“Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink,” Coleridge’s sailor complains in the famous 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The mariner is talking about the plight on his ship, but he may as well be describing the city of New York. That year, a yellow fever epidemic led to an outcry over the city’s drinking water shortage. Foul water was believed at the time to cause not only that outbreak but a host of other diseases.
Sante is a longtime resident of Ulster County, 80 miles up river from NYC. The Dutch settled the area in the 1600s, establishing little towns around dairy farms and other small industries. The sparse population was used by the city as a primary point in justifying the sacrifice necessary to meet desperate municipal requirements.
Just the idea that water usage should be monitored was used by political parties of every stripe. Liberals might argue that charging poor people for their water was an undue burden, but without measuring or conservation, the city was wasting millions of gallons a day. Astoundingly, Sante cites the fact that in 1999 around 65 percent of apartment buildings in the city were still unmetered.
As with every piece of Sante’s writing I’ve read, the prose is crystalline and the pages are richly illuminated with maps, adverts, and period photography—often from her own extensive collection of vernacular materials and ephemera. The visual matter serves to further accentuate the intractable issue at the heart of this book: how to help an urban population without utterly destroying a rural one.
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