Focus: Preservation

Actuator before restoration

A little more than a year after the Friends of the OCA celebrated the building of the Croton Arch of Triumph in Dobbs Ferry, there’s a new piece of history there to look at. An original actuator from the New Croton Dam has been saved from the scrapheap, refurbished and permanently installed outside the Keeper’s House on Walnut Street.

Friends’ Board Members Aram Aslanian-Persico and Bob Kornfeld with Tom Minozzi and assistants at installation

This bit of historic preservation took many hands (and many years). The Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct (FOCA), including Board Members Bob Kornfeld and Aram Aslanian-Persico, Parks and Trails New York, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historical Protection successfully rescued one of three sluicegate actuators that were scheduled to be scrapped at the New Croton Dam. Tom Tarnowsky, a FOCA board member, saw the actuators in 2014 and approached the DEP to request that FOCA obtain custody of one of them. State Parks agreed to move one actuator to their Peebles Island Resource Center and the restoration process commenced. Parks and Trails New York provided funding for its installation. After the actuator’s components were derusted and refurbished, State Parks and FOCA placed the actuator on a granite base outside the Keeper’s House.

Actuators were machinery used to raise or lower sluice gates in order to control the flow of water through the Dam. Each actuator weighed approximately 1000 pounds and the iron casting stood three feet high and two feet in diameter and provided a housing for gears and a rod connector. Two opposing hand cranks turned bevel gears which drove a threaded rod. The 80-foot long rod was connected to the sluice gate below. The original hand cranks were also recovered and are in the Keeper’s House.

The Enhancements to the Exterior of the Old Croton Aqueduct State Park Keeper’s House project was supported with generous funding from the NYS Park and Trail Partnership Grants and New York’s Environmental Protection Fund. Park and Trail Partnership Grants are administered by Parks & Trails New York, in partnership with the NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.”

For more articles about the installation of the actuator please go to:

A Vital Piece of Aqueduct History Rescued From Oblivion

https://riverjournalonline.com/around-town/slice-of-history/friends-group-rescues-vital-aqueduct-machinery-from-oblivion/98008/

Friends Board Members and Advisors Charlotte Fahn, Lesley Yu Walter, President Mavis Cain, Joanna Reisman and Sara Kelsey attended the grand reopening of the High Bridge Tower on October 27, 2021.

The tower had been sealed shut for years and sheathed in scaffolding for part of the time. Now that it’s open, guided tours to the top will resume. The New York Daily News called it “a soaring 200-foot 1872 structure that was essential in New York’s rise to global stature.”

The Tower is at the Manhattan end of the famed High Bridge, which reopened in 2015 after being closed for some 40 years. The Friends were active in the High Bridge Coalition, which led a decade-long campaign to restore the pedestrian bridge and public access to it.

More on the opening HERE

More on the history of the High Bridge Water Tower HERE

An old article from our newsletter about a visit to the Tower in 2002 is HERE

High Bridge Tower Tours are popular and pre-registration fills up fast! Keep checking back for additional tours if they are full. To sign up for Tower Tours, please check the NYC Parks calendar HERE

This summer, Dobbs Ferry resident Felix Warner worked with the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct to create this video about efforts to manage invasive plants on the Old Croton Aqueduct. Felix is a sophomore at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection closed the public walkway atop New Croton Dam for five days earlier this month, creating a safe work zone for an inspection of the dam.

The closure allowed a team of rope-access technicians to rappell down the face of the dam and inspect the stones that were used to build the structure 115 years ago. It was the largest dam in the world when it was completed in 1905.

Hello all: we would like to keep the Aqueduct trail park open, but this can only happen with your cooperation. Please observe social distancing rules, or the Park may have to close as has been done in New Jersey.

A parking lot that for more than 50 years has blighted a section of the Old Croton Aqueduct trail in Tarrytown is no more. Thanks to State Parks and the Village of Tarrytown, the parking lot – roughly paved, usually unkempt, and often full – has been replaced by a pristine swath of green, with a delineated path and new plantings.

The site, about 500 feet long, is at the corner of Prospect and Martling avenues, behind the Transfiguration Church (“the round church” at 268 South Broadway). According to Steve Oakes, state manager of Old Croton Aqueduct State Historic Park, this section of the Aqueduct had been a parking lot in one form or another since the late 1940s, although the church, which held the permit issued by New York City, had stopped using the parking lot decades ago. 

Once State Parks decided to move ahead with reclaiming the land, Parks staff spent a year removing vehicles from the space, including two abandoned trailers that were full of trash and – improbably – previously registered to a company in western New York State. With fortunate timing, Tarrytown received a grant from the New NY Bridge Community Benefits Fund and made the parking lot site part of its program for the grant. The Village then was able to remove the paving, bring in topsoil, and plant grass and trees.

The result: transformation! Take a walk and see the change for yourself –  the “new” section is a little north of ventilator 14 on the Friends’ map of the Aqueduct in Westchester County. 

Photo: Scaffolding photo courtesy of NYC Dept. of Parks & Recreation

Good news!  Construction work has started on High Bridge Tower, which is now enveloped in dense scaffolding. The 200-foot-tall tower stone tower at the Manhattan end of the High Bridge – elegant inside and outside – was closed to public tours years ago, first for emergency repairs and then for major work and safety improvements, now underway. The 1872 tower was part of the High Service Works, built to bring Croton water to the higher elevations of north Manhattan.  Access to it has been sorely missed. (The tower is fleetingly visible from Metro-North’s Hudson Line. See sidebar C on the Friends’ map of the Aqueduct in New York City to learn more about the tower.)

More good news:  the pedestrian bridge that will reconnect two large parts of Van Cortlandt Park and the Old Croton Aqueduct trail across the Major Deegan Expressway is now fully funded. Once the bridge is in place (still years off), Aqueduct walkers will no longer need to detour to 233^rd St. to get across the highway. The east end of the bridge will be near the north ballfield of Shandler Recreation Area; the west end will be a short walk to or from the section of Aqueduct trail between the Yonkers-NYC border and the Deegan. The bridge will be ADA-accessible.

A similar announcement was made at a press conference in the park in 2015, but redesign and necessary re-siting led to a substantial increase in cost, now expected to be $23.5 million, from a mix of city and state sources. The bridge location had to be changed in part was because placement as originally planned would have compromised the Aqueduct itself – the 1842 below-grade masonry conduit through which Croton water first flowed, long before there was a park.