Aquaculture

Water, water everywhere...

You'd be forgiven for mistaking the dark line that winds through Queens and Brooklyn for the BQE. It's actually the route of City Tunnel 2, part of New York's far-reaching water supply system. If you're like me, you eagerly await the arrival of the annual New York City Drinking Water Supply and Quality Report mailed out by the DEP.

And this year, water supply junkies have a real treat, the Queens Museum of Art has put on permanent exhibit the large-scale Watershed Relief Map, which depicts in 3-D (no glasses required) how our water is brought into the City from as far away as the Schoharie Resevoir in Delaware County. The exhibit also features many great photos from the building of the system, like this one of the transport of a 66-inch section valve for Tunnel 2 under the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City in 1931.

It brings back the opening of Jimmy Breslin's great 1986 novel, Table Money, about the "sandhogs," or tunnel workers, who maintain the system--like their forbears who built the system, many Irish American. Breslin begins the story with the water that "runs downhill on land that drops one foot in each ten thousand over the 115 miles to the city." As Breslin informs us, it is only because of this unique geological feature that a city of 8 million could exist here.

While the prose is not always as lyrical as Jimmy's, it's worth picking up your copy of the Report. You can call 311 or get if from the the DEP web site.