1914: Hiking to Flatbush

 

New York finally started importing its water, first by aqueduct from Westchester, and later, when the immigrant population explosion had taxed that supply to its limit, from dams in the faraway Catskill Mountains. Public Works engineers and laborers...dug a tunnel from the Catskills to the Hill View Reservoir in Yonkers, then bored south through the bedrock under the Harlem River to bring the water into the city proper. The last segment of the tunnel was blasted open on January 11, 1914, and an incidental consequence of its completion was that it made possible one of the most peculiar marathons in city history: an underground hike of a hundred and twenty miles, from the Catskill Mountains to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter three

Following are the New York Times articles describing the actual (unsuccessful) hike to Flatbush. [Note to fellow nitpickers: while the Times reports the hike as starting on January 19th, in Sewer, Gas & Electric it begins a day earlier. That is because my original source for the story was Robert R. Daley’s The World Beneath the City, which gives the 18th as the start date. I spotted the discrepancy during my last round of fact-checking and—after agonizing over the matter for much longer than it was worth—decided to stick with Daley’s chronology. Though he probably did get the date wrong, his account of the incident contains fewer typos, and is more consistent regarding the length of the hike.]

From The New York Times, January 19, 1914:

Sewer, Gas & Electric / Home

IN 100-MILE TUNNEL HIKE.

Reporters to Explore Tube from Ramapo Mountains to Brooklyn.

 

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

 

KINGSTON, Jan. 18.—The first underground hike from the Ramapo Mountains to Brooklyn, a distance of more than a hundred miles as the crow flies and still further as the worm crawls, will be undertaken to-morrow morning by a party of nine men. The trip is to be made by way of the new acqueduct [sic] that is to carry the Catskill water supply to New York.

Seven reporters and two photographers will make the trip under the guidance of H.S.R. McCurdy, the engineer in charge of the Ashokan division.The party will enter the aqueduct at the Ashokan reservoir. They expect to emerge at nightfall at Highland Falls, a distance of thirteen miles.

Some of those acquainted with the hole that the acqueduct [sic] builders burrowed through the earth—and there are many such about Kingston—were willing to wager to-day that the party would come above ground for food and sleep before Highland Falls was reached. The members of the party have received many assurances that they have before them some subterranean Alpine ascents. Sheer descents and ascents varying from one hundred to more than one thousand feet where the acqueduct [sic] makes a drop under the Hudson River will be encountered.

The Alpine feature in to-morrow’s trip will be supplied by the valley of Rondout Creek. This wrinkle in the surface of Ulster County is about nine and a half miles from Ashokan reservoir. To dip the aqueduct under it a shaft was sunk 593 feet. A 710-foot shaft carries the aqueduct up to the foot of Bunticon Crag, which towers 1,200 feet above it. The initiate in Kingston are assuring the underground tourists that Bunticon Crag will be some miles before them on their sunset horizon when they emerge from the aqueduct to-morrow evening.

 

From The New York Times, January 20, 1914:

FOUND THE AQUEDUCT WET.

Explorers Forced to Abandon Hike from Ashokan Reservoir.

 

The first underground hike from the Ramapo Mountains to Brooklyn through the new Catskill Aqueduct came to an end yesterday morning within one mile of the starting point. The excursion was to have been made by a party of seven reporters from New York newspapers reinforced by two photographers.

It was on the train from Kingston, where the explorers had spent the night, that J. Waldo Smith, Chief Engineer of the Board of Water Supply, broke the news that the “dips,” technically known as siphons and pressure tunnels, were flooded with water which would make travel through them impossible. These “dips” represent twenty-three miles, or almost 25 per cent, of the completed work to Brooklyn.

The aqueduct makes a sheer drop of more than 500 feet to dip under the valley of the Rondout, rising on the opposite side to penetrate Bonticou [sic] Crag and thence to continue on its city-ward way. This dip was filled with water, and the party came to the surface. A tramp of three miles along the line of the aqueduct to High Falls followed. At this village the explorers stopped for the night. Of the thirteen miles covered only eight were made through the aqueduct.