The Hackensack Water Works:
Sparkling History, Cloudy Future

BY CLIFFORD W. ZINK

One hundred years ago the Hackensack Water Works was in the forefront of national efforts to deliver clean water to the public. Some of the finest engineers in the country developed innovations at the Hackensack Water Company's New Milford Plant that made it a national model of water works engineering. As Bergen County historian Adrian Leiby wrote in 1969; "Standard texts on water supply engineering now refer to the New Milford Plant, along with Louisville, Kentucky, and Little Falls, New Jersey, as one of the great pioneering plants in the field, one of the plants which laid the groundwork for most of the later filter plants in the nation."

Today the plant is again on the front line, but the campaign this time is about preserving some of New Jersey's finest heritage. Like the Hudson and Manhattan Powerhouse in Jersey City, the Hackensack Water Works is at the center of a struggle between public officials who want to save taxpayer dollars and private groups that want to preserve great symbols of America's technological leadership.

Located in Oradell in Bergen County, the New Milford Plant is nationally significant as the earliest example of the American system of mechanical filtration on a scale large enough to enable the delivery of purified water in many cities of the country, and it is a rare early example of a complete waterworks with both purification and delivery. While many people take clean water for granted today, the plant symbolizes the late 19th and early 20th Century development of municipal water supplies that were essential to the growth of American cities and towns and to the health of their residents.

The plant occupies most of historic Van Buskirk Island at the tidal head of the Hackensack River. The Plant contains a Pumping Station, begun in 1882 and expanded five times over thirty years, and a Filtration Plant, begun in 1903 and expanded twice in fifty years, that the water company operated until 1990. Most of the complex pre-dates World War I and its site, buildings and equipment are remarkably intact. In 2001 the New Milford Plant was listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places and designated an American Treasure by the Save America's Treasures program of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Since the water company donated the plant to Bergen County in 1993 along with $1 million, it has been the center of a preservation battle that has reached statewide and national levels. On one side is the Bergen County Administration, which after giving up on efforts to develop a public/non-profit partnership to preserve the complex, has developed a plan that calls for demolishing most of it and creating a "walled garden" ruin out of remaining fragments. The rest of the island would be developed as a passive park. County officials argue that they don't want to burden Bergen taxpayers with restoring and maintaining the complex nor expose people to the hazards of visiting a museum in a floodplain. Some environmentalists support the County's plan to get rid of buildings and structures that they believe should never have been built within the river corridor.

On the other side are the Water Works Conservancy, a non-profit in Oradell formed in 1996 by local citizens with a vision to restore the complex as a museum and education center, and the State and National Coalition to Save the Water Works in Trenton, which includes the Advocates for New Jersey History, the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the New Jersey Historical Society, Preservation New Jersey, Save America's Treasures, the Society for Industrial Archeology, and US/ICOMOS ­ the International Committee on Monuments and Sites. Preservationists see the site as a national historic gem that should be preserved by a non-profit within the proposed county park as a museum and education center funded by public and private grants and a capital campaign. According to Robert M. Vogel, Curator Emeritus of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at the Smithsonian Institution, the New Milford Plant has the potential to become a "unique monument to the nation's water works industry."

Origins of New Milford Pumping Station

In 1969 Adrian Leiby chronicled the history of the Hackensack Water Company in a book published by the Bergen County Historical Society. A native of Hackensack, Leiby was an attorney and a director of the water company, as well as an accomplished historian with several works on the history of Dutch New Jersey, including "The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley" and "The Early Dutch and Swedish Settlers of New Jersey." Leiby traced the roots of the company to two prominent Bergen Dutchmen. In 1867 Charles H. Voorhis, a lawyer, landowner, banker, and a prominent Republican who was born at the Voorhis homestead on Spring Valley Road in Paramus, chartered the Cherry Hill Water & Gas Company to supply water to Hackensack. In 1869 Garret Ackerson, a businessman and banker, militia officer, and prominent Democrat who was born in Pascack, chartered the Hackensack Water Company for the same purpose.

With the Civil War and the expansion of railroads, the Bergen landscape began to change from farming to suburban development. Hackensack's mid-century population quadrupled in twenty years to nearly 4,000 residents in 1869, changing from a "complacent country village...to a cosmopolitan suburban town." In November 1869 an editor of the Bergen County Democrat wrote: "Hackensack is rapidly advancing in wealth and population in spite of old fogeyism; we have a superior quality of gas in our streets and we need pure water in our houses as well. We cannot get along with the supply furnished us from our superficial wells and cisterns; what we need is a broad, liberal and gushing supply permeating through our houses, and affording every family enough and to spare for bathing as well as culinary and drinking purposes. A good bath is a luxury which cannot be too highly appreciated, but it can be obtained but in few houses in Hackensack except at the expense of much toil and trouble. Let the...water company build their works and give our people a good supply of water and it will pay from the start."

