Some Sewer History

1906 Foster Avenue Sewer at Brighton Line Grade Crossing Elimination Project

With pressurized water and gas main replacements tearing up our roads, we’ve been able to see for the first time some of the vital infrastructure installed here 120 years ago. Not yet visible, at ten feet deep, are the sewer pipes, which combine household waste (sinks, toilets, bathtubs, drainpipes – categorized as wastewater) with the precipitation pouring into our catch basins (stormwater). All of that is conveyed by gravity into two separate sewer systems, one under Glenwood Road, the other under Foster Avenue, both built at the turn of the 20^th century by a visionary engineer who, foreseeing climate change, built BIG. Queue the history music, maestro. My suggestion is Gravity by John Mayer…

After the creation of Greater New York in 1898, the Bureau of Sewers Chief Engineer, a remarkable veteran from a distinguished military family, Major Henry R. Asserson, took a look at southern Brooklyn and concluded: Danger, Will Robinson, DANGER! The Flatbush area had an old brick system that emptied its wastewater into the Paerdegat Creek, an inlet from Jamaica Bay. That raw sewage was wiping out oyster beds – back then New York City was the oyster capital of the world – which led to a court order against the City to cease that dumping by 1905. Moreover, since 1881 Flatbush Water Works, owned by the scions of the old Dutch rural families, had been pumping groundwater from the aquafer at the foot of Paerdegat Creek to supply most of the Flatbush area with its drinking water. Uh-Oh.

Fun Fact: Flatbush Water Works, located along Foster & Newkirk Avenues, east of Nostrand Avenue (the site of today’s Vanderveer Estates/Flatbush Gardens apartments), supplied most of Victorian Flatbush with drinking water until 1947 when, after decades of complaints about its foul taste, the City canceled its franchise. But after those wells were capped, in just a few years the water table in the aquafer rose, creating a babbling brook that coursed for decades between the tracks of the IRT subway from the Newkirk station to Flatbush Avenue. The US Geologic Survey stopped monitoring the huge Brooklyn-Queens Aquafer in 2013. Uh-Oh.

1947: Celebrating the end of "Water Works"

On a larger scale, Major Asserson also realized the increasing population of southern Brooklyn was taxing old sewers. And so he devised a plan to divert a significant portion of the flow away from Jamaica Bay and push it west to the waters off Bay Ridge. The waste and storm water flowing down from the glacial ridgeline stretching along Crown Heights, Windsor Terrace, and Prospect Park would be sent through Flatbush, then westward under Parkville, Borough Park, New Utrecht and Bay Ridge. There it would empty into a new gigantic trunk sewer that would dump it out, untreated, at the foot of 64^th Street near Owl’s Head Park into Lower New York Bay where oyster beds were already tapped out. A new sewer under Foster Avenue would be the lynchpin for redirecting the flow.

Another sewer, originating at Glenwood Road & Coney Island Avenue, would be a major part of the system needed to drain Flatlands, flowing to a plant at the Paerdegat Inlet, near the intersection of Ralph & Flatlands Avenues. From there the waste would be pumped to a new “Disposal Works Plant” located near Flatlands & Pennsylvania Avenues to mitigate the sewage before it discharged into the Bay, thereby satisfying the court mandate.

But Asserson’s grand plan languished until Mother Nature came calling on Monday morning, December 15, 1902, when a driving rain in Brooklyn pelted the piles of snow and ice left by a blizzard days earlier. Small sewers and catch basins were overwhelmed, flooding Flatbush Avenue from Prospect Park to Flatlands. All the buildings along Church Avenue, Beverly Avenue, and Cortelyou Road and basements from Windsor Terrace to the north and Parkville to the south were inundated.

The worst-hit location was on the western border of a planned real estate development, West South Midwood, specifically at the intersection of Glenwood Road (then, Ave G) and Coney Island Avenue. A huge lake had formed, preventing trolleys from passing and flooding nearby roadhouses. The situation there was so dangerous that the Bureau of Public Works dispatched its only water-pumping truck to battle the rising waters. Ironically, that very intersection was the site of a shaft that had just been sunk to create the Glenwood Road sewer…if new funding ever arrived. In the aftermath of that December flood, it did. And Major Asserson completed the two Brooklyn sewers by 1905.

1902 Sewer Map: Brown=Existing Brick, Green=Existing Pipe, Other Colors=Planned/Started

It so happened that West South Midwood would lie equidistant from the terminal points for those two sewer systems and today it straddles their catchment areas. The Paerdegat Basin Sewer – now part of the “Coney Island System” – runs eastward under Glenwood and Farragut Roads, draining the area from Coney Island Avenue east to Jamaica Bay and all of Flatlands. Buildings and catch basins south of Glenwood (and a slice of Rugby and Dekoven north of Glenwood) flow into the Glenwood sewer. The Foster Avenue Sewer – now part of the “Owl’s Head System” – runs westward from Flatbush Avenue, connecting pipe/brick conduits to feeder branches in Parkville, Borough Park, and eventually into the enormous trunk sewer in Bay Ridge. Houses north of Glenwood flow into the Foster sewer.

