New York City is defined in many ways by its iconic infrastructure, from our parks to the soaring towers of the Brooklyn and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges, and even the controversial roadways of Robert Moses, which displaced many communities of color, leaving a legacy we still feel today. But for one of the city’s most awe-inspiring pieces of infrastructure, there is a surprising lack of public knowledge or mythology: our water system. The names of the people involved are not tossed around at dinner parties. The physical structures, which sit largely out of view, are perhaps best known to those living or hiking near the reservoirs far from Manhattan’s grid. And yet, we New Yorkers are the beneficiaries of some of the cleanest and best-tasting tap water in the world, which hydrates not only millions of people living and working in the five boroughs, but also more than a million people living in Westchester, Putnam, Orange, and Ulster counties.
Photographer Stanley Greenberg has spent decades endeavoring to both answer the question of how water arrives in our taps and toilets and build interest in this vast and impressive system. His black and white images often feel epic in scope, even as some depict quiet street scenes and out of the way corners that only hint at all that’s going on below the surface. Now his book Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York, originally published in 2003, has been re-issued and expanded.
A native New Yorker, Greenberg grew up in Flatlands, a Brooklyn neighborhood southeast of Flatbush. After attending high school in Manhattan, he went on to pursue degrees in art history and public administration, eventually landing jobs in city government. It was during his time at the Department of Cultural Affairs in the 1980s that he learned the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the agency that manages the city’s water, had an archive, parts of which were neglected or being thrown away. Along with another artist and a group of Cooper Union students, Greenberg helped to catalog that vital record. The experience of going through those drawings and photos is what inspired him to expand his existing image-making practice to include the city’s vast water system. A photographer from a young age, Greenberg has exhibited extensively, and published a number of books, including another that touches specifically on water sources in New York City: Springs and Wells, Manhattan and the Bronx (2021).