Little happened until 1873 when Voorhis bought up the Hackensack Water Company stock and merged his company into it. He hired the engineering and construction firm of Bacot & Ward in Jersey City to build the Cherry Hill Reservoir on the John Zabriskie farm across the Hackensack River from New Bridge. The company initiated a gravity-fed water service in October 1874 with a "Water Celebration" that included a parade and the dedication of a fountain donated by Bacot & Ward on the Public Green in Hackensack. In a speech the president of the Hackensack Improvement Commission proclaimed: "the people should feel proud of the water and grateful to the gentlemen who had initiated the enterprise."

After the tough 1870s economy had driven the water company into bankruptcy, the John Stevens Estate, of the Hoboken steamship inventor and Camden & Amboy Railroad promoter, acquired a large stake in it in 1881 and reorganized it to supply water to Hoboken with Robert de Forest as president. A prominent New York philanthropist, Wall Street lawyer, and Central Railroad of New Jersey officer, de Forest ran the company through four decades of rapid expansion. A few weeks after sealing the Hoboken supply contract, the company acquired J. & H. Van Buskirk's grist mill on an eleven acre island in the Hackensack River at New Milford. Known as Van Buskirk Island, the site had been occupied by mills since before the Revolutionary War. It was at the head of navigation and brack- ish water, and a railroad along the river connected it with Hackensack, providing a water line route as well as transportation for construction materials and operating supplies.

To design the new plant de Forest hired Charles Benjamin Brush of Spielmann & Brush, Civil Engineers, of Hoboken as the company's Chief Engineer. Brush was "a college professor, the engineer of three water companies and a street railway company, a consulting engineer of the New York and New Jersey Bridge Company, and...a great pioneer in the field of water engineering." Leiby described the 1882 En-gine House that Brush designed for the company as "a monument to his skill as an architect."

Designers of the Fairmount Water Works in 1818 in Philadelphia and the Louisville Water Company in 1860 in Louisville, Kentucky, had used Neo-Classical design to relate their buildings to the great engineering works of ancient Rome. (See sidebar on page 25). For Hackensack Brush designed a small temple of water supply with the Romanesque detailing that was popular in the late 19th century. The Engine House established the company's commitment to substantial construction, with thick brick walls, large windows and doors capped by arches, and slate roofs trimmed in copper with projecting eaves. Brush installed a three-million-gallon-per-day (MGD) Worthington steam engine and the plant began pumping water to Hackensack and Hoboken in November of 1882. Because the river water was often turbid, or cloudy, particularly after spring rains, Brush built a 110-foot wide basin to allow suspended particles to settle prior to pumping. While pumping and distribution dominated the company's early activities, cleaning the river water would soon become equally important.

To insure a steady supply in Hoboken, the company built the Weehawken Reservoir and Water Tower in 1883. Architect Frederick Clarke Withers modeled the Tower after those of the Middle Ages, and <I>Engineering News</I> described it in 1886 as "the most important structure of its kind in the country". When the reservoir water acquired "a very unpleasant vegetable odor and taste" from a "thick coat of bluish-green algae," Brush installed an aeration system patented by Albert Leeds, a Professor of Chemistry at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. "We forced air into our pipes in 1884 and up to this time we have had no repetition of trouble," Brush later wrote. "We are now aerating the water in the reservoirs as well as in the pipes. The public sees the air bubbling up in the reservoir. It looks like springs and creates a favorable impression." While a shopping center replaced the reservoir in the 1980s, preservationists successfully fought to save the Tower. Today the Weehawken Tower is a local landmark listed on the National Register and the Town of Weehawken is planning a restoration.

In the 1880s and 1890s Bergen and Hudson counties grew rapidly. Trolley and interurban lines brought more people to the old towns of Hackensack and Hoboken and to new villages like Englewood and Ridgewood. The Borough of Oradell was established in 1895 and Van Buskirk Island became part of it. Dense construction raised the demand for fire hydrants, and the elevated villages on the east side of Bergen required extra pumping. To meet this demand, Brush designed additions to the Engine House in 1886 and 1891 that replicated his original designs and he installed two additional Worthington pumps. To address new turbidity complaints, the company installed floaters and skimmers on the settling basin to help remove some of the foreign matter. In 1898, following Charles Brush's death, the company erected a new Power House designed by his firm and built a two-story addition to the Engine House for two large Allis Chalmers vertical triple expansion (VTE) reciprocating pumps, with capacities of 12 and 18 MGD. The 1898 construction included innovations like steel roof trusses and additional ornamentation like stained glass windows.

The National Quest for Pure Water

Bergen and Hudson residents were far from alone in their concerns about water quality. Problems in Passaic, Essex, and Somerset counties also contributed to New Jersey's early involvement in national purification efforts. In the late 19th century cities and towns all over the country struggled with dirty municipal water. Some cities advised residents to let their yellowish-brown tap water stand for a few minutes before using it, so particles could settle to the bottom. Excessive organic matter also created foul odors in the water. Water reports from different parts of the country stated: "The odor was so bad that it would be almost impossible to take it as far as the mouth to taste it. Horses refused it at the street watering-troughs and dogs fled from it." "Strong, fishy odor and taste, also odor of smartweed. Popular complaint was dead fish in water mains. Very rank." "The odor was so strong that we had to discontinue sprinkling the streets and lawns." "The water is so bad that we have had to shut off the supply from June to December."

