Podcast: FAQ NYC
A Pipe Dream and ‘A Key to Everything
Originally published by THE CITY on August 23, 2025 at 12:27pm EDT
Growing up here, I think I've always been aware of the water system but not that consciously. I had seen the Central Park Reservoir, and we had friends up in Westchester, near Kensico, so there were little bits and pieces. There was a sewer -- what turned out to be some kind of sewer plant near where I lived, it was kind of out on the periphery. Then after grad school, I was working in city government, and for one year I worked at DEP and I had a job where the commissioner took me to a lot of his field visits. They were usually to water-main breaks, but one of them was to this incredible cavern, 300 feet underground in the Bronx. And I thought, “Wow, I'm in a James Bond movie,” and that turned out to be part of the new third water tunnel. So I started getting a little bit more interested in what was going on there but I wasn't working as a photographer when I was in city government through a lot of the 80s.
That's how photographer Stanley Greenberg opens up his conversation with Harry Siegel and guest host Lizzie Walsh in the latest off-cycle episode of the FAQ NYC podcast, about his epic new book Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York.
https://feeds.fireside.fm/faqnyc/rss?waterworks
After I left to work full time as an artist, I started this project about hidden places in the city, many of which were essential to the city's operation. I knew about parts of the water system and I started asking about going to photograph them, and I got a lot of “no.” But there were a couple people at DEP who took me to places where -- we didn't sneak inside anywhere. They just showed me things that might not have been so obvious to the bystander. And then I started asking more formally about photographing, and I was asked to send a list of places. So I did that, and they called me back and they said, “You know too much about the system. You're a security threat.” So I thought, “Okay, this is not going to happen right now.”
A little while later, I had published a few things here and there, not about the water system but about the waterfront, and I had a couple pictures that they wanted — DEP was co-sponsoring an exhibit in Westchester — and they said, “Would you let us include some of your pictures?” And I did. And I saw the commissioner at the opening and the chief of staff, and I said, “Are you ever going to let me do this?” And they said, “Well, send us a list.” And I said, “I did that once.” And they said, “Well, send it to us again.” And sure enough, a couple days later, they said, “You can go to most of these places. You just have to go with one of our staff people.” And that was fine, because he had a key to everything.
So I think it was mostly 1997 to 1999 that I did most of the pictures for [the first edition of Waterworks]. The last picture I did for the book was the 135th Street Gate House, which was actually about to be turned into a performance space, and that was in Spring, 2001, and I was done. And when 9/11 happened, of course, everything was closed out again, and I had a publisher and a designer, and we had text, and I wanted to include some of the older pictures that I had learned about that were in the DEP archives. And when I asked for them, they came back and they said, "Oh, we need to approve everything in the book." And I said, "No, it doesn't work that way. You already gave me permission." And my publisher got kind of chickened out, and I spoke to an attorney who gave me some good advice, and I responded to DEP, and I said, “You can't stop me.” And they backed down. So the book was published in 2003, and then a few months later, they called me and they said they wanted to buy 200 copies. So I have a very love-hate relationship with them.
Afterwards, I kept learning about the water system and I realized there were so many things I had missed. A lot because I didn't know about them, and some because I just had decided, okay, I can't do wastewater treatment. It would be too big a book. So here and there, I would look out for places. I did a bunch of trips out to Long Island to look at the old Brooklyn water system, and found a few new places upstate, and research started to get a little bit easier because more and more things were online, all kinds of reports and maps, and I started to build my own map of sites, and which now has something like 400 different entries on it. And I did ask the DEP if I could go back occasionally, and every time they said “no.”
I even met the commissioner at the time, in 2020, who said he would help me. And then COVID came around, and who knows if they just never really wanted me in or if they didn't have any staff, but they never let me back in. But at the same time, I was thinking more about: “What are all the parts of the system that are right in front of you, and you just don't know it?” And since I had been mapping some of them, I went back and got more serious about that research and I found all of the shafts for the three distribution tunnels around the city. I found remnants of old systems like the Williamsbridge Reservoir, which is now the Williamsbridge Oval Park. A bunch of things in Westchester – Google Maps and Google satellite photographs are great for finding things. So I thought, okay, I don't need them anymore. It would have been nice to go to places like the filtration plant at Van Cortlandt Park, but this is enough to make a whole new book, and it's and it's a reason to completely redesign the book… and that's what we did.
A bonus episode for anyone who's made it this far: The late Ibrahim Abdul-Matin speaking beautifully about “New York’s water miracle”:
https://feeds.fireside.fm/faqnyc/rss?watermiracle
