as a beverage at the table, but you will know that all the cooking of a very large portion of this community is done through the agency of this common nuisance. Our tea and coffee are made of it, our bread is mixed with it, and our meat and vegetables are boiled in it. Our linen happily escapes the contamination of its touch, “for no two things hold more antipathy” than soap and this vile water.

A letter in the
New York Commercial Advertiser
described the company as “the most outrageous insult ever offended to an afflicted city.” Despite unhappy water customers, the company defended its monopoly power over water provision and helped drive Tea Water pumps out of business. New Yorkers were thus forced to rely on the increasingly noxious Collect pond and local wells. People with money turned to imported soda water and well water mixed with liquor. As a historian of the era has described, “As for New Yorkers, drinking no more Tea Water and scant Manhattan, it was once again back to street wells and carted spring water. New York had
entered the first American century with less good water than the Dutch had bequeathed to the English.”

Over time, this water company gave up all pretense and developed into the powerful Chase Manhattan Bank (now known as JP Morgan Chase), undoubtedly the first commercial bank that owes its origins to drinking water. In homage to its origins, the corporate logo of Chase Manhattan is a stylized cross section of a wooden water pipe. Ironically, Burr, the mastermind of the enterprise, ran into financial difficulties, sold his stock in the company, and was forced off the board in 1802.

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the citizens of Philadelphia enjoyed ample supplies of clean water for drinking, cooking, battling fires, cleaning, and washing down the streets. Boston and Baltimore were in the process of building public waterworks based on Philadelphia’s model. But following the debacle of the Manhattan Company, New York did nothing. In 1828 a large fire caused extensive property damage, and in 1832 a severe cholera epidemic killed 3,500 people. Philadelphia, by contrast, had lost just 900 lives during the same scourge. A water commission appointed by the New York City Council had to admit the obvious in its 1835 report: New York suffered by comparison with its rival City of Brotherly Love.

No disagreeable odor assails the persons who pass through the streets of that city [Philadelphia]; everything calculated to annoy the senses is swept away by the running stream; but in New-York a person coming in the city from the pure air of the country, is compelled to hold his breath, or make use of some perfume to break off the disagreeable smell arising from the streets. … The only way we can account for this difference in the health of the two cities is, that Philadelphia is supplied with abundance of pure and wholesome water, not only for drinking and culinary purposes, but for bathing, and for washing the streets of the whole city, while New-York is entirely destitute of the means for effecting any of these purposes.

The need for new infrastructure to store and distribute water was clear. The key question was how to pay for it—whether to rely
on public or private financing, municipal funds or private capital. Philadelphia’s experience certainly showed that public funding could be successful. London, however, was the capital of the world’s greatest empire, and it relied on private means.

Through the Middle Ages, Londoners had gathered drinking water from local springs, wells, and the Thames River (the Romans never built aqueducts for London). In the thirteenth century, a connection known as the Great Conduit was built from springs near Tybburn to cisterns in the city and provided a source of clean drinking water, which apparently was sold by leasing official tankards to people for drawing water. The poor relied on the unsanitary and foul-smelling Thames, and some merchants even tried to charge for that. A 1417 city ordinance forbade owners of wharves and stairs on the Thames from charging for access to the river.

During the sixteenth century, with the rise of England’s first industrial revolution, the city was unwilling to spend money on public works and relied instead on private commerce for water supply. As early as 1609, an open canal nearly forty miles north of London had been dug. It was known as the New River, and its management was granted to a private company. In 1721, the Chelsea Waterworks Company was founded, followed by six more private water companies over the next century. In all, eight companies provided more than twenty-eight million gallons of water from various sources in and around London. Supporters of privatization pointed to the might of the British Empire and urged New York to follow the privatization path of London.

Yet the same story could just as easily provide the opposite conclusion. Much of the water was taken from the River Thames, the receiving body for the city’s sewers. Terrible cholera outbreaks were quite common but shrugged off as an unpleasant fact of urban living. The different water companies did not compete. Far from it. Following a model familiar to crime bosses, they realized far better profits by dividing the territory into separate monopolies where they each set their own rates as they saw fit.

In the end, chastened by the Manhattan Company debacle and envious of rival Philadelphia’s success, New York’s water commission
strongly recommended public financing for construction. A permanent Board of Water Commissioners was created and authorized to raise infrastructure capital and condemn land in order to supply water to the city. Surprising even today, the condemnation authority extended beyond the boundaries of the city, for the water source lay upstream of New York in the town of Croton. By 1838, condemnation of thirty-five acres of land in the Croton watershed had been completed.

The Croton Reservoir was a massive project, piping ninety-five million gallons daily through forty-one miles of pipe to a reservoir located in Central Park, lavishly decorated with Egyptian designs. The civic pride in the completion of the new water system is hard to imagine. The four days of inauguration ceremonies in October 1842 put a modern-day ticker-tape parade to shame. As Mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary at the time, “Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impede our progress through the streets. Political spouting has given place to water spouts, and the free current of water has diverted the attention of the people from the vexed questions of the confused state of the national currency.”

Commencing the festivities, amid one hundred firing cannons and ringing church bells, a five-mile parade snaked through the city. City Hall Park featured a fifty-foot fountain, and a hymn, “The Croton Ode,” written specially for the occasion, was performed by the New York Sacred Music Society.