West Midwood=Under the 2nd "O" in Brooklyn

Closeup of West Midwood Area. Gray=Owl's Head; Pink=Coney Island

The Foster Avenue sewer consisted of a brick tunnel with an inside diameter of ten feet. But in 1906, the surface Brighton line was depressed into a trench fifteen feet below the street and the Foster sewer had to be lowered to accommodate that railroad bed. Accordingly the sewer for a stretch of 120 feet was flattened by two feet but widened to 14.5 feet so as not to reduce its capacity. The Glenwood sewer was smaller and The Grade Crossing Elimination Project failed to inform the contractor of its existence. As fate would have it, the excavation of the Brighton line began at Glenwood Road where the contractor unexpectedly encountered “a gas pipe, water pipe, sewer and some electric and telephone conduits.” They were all lowered under the roadbed.

1906 Foster Sewer at Brighton Line

Fun Fact: The Foster sewer was capped with a reinforced concrete top as it passed under the Brighton trench – still visible today in the center of the roadbed just beyond the Newkirk Plaza station platforms. Moreover, a separate 36 inch circular brick drainage sewer was created under Newkirk Avenue to collect all the rainfall from the Brighton trench and send it to the large Paerdegat Inlet Sewer under Farragut Road. To create a steady flow of the Brighton storm water, a slope of only three-quarters of an inch for every thousand feet was necessary. Gravity does the rest.

Alas, the sewer redirection did not save the oysters of Jamaica Bay. In 1921 the City Health Department, concerned about typhus, banned their collection in the Bay and by 1929, all oyster beds in the City had been closed. Soon, concerns spread from oysters to people as Brooklyn’s beaches drew huge crowds. Enlightened pioneers in public health pointed out that bathing in those near-shore waters, increasingly polluted by raw sewage, was an epidemic waiting to happen. The result? In 1935 the City built its first Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) on Knapp Street in Mill Basin (called the Coney Island Facility) which now processes the sewage for the eastern half of Brooklyn. In 1952, another WPCP opened at Owl’s Head, which now handles all the waste of western Brooklyn.

Since those sewers were built, swaths of Brooklyn gradually disappeared under solid surfaces that prevented rain from soaking into the earth: asphalt, concrete, stone, brick, sidewalks, patios, driveways, parking lots. Flooding again proliferated in southern Brooklyn neighborhoods. And so a new system was created: Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) to catch and temporarily store the runoff in concrete tanks. A huge CSO was completed at the old Paerdegat site in 2011, catching the overflow during heavy rain, storing and then pumping it to the Knapp Street plant when conditions abate. A two tank CSO is now being constructed for the Owl’s Head system along the Gowanus Canal at Butler Street, and at the foot of 2^nd Avenue near 6^th Street.

Amazingly enough, Major Asserson foresaw the changing climate in 1900, publicly predicting that rainstorms of five inches or more would occur much more frequently. Which is why Brooklyn became the beneficiary of the largest trunk sewers of their time. I think the Major would agree we could use a few more nowadays. And some new catch basins on Dekoven Court, Glenwood Road and Avenue H.

Fun Fact: Two Flatbush men, Henry Meyer, whose Germania realty company developed East Flatbush, South Midwood, Midwood Park and West South Midwood, and John Corbin, the builder of most of our one family houses here, created the Jamaica Bay Improvement Association in 1907 and began lobbying for a new port that would divert traffic from the teaming docks in Red Hook and Manhattan. In 1918 Meyer was appointed Deputy Dock Commissioner of New York City and drafted plans to create channels in the Bay that could accommodate more ocean-going vessels, followed by docks, storage facilities and eventually railroad spurs to and from the LIRR Bay Ridge freight line at Ralph Avenue and the City’s new airport at Floyd Bennett Field. And where would this port be located? At the foot of Paerdegat Creek! In 1930 this plan was approved by the City and the Creek was damned, transforming Paerdegat Inlet into Paerdegat Basin. However, the Depression cut off the funding needed to complete this grand project. In 1934, Meyer retired from his City post and the Project was never revived. The focus on the Bay, however, undoubtedly spurred the building of Cross-Bay Boulevard, Floyd Bennett Field, and the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. Finally, we have Robert Moses to thank for saving the Bay from being “improved.” He put an end to the City's garbage dumping there and preserved what is today a wonderful wildlife refuge.