Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

On the Fourth of July Queen Crotona resumed her royal progress and proceeded the necessary parasangs to Murray’s Hill, pausing to fire the salute of a beautiful jet of water fifty feet in air at Forty-seventh Street.

It was noted by one of the observers that when the waters of the Croton gushed up into the reservoir they “wandered about its bottom as if to examine the magnificent structure or to find a resting place in the temple toward which they had made a pilgrimage.” That river was as much of a god to the New Yorkers as old Tiber ever was to Rome, or Nilus to Egypt.

But thereafter the stream, like another conquered Andromache, became the servant of New York, pouring into its thirsty throat twelve million imperial gallons of pure water every day.

The people congratulated themselves upon this achievement of their city single-handed in a time of national financial prostration. In the memoir written by the chief engineer, J. B. Jervis, he proudly compared the new aqueduct with the great works of Rome, built under contracts with private speculators, paid for with the plunder of ruined peoples, and “cemented with the blood of slavery.” The Croton work was a triumph of a city of 280,000 inhabitants, who wrought a task, said Jervis, “on a scale greatly beyond their actual or any near future wants, but which, designed to endure for ages, would bear record to those ages, however distant, of a race of men who were content to incur present burdens for the benefit of a posterity they could not know. Magnificent as may be the works of conquerors and kings, they have not equaled in forecast of design, and beneficence of result, the noble aqueduct, constructed at their own cost, by the freemen of the single city of New York.”

Much eloquence, much of the bold and braggart Yankee eloquence so distasteful to foreigners and to foreign-hearted Americans, was squandered on that feat of theirs; but before they talked, they had toiled; they sweat before they boasted; they fought the epic before they chanted it; and their words were not so big as the stones they heaved into place. Their phrases were less ponderous than the majestic forty-six-mile sentence in stone they wrote across the green valley of the Westchester hills, through rock and air, over hills and ravines, through villages and streams, across the Harlem River and down into the heart of Manhattan Island.

But the massive High Bridge was yet to build and the Croton had yet to reach the lower fountains and the homes of the citizens. They had waited long for it, and it meant miraculous relief to have the river from far away magically bubbling in the very houses at the wizard twist of a faucet handle, and sending up geysers of beauty in the hot parks. Many of the New Yorkers who marveled told how they had in their day paid a penny a gallon for water from the carts that peddled the product of the “Tea Water Pump.” Even David and Patty RoBards could remember when they fled the town and thought it doomed to die of drouth and pestilence.

The city felt that this immortal benison must be commemorated fittingly. When the New River had entered London the Lord Mayor had addressed it in his full splendor. When the waters of Lake Erie had come through the canal to New York they had been married to those of the ocean with grandiose ceremonial.

So now the Board of Aldermen appointed a committee, and the committee called upon General George P. Morris to write an original ode and the Sacred Music Society to sing it. “The Society’s vocal performers were rising two hundred, male and female.” The bells of the churches were bidden to ring; the artillery to fire salutes. All the distinguished personages on the continent were invited to attend and witness the most resplendent procession ever devised.

The date was set for the fourteenth of October and the citizens devoted themselves to the preparation of banners, uniforms, and maneuvers, and the polishing of fire-engines, swords, shoes, and phrases.

An invitation was addressed to the President of the United States, but Mr. Tyler was prevented by “circumstances”; and the ex-President John Adams by “indispensable engagements at home.” Ex-President Van Buren found it not in his power to avail himself of the polite invitation. Governor Seward had “a severe indisposition,” but accepted. The British Consul accepted “with feelings of no ordinary kind,” and remarked that “tyrants have left monuments which call forth admiration, but no work of a free people for magnitude and utility equals this great enterprise.” The Consul of France presented his compliments and would be happy to join with them. The Consul of Prussia had much pleasure in accepting. The Consul of the Netherlands had the honor of joining. The Consul for Greece and Count Heckscher, the Consul for Mecklenburg, regretted, but the Consuls of the Two Sicilies, the Grand Duchy of Hesse, Frankfort, and Venezuela accepted. The Consul of Mexico was prevented by absence, and the Consul of Texas, the recent republic of Texas, feared that his “engagements of the day would deprive him of the pleasure.”