We take our water for granted; turn on the tap and it’s there. Yet New York City’s faucets are endpoints in a journey through a vast, sophisticated, and visually humbling infrastructure of aqueducts, tunnels, water mains, pipes, pumping stations, treatment plants, reservoirs, gatehouses and more.
Photographer Stanley Greenberg has spent over three decades documenting these public structures; the subject remains a constant source of fascination for him. Now he has published a completely re-designed and expanded version of his original 2003 book, with 362 photographs and a large two-sided insert map, all paying further tribute to the history, engineering, and beauty of our far flung water system.
Published by Kris Graves Projects, with maps co-created by Larry Buchanan, this redux volume – Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York – comes at a moment when public thinking about water resources is increasingly complicated, and awareness of a system that has been continually under construction since the 1830s is heightened.
Greenberg, Graves and Buchanan discuss the artistic work, and also help us grasp the systems that are so vital to our lives, in a conversation led by Mariana Mogilevich, editor in chief of Urban Omnibus. Leave with a new appreciation of what it takes to provide over a billion gallons of water a day to our city, and the beauty of the hidden structures that do the work.