New York City’s very first enclosed sewer is also a remnant of the freshwater sources

that were once fundamental to the city’s origins. This is the old Canal Street sewer, running underneath Canal Street to the Hudson River. In the early days of New Amsterdam, there was a meandering and marshy waterway along this route that drained the overflow from the Fresh Water or Collect Pond, the primary fresh-water supply for New Amsterdam through the 18th century (it was located at the site of what is now Columbus Park in Chinatown). When the water was high, this stream was enough to float a canoe. Native Americans living in the area brought catches of oysters in through this route, and over the years the discarded oyster shells added to the hill next to the Fresh Water Pond. The Dutch settlers called this hill beside the pond Kalch Hoek, translated as Shell Point, and the name evolved phonetically until it became the “Collect,” which became the name for the Fresh Water Pond as well as the hill beside it. The marshy area was almost unusable; good grazing pasture was mixed in with the swamps, but cattle set out in these fields were sometimes lost in the “pestilential quagmires” around them. One writer told of a man, lost in the dark after a night at a tavern, who drowned in the deep water of a marsh at what is now the intersection of Grand and Greene Streets, in the middle of SoHo. In the 1730s, Anthony Rutgers became the owner of the marshes and meadows through a royal grant, and over the next decades he and his son-in-law Leonard Lispenard dug a ditch to speed the drainage route along the present-day Canal street. By the end of the 18th century, however, the fast-growing city had polluted the Collect Pond to the point that the water was unusable—a fetid stew of sewage and the refuse from slaughterhouses, tanneries, and breweries. Outbreaks of cholera forced the city to take action. The original Collect Pond was filled in, but the underground springs that supplied it still continued to flow. In about 1811, the city enlarged Rutgers’ ditch and lined it—first with planks, and later with stone—to better drain the area. This was effectively an open sewer, and the slow-moving water stank. Around 1819 it was replaced with a covered, brick-arched tunnel, which was buried beneath the street to become the city’s first enclosed sewer.

New York City: Canal Street Sewer “the past is never dead… it’s not even past.”

Canal Street Sewer

Water from a natural underground spring flows into the Canal Street Sewer, likely the same spring that gave Spring Street its name.

This 18th-century drainage ditch through Lispenard’s Meadows became the route of Canal Street today.

Left: Canal Street about 1811, when bridges still crossed the open ditch.

Right: Much of the Canal Street Sewer is still the original stone channel and brick arch.