From this weekend you can visit one of the most interesting places in the infrastructure history of New York. On Saturday, June 13th, the Highbridge Water Tower, in Washington Heights, will open to the public for a series of free guided tours organized by NYC Parks’ Urban Park Rangers. The tower is about 60 meters tall, located above Highbridge Park and allows you to see Manhattan, the Harlem River and the Bronx from an unusual point: not from a skyscraper or a panoramic terrace, but from a work built in the nineteenth century to bring water to a city that was growing very quickly.
The Highbridge Water Tower was completed in 1872 as part of the Croton aqueduct system, one of the great works that changed the daily life of New York in the 19th century. Before that system, the water supply of the city was more fragile and less secure, with consequences also on public health. The tower used to adjust the water pressure distributed in the upper part of Manhattan, when urban expansion required a more stable system. Today it is the last structure of this type remained in the city and for this reason it became not only a monument, but also a way to understand how New York was made before the great modern aqueducts.
The visit includes the ascent along the internal staircase in cast iron, narrow and winding, up to the observation deck. From there you can see the High Bridge, the oldest bridge still existing in New York, originally built to support the passage of the aqueduct; the Harlem River valley, with the bridges and the urban front of the Bronx; and a part of the Manhattan skyline seen from the north, a different perspective than the most photographed one in Midtown and Downtown. It is one of those places where the view counts, but it also counts why that view exists: the tower was not born to be panoramic, but to make the city work better.
The place has crossed several stages of New York history. The heights around Highbridge Park were also used during the American Revolution, when the area had a strategic value for land control; not far away, the Morris-Jumel Mansion was the headquarters of George Washington for a period in the autumn of 1776. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the High Bridge and the tower became a destination for walks and trips outside the center, when New York was already beginning to look for spaces of breath within its growth. In 1958, a five-octave music box was installed in the tower, funded by the magnate of the Benjamin Altman department stores, which for decades spread music on the Harlem River valley, until the 1980s.
In recent years the tower has been restored by NYC Parks with interventions on the masonry, on the windows and on the internal staircase, after being largely inaccessible to the public. To participate on Saturday, June 13th, no tickets or reservations are required: access will be on arrival. Visitors will have to show up between 13 and 14:45 at the base of the tower, behind the Highbridge Recreation Center and Pool, between West 174th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The area is reached by metro lines 1, A or C, going down to 168th Street and walking for about ten minutes to Highbridge Park. The parking lot on the street is few, so getting there by metro remains the simplest solution.
L’articolo In Washington Heights reopens for visits the old water tower comes from IlNewyorkese.
