Columbia Runners at OCA, Feb. 5
Westchester Trails
 Twin Lakes

Some History of OCA and Putnam Trail

These runs take advantage of the historical relationship between Westchester and New York City. In this instance, the relationship is framed first by the City’s ever-expanding need for water, which it found in Westchester. Separately, there was the creation of a railroad that as an “inland route” from New York City to Boston. Neither the aqueduct that carried the water nor the trains that carried the passengers still exists, but both left behind particularly useful trails. (For those interested in another 19th Century venture that had an immense impact on New York’s pre-eminent position in the United States and perhaps on the world (it is argued that the availability of grain from the mid-west via the Erie Canal in the mid-19th Century had a major impact on the Industrial Revolution in the UK, allowing farmers to eat when they left to work in the factories), I recommend “Wedding of the Waters” by Peter Bernstein, which I just finished. It tells the story of the Erie Canal, which, too, is the source of a goodly number of nice trails, but they are a bit to the north. And while I’m waxing nostalgic over one technological advance that had a remarkable impact on 19th Century life, I’ll mention another, the aptly named “The Victorian Internet” by Tom Standage, which is about the telegraph. And to go in the opposite direction, there is a project to reconstruct Manhattan’s ecosystem as it was in 1609, when Henry Hudson arrived.)

I am now reading Westchester: The American Suburb, edited by Roger Panetta and published in connection with an exhibition of that name (through May 28) at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. Both the OCA and the Putnam Railway figure in that history in a number of respects.

The Old Croton Aqueduct

OCA Bridge in Irvington

By the mid-19th Century, New York City was in desperate need of a new supply of water, for health and fire-fighting reasons. A source was found in northern Westchester, at Croton. As the ancient Romans knew, and others had shown even before them, aqueducts are a fiendishly simple means of transporting water over long distances. Build a pipe that drops a consistent 13 inches a mile. So that’s what the City did. It built, and buried, an 8 ½ by 7 ½ foot tube. While it generally is contoured to the ground, there are points where it bridges valleys, as in Irvington in the picture to the right.

The Old Croton Aqueduct, or OCA, ran from the Croton Reservoir to a 55-acre holding reservoir centered in what is now the Great Lawn in Central Park and then to a distribution reservoir where we now have the New York Public Library and Bryant Park, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The City’s Parks Department, which calls the OCA “One of New York City’s best-kept secrets,” says that when water reached the Harlem River in June 1842 after a 22-hour trip, “A day-long celebration was held around the City Hall fountain. The celebrations were for a good reason, as the water enabled New York City to fight the twin scourges of disease and fire.” But even that proved inadequate, and a “New” Croton Aqueduct, thrice the size of the OCA and deeper in the ground, was built nearby. (For those who run the Bronx half-marathon, the Jerome Park Reservoir near which that race goes is part of the “New Croton Aqueduct,” and the OCA travels along its eastern sides.) The OCA brought water into New York City until 1955. There’s a very nice description of the OCA in New York City, including an illustration of the aqueduct at 42nd Street, as part of the Forgotten NY: Street Scenes (and which manages to connect Winston Churchill to the Jerome Reservoir).

Roger Panetta, in his Westchester: The American Suburb essay (at 16-17), notes that while construction of the OCA steamrolled over affected commercial and rural properties that were in its path, it also brought many Irish workers into the County -- Washington Irving called them “Patlanders . . . forming a kind of Patsylvania” -- and “prefigured the ways in which the city would alter the landscape of the county. . . . The aqueduct also deepened the north-south axis that vividly demonstrated the force of the city’s gravitational pull.”

From Westchester: The American Suburb, I find that the Village of Katonah is actually the “New” Village of Katonah. When New York City required more water in the the 1890s, by which point the New Croton Aqueduct had been built to supplement the original, it created a reservoir by placing a large dam on the Croton River, flooding a large area, including what was Katonah. The property was condemned (some buildings were moved), and a New Village built about a mile to the south, by the Katonah Land Company, which retained the architects B.S. and G.S. Olmstead to create a master plan, which resulted in the unusual design of Katonah, with businesses next to the train tracks away from Bedford Road (Rte 117), which received a median and was non-commercial. Katonah did not become a true suburb until after World War II; before that it was a place for country places for city-dwellers. This is described in an essay by Gray Williams entitled Westchester County: Historic Suburban Neighborhoods at 195-200 of Westchester: The American Suburb.

While urban legend has it that the aqueduct is 26.2 miles long, that is actually its length in Westchester, to which 15 miles are added once it crosses into the Bronx. The route is just east of the Hudson River until it reaches Yonkers, where it takes an eastward turn before heading south again. But our interest is in the OCA from Tarrytown to Yonkers and from Yonkers to the Bronx.Wikipedia entry.

The Putnam Trail

But before getting to that, we look at a distinct bit of engineering. Later in the 19th Century, during a railroad-building era, an “inland route” from New York to Boston was sought. After fits and starts, and some bankruptcies (J.P. Morgan would eventually be involved), in April 1881, the first passengers rode on what became the Putnam Division of the New York Central Railroad. The road ran alongside Tibbetts Brook, just to the east of what is now the Saw Mill River Parkway and the upper reach of the Henry Hudson Parkway and through Van Cortlandt Park (Jacobus Van Cortlandt created the Van Cortlandt Lake when he dammed the brook in the 1690s). The last passengers rode on May 29, 1958, and the last freight was carried on March 14, 1970. By then and thereafter, portions of the track were abandoned and taken-up.

Westchester paved a stretch from Yonkers north to create what are the The South County Trailway and The North County Trailway [these are PDF files files that will open in a separate window]. While the northernmost part of the unpaved segment in Yonkers is largely overgrown and treacherous, the OCA:Putnam Trail run does not include it. Instead, the run takes advantage of the fact that, by coincidence, the Putnam Trail runs parallel and only 100 yards or so to the east of the OCA. Once again Forgotten NY has a page devoted to the “Old Put.”

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Nature Study Woods

This also began life as a railroad. In this case, it was the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway. NYC Subway.com has an excellent description. The railroad itself ran from 180th Street in the Bronx to Bloomingdale Road in White Plains, and there are numerous remnants, including a trestle at the entrance to the Hutch from Lincoln Avenue in Mt Vernon and the Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps building at 5 corners (which was a train station). On the current trail, the most visible remnant is a trestle where you climb a rocky stretch on Nature Study. The road itself ran only from 1912 until 1937. Mile Highway itself and a narrow park near Weaver Street into White Plains are also from this road.

The NYCSubway site quotes extensively from a May 1912 description of the history and prospects of the road in the Electic Railway Journal, including:

The new road will serve a great area of most attractive residential territory which hitherto has been too isolated from the metropolitan district to enjoy any considerable development. Much of this land is several hundred feet above sea level and from a hygienic point of view is exceptionally adapted to the requirements of home builders. The prospect for the growth and development of the territory through which the road passes probably can be best indicated by the statistics which show its progress in the past and foreshadow what may be looked for in the future under the very greatly improved conditions brought about by the building of the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway.

Those statistics show that the population of southern Westchester, excepting Yonkers, increased by some 66.2% from 1900 to 1910 (to 116,936).

The Leatherstocking Trail

Intended to be used for a Bronx to Port Chester parkway in 1926, the land on which the Leatherstocking Trail sits became available when the New England Thruway was built. Locals kept the land from being developed. It, the Town notes (a PDF file, will open in a new window), “features a typical northeastern hardwood forest with occasional riverine areas.”

Some Other History Sites


Last edited on ... March 12, 2006 PoweredByStealth