Croton water, however, satisfied the city’s needs for only a few decades. The city then looked farther north, to the Catskills and Delaware watersheds some 125 miles from the city. In an even more impressive feat of engineering, more than six thousand miles of tunnels, aqueducts, and distribution mains carried 1.2 billion gallons a day. In all, twenty-two upstate farming communities were moved in New York City’s quest to secure freshwater, their towns drowned beneath the massive new reservoirs.

Construction of the reservoir in Croton marked the end of significant private provision of drinking water for New Yorkers, displacing the Manhattan Company. Interestingly, however, it did not mark the end of water as an unpriced good, for with construction
of the Croton Reservoir and the Croton Aqueduct came the installation in New York of so-called Croton Hydrants. Following the lead of Philadelphia, these fire and street hydrants provided water free of charge and proved very popular.

The net result bore a fascinatingly strong resemblance to the Roman system of cross-subsidization from private pipes to
lacus
at the time of Caesar. Water from hydrants and fountains was free for the taking. Indeed, most New York homeowners felt no need to install piping or pay for the water service. It took several decades after introduction of the Croton Aqueduct for piped water to become dominant. The greatest attraction for piping water into the home was not drinking water but, rather, the convenience of domestic uses such as toilets (aptly named “water closets”), washing, and bathing.

A
T THE BEGINNING OF THIS CHAPTER
, M
AUDE
B
ARLOW ARGUED FOR
access to drinking water as a human right granted by the state rather than a commodity furnished by markets. This remains a harshly fought controversy, with strident advocates on both sides of the issue. If our survey of drinking water management in different societies has shown anything, though, it is that markets and rights to water have often existed alongside one another.

A rights-based water management regime is clearly not a new idea. Not only have markets and rights to water coexisted, they have openly depended upon each other through cross-subsidization. In Rome, the private
vectigal
tax largely funded the
lacus
public wells. Though different in detail, a strikingly similar arrangement of private and public drinking water reappeared two millennia later in the form of the Croton Hydrants in New York and open hydrants in Philadelphia. From a historic vantage, the cases of Rome and New York show that markets can actually be used to
ensure
fulfillment of rights. Whether we can achieve the same result in the twenty-first century remains an open question, one that we will return to later in the book. First, though, we need to consider whether the water provided, by right or market, is safe to drink.

D
ID LEAD PIPES CONTRIBUTE TO THE FALL OF THE
R
OMAN
E
MPIRE
?

The behavior of many of the Roman emperors during its decline has always seemed bizarre, to say the least. Claudius slobbered when talking and suffered from tremors and inappropriate giggling. The brutal Caligula declared himself a god and appointed his horse a priest. There are plenty of other examples of mad behavior, starting with the infamous Nero who allegedly fiddled while Rome burned. Classicists have long wondered why there were so many crazy emperors.

In 1909, the German pharmacologist Rudolf Kobert proposed an explanation that has remained popular today. Kobert argued that the emperors’ aberrant behavior was the result of lead poisoning from drinking water that had passed through lead pipes.

The theory seems more than plausible on its face. Lead was readily available, had a low melting point, and was easy to work into sheets and pipes. Indeed, the name for lead craftsmen was “
plumbarii
,” the origin for our word “plumbers.” Lead pipes were in common use both in aqueducts and street connections to houses. There is also clear evidence that Romans ingested large amounts of lead, more than enough to cause lead poisoning and perhaps some of the strange behavior so common among the emperors.

Interestingly, the Romans knew about the dangers of lead poisoning. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, clearly described the symptoms of lead poisoning as early as the fourth century BC. The great chronicler of Roman engineering, Vitruvius, advised that “water conducted through earthen pipes is much more healthy than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in the lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [often used for facial cosmetics] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human body. … Water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.” Despite Vitruvius’s warnings, lead pipe remained in common use.

The lead pipe theory sounds reasonable, but was drinking water the primary source of lead found in the Roman bodies? Probably not, for two reasons. First, the aqueducts were constantly flowing. Water fees, the
vectigal
, were based on the size of the nozzle, not how much water was actually consumed, so there was no reason to collect and store water. As one archeologist has written, “you could no more turn off a Roman aqueduct than you can turn off a river.” The water would not have the chance to settle and stay in contact with lead for very long. More important, the geology around Rome is dominated by limestone. This makes the water “hard,” which leads to scaling inside pipes. We know from Frontinus’s accounts that “the accumulation of deposit, which sometimes hardens into a crust, contracts the channel of the water.” Analysis of aqueduct pipes today shows just such an incrustation. This layer of calcium carbonate would effectively have created a second, inner pipe, insulating the water from contact with the lead pipes and, as a result, prevented lead from dissolving into the water.

So what was the source of lead? The most likely culprit was the Romans’ diet. Sugar was not an ingredient in Rome. Instead, cooks would boil down fermented grape juice, reducing it to a thick syrup known as
sapa
. This was widely used in sauces and mixed with wine and fruits to preserve and enhance their flavor. The
sapa
, unfortunately, was generally produced by boiling the mixture in lead pots or lead-lined copper kettles. Lead would leach into the acidic liquid, resulting in a sweet but poisonous elixir. Studies of
sapa
suggest that just one teaspoon of the syrup ingested once a day would have caused chronic lead poisoning over time. Modern analysis of the lead content in the bones of exhumed skeletons show much higher lead levels in the aristocrats than slaves, supporting the
sapa
theory since only the wealthy could afford a diet with
sapa
. It may well be that the fall of Rome was due in part to the Roman sweet tooth.