For eighteen thousand years, a pristine freshwater lake lay just north of today’s City Hall. This “kettle pond” formed as the last glaciers retreated from Manhattan Island, leaving behind an ENORMOUS chunk of ice pressed into the ground. As the island continued to warm, that chunk gradually melted and the huge depression it made was fed by underground streams. Its waters covered fifty acres (City Hall Park covers nine) and reached depths of sixty feet (New York’s shipping lanes are only forty-five). For centuries, the indigenous Munsee tribe maintained a settle- ment on the pond’s southern shore. Its high-tide overflows drained through open channels into the Hudson and East rivers, and Mun- see canoes could travel clear across the island. The Munsee left the area only after the Dutch drove them out in the seventeenth century. But while the Munsee treated the pond with deep respect—the only debris accumulating along its shores were piles of discarded oyster shells harvested from the East River— the Europeans had a different mindset. Fresh water was always a precious commodity on Manahatta. The waters surrounding the island are salty, and close-to-the-surface bedrock made drilling for freshwater reserves difficult at best. And while there were early efforts to transport water from the dozens of island streams and ponds farther north, this pond was by far the largest of them all—and the closest to the growing settlement of New Am- sterdam. Collect Pond (there are various explanations for its name) was the main source of fresh water for the short-lived (1625–1664) Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. It continued to nourish the English after they took the island by force and New Amsterdam became New York. For the next hundred years, the pond remained pristine. New Yorkers picnicked on its shores, fished and swam in its waters, and skated river to river when it froze. But as the population grew, so did its needs and its commercial activities. The eighteenth century brought breweries, slaughterhouses, and tanneries—the most odorous of industries, banned from the town— to its shores. And almost inconceivably, they dumped their waste products into the very waters that sustained their businesses. Before long, Collect Pond was an irredeemable stinking polluted pit. In 1812, when New York began its formal expansion north, the hills surrounding the pond were leveled to fill it in—and make it go away. A middle-class neighborhood—Paradise Square—was too quickly built over it, and as the waste material below continued to rot, the homes sunk and the air stunk. As duped homeowners abandoned the putrid, disease-ridden streets, land values plummeted and the infamous Five Points neigh- borhood—the most notorious tenement slum in the city—took its place. Writers like Charles Dickens (American Notes) and Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives) shed light on this human and environ- mental disaster, and the city condemned and bought up the tene- ments, replacing them with large civic buildings—today’s Civic Center. The one-acre Collect Pond Park, bordered by Lafayette, Leonard, Centre, and White streets, is a small reminder of Manhattan’s greatest source of fresh water for more than eighteen thousand years—and a huge reminder of what happens when we fail to protect our limited natural resources. The devOlUTION Of COlleCT pONd COLLECT POND WAS THE MAIN SOURCE OF FRESH WATER FOR THE SHORT-LIVED (1625–1664) DUTCH SETTLEMENT OF NEW AMSTERDAM Collect Pond in the eighteenth century