For Gatehouses at Central Park Reservoir, a Second Act?

by

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll learn about the gatehouses in Central Park that the city wants to repurpose. And, with 99 days to the Democratic primary for mayor, we’ll also get details on how much money the candidates have raised so far.

To many New Yorkers, the reservoir in Central Park is a body of water surrounded by a 1.5-mile path they can run, jog or just walk on. Rohit Aggarwala sees it that way. He jogs there himself.

But Aggarwala, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, also sees possibilities in the two stone gatehouses at opposite ends of the reservoir.

The city is looking to repurpose the two gatehouses, built during the Civil War as control points for water from upstate flowing into Manhattan through aqueducts. The reservoir no longer feeds into the city’s water supply; the gatehouses now control only the water levels in the reservoir.

They were designed as monuments, as municipal structures often were in the 19th century. The south gatehouse, not far from Fifth Avenue and the 86th Street Transverse, is topped by an imposing clock with whitish Roman numerals on a dark round face. According to a description from Aggarwala’s agency, the back door leads to a balcony with “stunning views” of the site (whose official name is the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir), Central Park and the cityscape.

But inside that gatehouse? It “isn’t exactly pretty,” Aggarwala said. The factorylike space is dominated by water-pumping machinery that probably predates World War II.

The question is how to adapt the gatehouses. Aggarwala is looking for ideas and “appropriate entities” to tackle a transformation. He said the south gatehouse “could be a museum of water” or perhaps “a classroom where kids come and learn about the water system.”

But nothing is set. His agency has issued a “request for information,” a call for ideas from groups that could develop plans to use the gatehouses as “multifunctional space accessible to the public.” The deadline to respond is April 7. Aggarwala said that the agency would remove “equipment we don’t need anymore” — huge motors that once drove pumps to increase the pressure of reservoir water going into mains.

But the equipment to control levels in the reservoir will remain. It was decommissioned as a source of drinking water in 1993. “There was no controlling what a runner might throw in,” he said.

The reservoir was built from 1858 to 1862 as a holding tank for water from the city’s new upstate watersheds. At first, Aggarwala said, the gatehouses controlled “how much water flowed down Fifth Avenue” to two other reservoirs, one on the site of the Great Lawn in the park, the other at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where the New York Public Library was built in the 1890s.

The city invited the public to see the reservoir before it was filled for the first time. The New York Times was awe-struck by the pipes and valves controlling the reservoir, noting that there was enough water “to supply the entire city, at the present rate of consumption, for about a month.” That’s about what the city uses in a day now, Aggarwala said.

The level is currently low because the reservoir has not been refilled since a drought watch was lifted in January. The city’s reservoirs were 83 percent full on Friday, though the normal level at this time of year is 92.4 percent.

The gatehouses were not just functional when they were new; they were something to look at — although some New Yorkers didn’t like what they saw. William H. Rideing panned them in Scribner’s magazine in 1877 as “very conspicuous and, also, very ugly because they pretend to be decorative.” He loved the look of the machinery inside, though: “Every bit of brass and steel work is as bright as a new pin.”

The gatehouses, like the reservoir itself, reflected a level of civic pride that was “right up there with Lincoln saying we will keep building the Capitol” in Washington during the Civil War, Aggarwala said, adding: “New York City said we would keep building the water system” and the gatehouses, which he called “great examples of New York City building style from that period — a lot of ornamentation that said, ‘This is New York City investing in its future.’”

Weather

Expect a sunny day with a high in the low 60s. The evening will be clear, and the temperature will drop into the mid-40s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until March 31 (Eid al-Fitr).

The Democratic primary for mayor is 99 days away, and the campaign contributions are rolling in. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a progressive from Queens, are leading the Democrats who want to unseat Mayor Eric Adams, whose campaign declined to say before a Monday deadline how much he had taken in.

The deadline was for the candidates to submit their most recent fund-raising reports. The figures gave an indication of who seems best positioned to spend heavily on advertising.

Cuomo, who has led in polls, raised $1.5 million from more than 2,800 donors in the 13 days after he announced his candidacy on March 1. Among those donating to his campaign were Geoffrey Berman, whom President Trump fired as the U.S. attorney in 2020; Jessica Seinfeld, a cookbook author who is married to the comedian Jerry Seinfeld; and Cuomo’s former wife, Kerry Kennedy.

Cuomo said he had been “humbled by the depth and breadth of the outpouring of support.” He expects to receive matching funds based on $330,000 in eligible contributions from donors who live in the city.

Mamdani has raised more than $840,000 over the past two months and has more than 16,000 donors — an unusually good showing for a candidate who was not widely known until recently.

Among other candidates, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, raised $225,000 during the recent filing period that ran from January to March, bringing his total fund-raising haul to roughly $6.7 million with public matching funds. And Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker who announced her campaign on March 5, raised $128,000 in her first five days in the race.

Her campaign said she had not yet met the threshold for the city’s public matching-funds program, which awards $8 for every dollar donated by a city resident, up to $250 per contributor. That puts her campaign at a disadvantage; the earliest she could receive public matching funds would be May 30, less than a month before the primary.

METROPOLITAN diary

Dear Diary:

I went with good friends to a performance of the Nancy Harris play “The Beacon” at the Irish Repertory Theater on 22nd Street. It is a powerful play about a dysfunctional family hiding secrets, and it hit home hard for me.

“Did you like the play?” one of my friends asked me innocently after the performance.

Still reeling, I said I would rather not discuss it and that I had found the play difficult to take.

A friendly woman standing nearby spoke up.

“I’m a psychologist,” she said with a smile, “in case you’d like to schedule a session.”

— Howard Husock

Leave a Comment