Ashokan Dam

Happy (almost) summer everyone! With the good weather and vaccinations in full swing, I’m hopeful we’ll get the chance to do some road trips and meet up with people we haven’t seen in a long time. This weekend, in fact, my family will drive up to see my parents for the first time since September (hooray!)

In fact, we are up to that point in the album (1915) when the Dunning family also started some road trips. In fact, the pictures from today come from a trip that was memorialized in the local newspaper:

Miss Katherine Dunning, with a party of friends, motored to Kingston Monday, and took in the Ashokan Dam. They had a most delightful trip”

Middletown Times Press, 6 October 1915, pg. 2

The Ashokan Reservoir was constructed between 1907 to 1915 and involved the submerging of a number of communities to do so. Engineers realized years prior that New York City would face water shortages unless some water system was added to the Croton watershed. They saw that the Catskill Mountains could supply that, starting with a watershed at Esopus Creek.

Residents of the Esopus valley tried to block the work as it meant displacing some 2,000 locals and tearing down their roads, shops, churches and homes. The New York State Water Supply Commission ended up voting in New York City’s favor. Small wonder when you learn that every day, about 40 percent of New York City’s drinking water passes through the Ashokan Reservoir.

The picture above shows the bridge at the dividing line between the basins. I’ve looked up recent pictures and found it to look almost the same over 100 years later!

It may come as no surprise, then, that the the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has committed $750 million to the Ashokan Century Program, a set of projects to upgrade the infrastructure there. Announced in 2017, the projects are so extensive that they expect the work to continue even into the 2030’s.

Here you can see the dam still ‘under construction’. I’m not an engineer so I have no idea how to describe what we’re looking at. It’s cool though, isn’t it? It’s possible that soon we will be seeing similar pictures in the newspaper as the restoration work begins.

Can you imagine how people envisioned the Catskill water system “all the way back then”? And how – in rather short order – managed to procure the political support, the resources and the engineering skill to successfully carry it out?

Just like when I wrote about the construction of Grand Central Station, I’m in awe of these massive public projects that were undertaken with such foresight. Then again, I looked at Page 1 of the same newspaper that reported Great Aunt Kate’s trip to see what the news of the day was and found this:

PRESIDENT TO CAST VOTE FOR SUFFRAGE

President Wilson today came out for woman suffrage. In a formal statement he declared that he would vote in favor of amending the New Jersey State constitution to that effect.

Middletown Times Press, 6 October 1915, pg. 1

The vote for woman’s suffrage in the state of New Jersey was later defeated on the ballot. On October 19, 1915, voters rejected the measure by 58.04%. So…some events (dam-building!) feel prescient today and some others (rejecting women’s right to vote) feel positively antedeluvian.

Thinking about the construction and now reconstruction of the dam made me think about our lives pre and post-COVID. Certainly the newspapers are full of reports comparing our “pre” and “post?” COVID world. Has our outlook about work-life fundamentally changed? Will the economy look different from here on out?

It’s certainly revealed an old dam or two in my life, structures that are functioning well enough but could use a good renovation program. Physical health. Career. Things that I’ve made a substantial effort to build (my family) but that could use a good infrastructure inspection to identify improvements.

What about you?

Sending a big hug and a Happy Father’s Day to all those celebrating!