Collect Pond - History

History

In the 18th century, the pond was used as a picnic area during summer, and a skating rink during the winter. However, industries began to use the water and dump waste there. These included tanneries, breweries, ropewalks, and slaughterhouses. By the late 18th century, the pond was already considered “a very sink and common sewer”.

Proposals were made to solve the problem, including the conversion of the pond to a park designed by Pierre L’Enfant, and the creation of a canal between the East and Hudson Rivers. In the end, it was filled in from land removed from nearby Bayard's Mount, the highest hill in lower Manhattan, rechristened after the Revolution "Bunker Hill" (commemorating the American victory at Bunker Hill, Boston; a small battery had fortified Nicholas Bayard's Mount during the Revolution and leveled between 1803 and 1811. By 1813, the Collect was virtually gone.

Several decades later New York City obtained a new, plentiful supply of fresh water from the Croton Aqueduct. The neighborhood known as "Five Points", a notorious slum, developed near the former eastern bank of the Collect and owed its existence in some measure to the poor landfill job (completed in 1811) which created swampy, mosquito-ridden conditions on land that had originally had more well-to-do residents.

New York's jail nicknamed "The Tombs", built on Centre Street in 1838, was on the site of the pond and was constructed on a huge platform of hemlock logs in an attempt to give it secure foundations. The prison building began to subside almost as soon as it was completed and was notorious for leaks in its lowest tier and for its general dampness. When the original Tombs building was condemned and demolished at the end of the century, builders sank enormous concrete caissons to bedrock, as much as 140 feet below street level, in order to give its replacement more secure foundations.