“Dam Town”
Oil on Stretched Canvas, 6”x6”
The Croton Dam was built somewhere around 1906…wait, let me look it up. Sure enough, the New Croton Dam was completed in 1906. It replaced the Old Croton Dam that gave way. It was an engineering feat, which brought water all the way to New York City where they desperately needed it for clean drinking water as well as to fight fires. The aqueduct was an underground tunnel that brought water to the city some 35 miles or so. To celebrate the opening, the mayor, the head engineer and maybe 1 or 2 others rode a rowboat through the underground aqueduct tunnel all the way from the dam to the city, maybe to Bryant park, or perhaps to the reservoir at Central Park. You can look it up in Wikipedia. Highly recommended: a visit to the Ossining Community Center where a free museum depicts all this along with an extra bonus, a fascinating display on Sing Sing Prison. Just call for hours.
Anyway, the Croton Dam is a great place to spend an hour or an afternoon. After a heavy rainfall, it can be quite dramatic. It is a beautiful structure that changed the demographics of Croton. Italian stone masons were brought across the ocean to help build it, along with many Irish workers. If you peruse the burial plots near the Croton Library, you will see the family names of many of these workers. More paintings on this subject to come.
