{"id":18113,"date":"2016-11-02T22:00:56","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T02:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=18113"},"modified":"2025-06-29T12:22:51","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T16:22:51","slug":"where-did-all-the-streams-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2016\/11\/02\/where-did-all-the-streams-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Did All the Streams Go?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of <\/em>Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs<\/strong>. By Sergey Kadinsky. Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT. ISBN: 9781581573558. 336 pages<\/em>. Buy the book.<\/a><\/p>\n

There is something about a stream that just won\u2019t let go of the imagination. People somehow accept other aspects of the environmental destruction required to make cities. Most folks don\u2019t recall the legions of forests and acres of meadows that have been bulldozed for townhouses or that the soil must be encased in asphalt to make it easier for cars and bikes. Urbanites might find it sad, but understandable, that trillions of former wildlife inhabitants\u2014birds, bees, bears, beetles, bobcats\u2014have been swept from the cityscape to make room for people and our pet animals instead. But everyone wants to know, once they start to think about it: what happened to the streams?<\/p>\n

A remarkable number of streams and stream fragments still exist in New York City, and Kadinsky tries to find every one of them.<\/blockquote><\/figure> Sergey Kadinsky\u2019s new book provides 101 answers to that question for the five boroughs of New York City. For the 8.6 million citizens and the 50 million visitors to the city each year, Kadinsky’s book is your best guide to the lost and underappreciated hydrological features of New York City\u2014not only streams, but also ponds, lakes, creeks, and the occasional spring. His is the modern incarnation of the same spirit that drove James Reuel Smith, a former merchant in lower Manhattan, to buy a bicycle and an early camera, and ride around snapping pictures and penning nostalgic accounts, which resulted in Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx<\/a> from 1916 (later republished by the New-York Historical Society in 1938). Kadinsky trades Smith\u2019s bicycle for the subway and buses, but their impetus is the same.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Smith and Kadinsky are not alone in being drawn to running water. Paul Talling\u2019s Lost Rivers of London<\/em><\/a>, Joel Pomerantz\u2019s Kickstarter-funded maps<\/a> of the streams and springs of San Francisco, Mary Miss\u2019s artful explication of the White River<\/a> in Indianapolis, Jessica Hall\u2019s creek freak investigations<\/a> in Los Angeles, Steve Duncan\u2019s fearless expeditions into the sewers<\/a>, Robin Grossinger and Erin Beller\u2019s detailed studies of the streams of Silicon Valley<\/a> (formerly \u201cThe Valley of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d) and our own work on the

natural resources group<\/a>, and is engaged in a large number of stream, pond, and wetland restoration projects across the five boroughs. The city even has a wetlands strategy<\/a>. Contemporary New Yorkers are perhaps more willing than our peers in the past to see nature as part of the infrastructure of the city. Climate change is part of that: green, wet places help cool the city and, at the shore\u2019s edge, may contribute to blunting the adverse effects of wave energy and storm surge. Returning precipitation and snowmelt to the ground also has an effect on water quality. The city has only so much room for water treatment plants and infrastructure; the soil is an efficient sop that keeps water out of the treatment system; and water in the ground will help fill ponds and make streams perennial again. For a city that drinks more than a billion gallons per day<\/a>, returning a modicum to nature seems like the least that we can do.<\/p>\n

One of us (Sanderson) remembers giving a historical walking tour and stopping at the intersection of Maiden Lane and Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan, only a few blocks from Wall Street, in the shadows of skyscrapers, to describe the stream that once flowed there. Maiden Lane got its name from the Dutch washing women who used to leave the palisades of New Amsterdam to do their laundry along the \u201cMaagde Paetje” or Virgin\u2019s Path. In the old sources, the stream is invariably described as sparkling over a bottom of smooth pebbles. As I was describing this on a dank, unpebbled street corner at the height of rush hour, one of the guests on the tour abruptly interrupted, and asked, in a rather loud voice: \u201cwhere has the stream gone now?\u201d I pointed to the manhole cover in the middle of the street and the storm drain at her feet. For most of the city, gutters are our streams, and the water isn\u2019t hidden when it rains; rather, it pours out in fast, furious floods and swirls down into dark places not to be seen again. I told the ensemble about all the ways that we can bring streams back, by daylighting them<\/a>, revegetating them<\/a>, or, at the very least, in our mind\u2019s eye, <\/a><\/p>\n

Eric W. Sanderson and Christopher Spagnoli<\/strong>
\nNew York City<\/p>\n

On\u00a0The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n
Christopher Spagnoli<\/div>\n
\n

about the writer
\n Christopher Spagnoli<\/a>\n <\/h3>\n

Christopher Spagnoli Program Assistant at Wildlife Conservation Society's Conservation Innovation program. Since 2014 he has worked on the development of the Welikia Project and Visionmaker.nyc. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs. By Sergey Kadinsky. Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT. ISBN: 9781581573558. 336 pages. Buy the book. There is something about a stream that just won\u2019t let go of the imagination. People somehow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":58316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[299,296,297],"tags":[55,28,23,88,41,62,449],"coauthors":[127,788],"class_list":["post-18113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay-place-and-design","category-review","category-essay-science-and-tools","tag-conservation","tag-design","tag-north-america","tag-planning","tag-tools","tag-water","tag-wetlandsriversstreams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18113"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58269,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18113\/revisions\/58269"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18113"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}