Old Croton Aqueduct Becomes The Bronx’s First-Ever Scenic Landmark

The Old Croton Aqueduct may not carry water anymore, but it still has flow.

Dozens of residents and community organizers in The Bronx gathered at the aqueduct’s Roscoe Brown Plaza Thursday afternoon to celebrate its new status as the borough’s first scenic landmark. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously voted last month to bestow the honor onto the aqueduct.

“They’re rare and incredibly special,” landmarks commission director of community and governmental affairs Steven Thomson told supporters about scenic landmarks, noting that the Bronx would continue to see more landmarked sites. “And we’re not done.”

New York City has just 12 scenic landmarks, a designation the landmarks commission bestows on places at least 30 years old that have “a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage, or cultural characteristics of the City, state, or nation.”

Morningside Park in Harlem and the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn are the only two other sites named as scenic landmarks so far in this century.

The Old Croton Aqueduct’s new status arrives a half century after Central Park became the city’s first scenic landmark in 1974.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission has strived to diversify the city’s landmarks, as part of an “equity framework” launched in 2021. Since December 2022, the commission has approved seven Bronx landmarks that  include the Bronx Opera House , Engine Company 88/ Ladder Company 38 Firehouse, and Fire Alarm Telegraph Bureau, along with the Tremont library branch, Samuel Gompers Industrial High School and Joseph Drake Park and Enslaved African Burial Ground.

Where water once flowed belowground, people still promenade, run and play above it. The Old Croton Aqueduct walk is a 1.7 mile pathway stretching along 4.9 acres from Kingsbridge Road to Burnside Avenue. It features several benches, basketball courts and fitness equipment, as well as a playground and bathrooms. .

Renea Bush, a member of community group Friends of Aqueduct Walk and the nearby University Heights Presbyterian Church, has been walking the aqueduct for the last six decades.

“I had walked through it since junior high school, and it was always a nice relaxing walk. There were places to sit. At one point there was a handball court on the Fordham Road part, shuffleboard courts,” Bush told THE CITY in a phone interview on Tuesday before the celebration.

The aqueduct, as it’s known locally, is often used as a scenic shortcut to get to strips of the West Bronx, and it’s popular with students from nearby schools. A strip sits right in front of Bronx Community College and also can be used to walk to the Kingsbridge Armory. Residents walk their dogs, sit on the benches and railings on a path that spears through columns of apartment buildings on each side.

But the aqueduct hasn’t always been a pleasant stroll. At times, it’s been a hotbed of illegal drug activity, said Bush, especially during the pandemic.

“During that time it got heavily drug-infested. I mean, that’s been an issue over the decades,” said Bush.

At Thursday’s celebration, dozens of visitors filtered through Roscoe Brown Plaza, named after a former Tuskegee airman and the first Black president of Bronx Community College, with the chance to check out booths run by more than a dozen community organizations and city agencies, including the Morris Heights Health Center, Bronx Community Board 5, Union Health Community Center, Francis Martin Public Library and Bronx Community College.

Participants could also try their hand at giant Connect Four and a wooden air hockey table.

Transforming the City

Completed in 1842 after five years of construction by more than 3,000 Irish immigrants, the Old Croton Aqueduct, bringing water from a reservoir in Croton that was the first source providing reliably clean water to New York City as it was rapidly developing.

“By the early 1800s New York City desperately needed fresh water. The colonists had depleted nearly all natural resources. The water source from wells was dirty, disease was rampant, fires burned without the ability to extinguish them and the surrounding rivers offered no solution,” said Sarah Eccles, researcher for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, at last month’s meeting approving the scenic landmark designation. “The city began looking to construct an aqueduct.”

Eccles noted it took 22 hours for the water to reach Manhattan from the reservoir. Using a system relying on just gravity, the 41-mile-long aqueduct carried 45 million gallons a day.

As the aqueduct provided “fresh drinking water, clean streets, the ability to extinguish fires,and plumbing for creature comforts previously unimaginable,” Eccles said, it fuelled New York City’s rapid expansion in the second half of the 19th century.

It was so successful, in fact, that the city’s desire for fresh water quickly exceeded all expectations and outpaced the aqueduct’s capabilities, necessitating the construction of a second aqueduct, known as the New Croton Aqueduct, which opened in 1890 and carried enough water to keep up with New York City’s expanding population.

Despite its success, developers tried to recycle how the aqueduct was used. But local residents successfully thwarted attempts to build a trolley in 1903 and to sell the land for development in 1929.

The city constructed a bridge underneath the embankment of the aqueduct over West Burnside Avenue in 1896 to accommodate a growing trolley service, Eccles told THE CITY on Thursday at the celebration. That bridge was taken down in 1930 to widen roads as the number of cars and trucks shot up.

That was also the year that the city acquired stewardship of the land, and commissioned landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke to design the linear park there that opened in 1940, with new walls, railings, lawns, trees and play areas, even before the aqueduct itself was taken out of service in 1955.

‘One Place of Nature’

The celebration caught the attention of teens and students at Bronx Community College, some of whom stopped to score some points at a wooden air hockey game.

Other members of the community shared their experiences with the aqueduct as part of the college’s oral history project.

The local Francis Martin public library is also trying to take advantage of the space.

“It’s one place of nature that we can bring the kids to encourage them to read,” Lila Kwederis, a librarian at the branch, told THE CITY.

Bronx borough parks commissioner Jessenia Aponte got to enjoy some of those play areas established nearly a century ago. She told supporters that she grew up right along on the aqueduct, which Edgar Allen Poe was also known to meander, on 183rd Street and University Avenue, hooping at the basketball courts and riding her bicycle.

“Before Manhattan had the High Line, the BX had the aqueduct walk,” she said.

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