Beisaw, AM. 2022. Taking our water for the city - The archaeology of new york city’s watershed communities. Berghan Books. ISBN 9781800738140 (hardback, $120.00)/ ISBN 9781800738157 (ebook, $30)
(URL: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BeisawTaking)
Christopher Scott
Penn State University, cascott@psu.edu
To cite this Review: Scott, C. 2023. Review of "Taking our water for the city - The archaeology of new york city’s watershed communities", Berghan Books, 2022, by AM Beisaw, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/333-NY
Taking Our Water for the City gut-wrenchingly retells the story of New York City expropriating water and land – and with it economic opportunity and the very identity – of upstate communities in the watershed where the city sources its water supply. Meticulously researched with the aid of a cohort of college students, access to special collections at local community libraries and historical societies, field surveys, and archival work, April Beisaw uses painstaking archaeological methods to convincingly recreate the palimpsest of the two towns of Kent and Olive, doomed to have been in the path of the city’s water footprint.
A self-identified activist archaeologist, the author states that, “in knowing the past, we can critique the present and imagine alternative futures” (p. 6). Case analyses of the two towns and surrounding counties make significant reference to the 1875 Beers Atlas for historical land records. Fig. 4.4 (p. 84) is an especially telling map that superimposes the Ashokan reservoir (constructed in 1915) on land ownership boundaries (from 1906), in the process obliterating properties large and small, while noting that the smaller properties had been the women-owned ones. Prior to the city engineers’ arrival, these farming communities had diversified into tanning, timber, and railroad development, recognized to have their own serious environmental and public health impacts. Archaeology surveys by the author and her students produce intricate reports of stone walls, foundations, trash, abandoned vehicles and appliances, bricks, an occasional family cemetery, and stone cellars (looking suspiciously like covered springs) – many of these physical features enhanced through analysis using advanced LiDAR mapping to peer deep in the woods.
Once their lands were expropriated, watershed residents found relocation to other sites and properties was difficult, especially for farming on stony agricultural fields that were less productive than submerged valley-bottom land. In the process of land acquisition, the city also and perhaps intentionally made many public access lands inaccessible, surrounding these with city-owned land ominously posted with “No Trespassing” signs. The author does not problematize the institution of private property that led to expropriation, just the coerced nature in which land ownership was transferred to the city. Indeed, the pre-existing property of local residents is stressed.
The book takes on not just city managers, politicians, and watershed protection officers with patrol cars and dogs, but also city elites who have bought urban getaways in watershed communities, now protected from future development, ostensibly to protect water supplies but also to preserve ‘wilderness’ around their estates, as if the region was always naturalized this way. It was lost on no one that this also boosted property values. Yet, the partisan political dynamics between today’s upstate (mostly) Republicans getting the heavy hand of downstate city Democrat politicians are not addressed in the book.
The final chapter, Water Pasts for Water Futures, provides the damning take-home message (p. 97):
"With each passing decade, the city extended its reach farther away from Manhattan’s booming population. Now nineteen reservoirs and controlled lakes bring water bring water to the city from up to 125 miles (201.2 km) away. Creating this vast network destroyed many rural communities and crippled the economic viability of those that remained. Roads and railroads were rerouted, agriculture and other potentially polluting activities were banned, and property values changed. Those people who remained were limited in where they could live and what they could do there… This approach of demolishing the rural to feed the urban became a model other cities followed."
A major omission lies with when and where the author chooses to begin recounting events – this is a selective palimpsest archaeology. European settlement and trade in Manhattan are not recognized in the volume as exploiting prior Indigenous communities. Nor do the accounts of the early colonial and post-American independence settlement in what is now upstate New York tell the bloody tale of genocide that established the towns that later were so unceremoniously cleared, ruined, or entangled by the city. The few times Indigenous peoples are mentioned involves the retelling of a pageant the city used to portray events in which a caricature of an Indian chief nods approval for the city to take the water, but never were Europeans who settled the area consulted. Additionally, in speaking of the stone structures found in the field surveys, mention is made of conferences to assess whether they were built by “aliens or Native Americans,” without probing Indigenous resource use practices. Further, Pittsburgh taking Seneca Allegany water and land, and Winnipeg taking Shoal Lake Indigenous water and land are critiqued for urban expropriation of Indigenous resources, but never are European settlers in upstate New York’s watershed communities mentioned for their erasure of Indigenous communities in their own land grabs.
Taking Our Water for the City is a fascinating read. With mixed perspectives on historical, present, and future social-natural dynamics, the book engaged me from start to finish. Set to the backdrop of New York City’s residents being largely oblivious to the source of their water, and indeed, the watershed from which it comes conceived in the public’s imaginary as a wilderness, the author painstakingly reconstructs how city planners, engineers, and elected leaders have been complicit in an ongoing intentional campaign of erasure – using ‘greater good’ justification to demolish physical objects and boundaries, erase memories, and in the process, deny the future aspirations of watershed communities.
