Early Water Delivery System in the City Cut Corners and Trees

Uli Seit for The New York Times One of the two early 19th-century wooden water pipes unearthed at a street excavation in Lower Manhattan. This one’s wrought-iron connector ring is still intact.

The Manhattan Company, founded in 1799 to provide “pure and wholesome water” to Lower Manhattan but more interested in building a banking empire, is considered to have done a pretty poor job with the water part. They cut corners all over the place, and their service was unreliable.

“Alas!” one customer lamented in 1803, “for the last 14 days, I have turned my cock repeatedly, but nothing comes from it.” Even into the 1820s, as other cities began using cast iron, the Manhattan Company was still laying wooden pipes â€" hollowed out tree trunks, actually â€" that were susceptible to leaks, low pressure and invading roots.

All of which made it rather remarkable when a 2006 street excavation near the South Street Seaport turned up two of the company’s original wooden pipes, 12 and 14 feet long, entirely intact.

The pipes, believed to date to the 1820s, are the largest remnants of the city’s original water delivery system to have been preserved whole.

And on Thursday, after several years of sitting in the headquarters of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, they were loaded on a truck at a warehouse in Maspeth, Queens, and conveyed to the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, where they will take their places alongside an 1863 Civil War draft wheel and George Washington’s cot.

The pipes, made of pine, probably shortleaf pine, augured to an eight-inch internal diameter, look today much as they did when they were laid four feet below Beekman Street near Water Street, said Amanda Sutphin, director of archaeology for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, who went to Maspeth to see the pipes off.

“They were crudely made to begin with,” Ms. Sutphin said. “They didn’t even take all the bark off. They just hollowed it out.”

Uli Seit for The New York Times The pipes are made from hollowed out pine tree trunks that still retain some of their bark.

The Manhattan Company’s water was not much more widely revered than its piping system. While it had been expected to bring clean water down from the bucolic Bronx, the company opted instead to rely on ground wells dug in Chambers Street and its environs. The water there was rich with “the day-to-day issuances of people living in a crowded city,” said Samar Qandil, the Department of Environmental Protection’s director of records and archives.

Or, as The New York Evening Post put it in 1808: “Some wells have been dug in the filthiest corners of the town; a small quantity of water has been conveyed in wretched wooden pipes, now almost worn out, for family use; and in a manner scarcely, if at all, preferable to the former method of supplying water by the carts.”

Gerard T. Koeppel, author of “Water for Gotham,” called the pipes “evidence of how poorly New York handled its water supply in the early 1800s by relying on a private company that was not really much interested in supplying water in any great abundance.”

On Thursday, though, the various officials assembled in the Maspeth warehouse were there mostly to praise the pipes. The D.E.P.’s chief operating officer, Kathryn Garcia, called them the inspiration for the city to build its world-renowned system of aqueducts from upstate, the first of which went into operation in 1842.

Ms. Sutphin of the landmarks commission noted, “What makes this special is that where these were found, a new line is being laid for 21st-century New Yorkers - there’s a nice symmetry there.”

And Mike Thornton, a research associate at the historical society, enthused about the frayed wrought-iron connector that still clung to the end of one pipe. “What we’re excited about is that it shows not only the intact pipe, but the coupling, which tended not to survive the souvenir-collecting process,” he said.

As for the Manhattan Company, things turned out all right for them, too. In 1955, the company merged with the Chase National Bank and became Chase Manhattan. It is now known as JPMorgan Chase.

Uli Seit for The New York Times After several months at a Department of Environmental Protection warehouse in Queens, the pipes were loaded onto a truck bound for the New-York Historical Society.