The most dangerous conditions were undetectable to the senses. Bacteria from untreated sewage dumped into rivers caused diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, and gastroenteritis. Residents in downstream cities usually suffered the worst and newspapers chronicled typhoid and yellow fever epidemics. Typhoid was rampant in Lawrence, Massachusetts, eight miles below Lowell. Philadelphia reported 450 typhoid deaths in the first three months of 1899. Polluted water threatened future prosperity, as one observer noted, "no city can grow beyond the possibilities of its water supply, as the water supply limits increase in population."

Some European cities filtered public water, but there were few similar efforts in America prior to the Civil War. In 1866, St. Louis civil engineer J.P. Kirkwood studied the "English" system of slow sand filtration in 19 European cities that filtered water though layers of fine sand and gravel designed "to remove suspended matter ... earthy materials ... fine veget-able fibers ... and minute organisms." The cost of building and maintaining sand filters on a scale large enough to remove the "clayey discoloration" of American river water deterred many cities from acting. With Kirkwood as consulting engineer, Poughkeepsie built the first slow sand filter in the U.S. in 1872. It worked intermittently, but other sand filters in cities like Columbus, Ohio, failed since small clay particles slipped through the sand and left the water yellowish-brown.

In the late 19th Century, several inventors in Europe and America patented "mechanical filters" with revolving de-vices to stir the sand during backwashing. The wood and metal filter tanks took up less space and filtered water up to 40 times faster than slow sand filters, and were often good at removing clay but were less effective in removing bacteria. In 1884 Isaac Smith Hyatt, an associate of the Newark Filtering Company, patented a coagulation filtration process that used a positively-charged chemical agent to attract negatively-charged impurities in water. The resulting coagulation, or curdling, produced a jelly-like substance called flocculent that was easier to filter out than individual particles. In 1885 the filtering company installed the first pressurized Hyatt filters with a "coagulating apparatus" in Somerville. The process soon became know as "rapid sand filtration", "mechanical filtration", or the "American" system of filtration since most of its development occurred here in efforts to clean river water. However, the early mechanical filters were unreliable and expensive to maintain, and Hyatt's coagulation patent impeded their use by requiring licensing fees.

In the 1880s many professional scientists and engineers joined the quest for pure water. The American Water Works Association formed in 1881 and the New England Water Works Association in 1882. In their published proceedings and in those of engineering, chemical, and bacteriological societies, a group of emerging "sanitary engineers" openly shared their efforts to purify water and to treat sewage. Illustrated reports with peer "discussions" aimed at water works superintendents and engineers promoted continuous innovations around the country. In 1903 sanitary engineer George Whipple wrote: "At the present time there is no more promising field for a young graduate engineer than that of superintending the operation of filter plants."

In 1887 the Massachusetts Board of Health established the Lawrence Experiment Station in Lawrence to study the treatment of Merrimack River water which was heavily polluted with sewage. Allen Hazen, a chemist and engineer, supervised the construction of experimental slow sand filters designed to reduce bacteria. George Warren Fuller, an MIT-trained chemist and bacteriologist, tested various sand and gravel configurations and gradually produced a satisfactory reduction of bacteria. When the city opened a slow sand filter based on the results in 1893, the number of typhoid cases plummeted. In 1895 Hazen wrote "the first treatise on the art and science of filtration", but he paid scant attention to mechanical filtration, which remained unproven. The Lawrence experiments, the city filters, and Hazen's treatise "established American confidence in filtration at a time when water borne diseases, endemic and epidemic, was taking a heavy toll; at a time when American cities and water companies were at last willing to pay the cost of efficient purification."

In Albany, which had an excessive typhoid death rate, Hazen supervised the construction of a large slow sand filtration plant, which opened in July 1899. In October, "feeling with some justification that it was in the forefront of progress, the Hackensack Water Company hired Hazen to 'see what results could be accomplished by the different methods of filtration.'"

To see if mechanical filtration could remove clay as well as bacteria, George Fuller began experiments in 1895 on Ohio River water for the Louisville Water Company in Louisville, Kentucky, and soon demonstrated that muddy water could be successfully treated with carefully controlled coagulation. Fuller's Louisville experiments, which he described in a "classic" 1897 report, "brought mechanical filtration to a point where it was able to deal in an efficient and practical manner with many of the most difficult American waters."

In 1898 Fuller confirmed his Louisville findings in experiments he conducted for the Cincinnati Water Commission on Ohio River water, which he described as "almost always unsatisfactory and uninviting, and for about half the time so turbid that it is repulsive when considered for domestic use." In 1899 Fuller reported to the commission: "the experience and data indicate clearly that the American system would be less difficult to operate; would be somewhat cheaper, would give the same satisfactory quality of filtered water; and could be much more readily enlarged for future requirement."

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