 |
Most of us take infrastructure for granted but we shouldn't; it tells us a lot about ourselves. The massive investment in designing, building and maintaining infrastructure is one of a society's most utopian actions: through it we seek to remake the world. Hydroinfrastructure, for example, shows our conviction that the perfect world has easy access to cold drinks and hot showers. It also links country and city through the flow of one of earth's most elemental substances, demonstrating that the worlds of “nature&rdquo and “culture&rdquo are not as separate as we often believe. A great book on infrastructure generally is Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes. Here are some of my favorite hydroinfrastructure sites. 
The Erie Canal Like many highways, the New York Thruway follows a Native American trail that was later the route of a canal. The Erie Canal—a 363-mile long artificial river connecting New York City with the upper Great Lakes—changed the economy of the young nation. After its 1825 completion, New York oysters traveled to landlocked upstate towns, and upstate apples made their way, albeit at 4 miles per hour—to New York City. Canals were the first step in our transformation to a society freed from the constraints of region. Today we eat mangos from India and expect fresh asparagus year-round. This is the Erie's famous flight of locks at Lockport, NY—closed for winter in this picture. It's hard to believe that these straightforward ditches were the dawn of our de-localized world. 
The Welland Canal The canal that allows ships to circumvent Niagara Falls is the Welland Canal, a 27-mile ditch chopped through the Canadian Niagara peninsula in 1829, and expanded several times thereafter. Throughout the nineteenth century, many Americans believed the U.S. government should build its own canal connecting Lakes Ontario and Erie, in case the British ever decided to refuse us access to theirs. That fear proved baseless. Today, people worry more about the environmental effects of the Welland; in connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence Seaway, the canal has brought all manner of invasive species from the ocean into the freshwater Great Lakes. In spite of this, Bob loves the Welland Canal—the sight of a massive freighter going through one of its 8 locks is indisputably impressive. 
The Croton Aquaduct's High Bridge At the northern tip of Manhattan, the High Bridge of the old Croton Aquaduct once brought New Yorkers water from the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County. Public servants wanted to make the bridge low and economical, but the public demanded a bridge with “the grandeur of ancient Rome” for what was then the world's largest public work. Today, the aqueduct has been replaced by New York's two giant city water tunnels. A third was begun in 1970 and is due to be done in 2020. But the system still borrows from ancient Rome's engineering know-how—like the aqueducts of Claudius or Trajan, the city tunnels work by gravity. 
NYC Catskills water: The Shandaken Tunnel The eighteen-mile-long Shandaken water tunnel—the world's longest at its 1924 completion—carries Catskills water from the Scoharie Reservoir, in Greene County New York, 2630 feet underneath Balsam Mountain, and into Esopus Creek, which is flows down until it empties into the beautiful Ashokan Reservoir. The rocky, lively Esopus is a famous trout stream, and also popular for tubing in the summer. Four times a year, New York City dials up the water, and tubers can have a faster ride on “the champagne of drinking waters” as it makes its way to the thirsty metropolis. 
Virginius Island, Harper's Ferry WV At the junction of the Potomac and Shenadoah Rivers, Harper's Ferry WV (Virginia until the Civil War) was a perfect site for early American industry, dependent as it was on hydropower. In antebellum years, Virginius Island, located on the left bank of the Shenandoah, was threaded with millraces and thick with waterwheels powering mills, tanneries, and the town's famous rifle works. Today, every one of these structures is a ruin; tourists wandering the island's paths can discover silted flumes and stone foundations overgrown with brush. In devastating flood after flood, the very waterpower those mills came for destroyed them. 
The Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway Much of America's hydroinfrastructure heritage is fading or gone. One example that survives in picturesque splendor is the Mabry Mill, the most-photographed spot on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Restored to quaint perfection by the National Park Service, the mill evokes idyllic Constable landscapes, rather than the backbreaking, sweaty work it once enabled. Tens of thousands of mills such as this one once dotted the American landscape, powering the nation before the steam engine came along and changed everything. 
Unnamed waterfall in the Catskills, Ulster County, NY On an obscure trail in Ulster County, Bob and I discovered a beautiful small waterfall, pouring into a round, moss-edged pool. The first time we were there, we watched a mink playing in the waterfall. The second time, Bob noticed this gearshaft lying in the clear water. There are no homes or roads to this remote site; it's a mile walk from the dead end where you park. But at one point, someone was using the motive power of this four-foot waterfall, probably to run a gristmill. Infrastructure often feels like an inevitable part of our world—but it can always be undone. 
Edward Burtynsky, Dam #6 (2005) Okay, I haven't been here, but I love Burtynsky's brilliant photograph of what will soon become the world's largest hydroelectric facility: the Three Gorges Dam. It will displace nearly 2 million people, drown some 1300 archeological sites and provide 22 and one half gigawatts of electricity. (By comparison, Niagara Falls, both Canadian and American plants—makes five.) According to Burtynsky, when the reservoir behind this dam was filled, a wobble could be detected in the earth's rotation. The scale and energy of this photo evoke both the utopianism and the hubris inherent in humanity's constant drive to master nature. back to top |
||