Brooklyn city engineers had dammed a Long Island stream decades before Moses found it

Evidence

There were another four ponds—and another wooded seven hundred acres—stretching south from Wantagh all the way to the Great South Bay. There were 595 more acres near Massapequa. Between Valley Stream and Lynbrook, there were only fifty acres, but in the center of them was a lake a quarter mile across. And when he entered the woods between Lynbrook and Rockville Centre, he realized he had come to something that dwarfed the others. The thin band of woods that he had seen from the train at that spot ran north for more than three miles, broadening as it went. Within the woods were long, rolling meadows. He had heard that somewhere in the woods was a reservoir, where a stream had actually been dammed by Brooklyn municipal engineers decades before, that couldn’t be seen from the train, and he pushed on, trying to find it. With branches slapping at his face and vines tangling his feet, he came at last to a man-made embankment. Scrambling up, he peered over its top—and there before him lay a body of water almost a mile long and half a mile wide. It was much bigger than the big reservoir in Central Park, he realized. And there was more land around it, he guessed—and he turned out to be right—than there was in Central Park. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 704

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in New York infrastructure history like Central Park comparisons and municipal water engineering. — connects to: Moses transferred his vision of unused space from Manhattan to Long Island — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 700

Broader Connections

• Moses transferred his vision of unused space from Manhattan to Long Island #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 700