As New York City expanded in the early 20th century, the need for water grew. The first water brought in from Westchester County was from the Croton Reservoir in 1842, which was enlarged several decades later. When that proved insufficient, the City built a dam in Kensico in 1885, to collect water from the Bronx River and Byram River. When the city’s needs grew further, they set out to construct an even larger dam in Kensico, creating a reservoir that would supply the city with waters from existing reservoirs.

Collected here is an extensive photographic record of the first years of the project, which was undertaken by the H.S. Kerbaugh Company, perhaps the largest contractor building public works projects in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work was mostly done by Italian immigrants - the collection includes several photographs of the quarry town built for the project, which provided a school, sewing classes for women, and English-language classes for the workers.

The project was massive and happened in several stages, with the demolition of the previous dam and the building of a new railroad line to transport stone and debris to and from the site. The dam itself, which is 1,843 feet high, would take four years to build, at a cost north of $15,000,000. The album shows these undertakings in exhaustive detail, with the scale and scope of the project on full display. The photographer may have been a C. Beccannon, who is credited in one of the photographs. Equipment on display includes excavators, scaffolding, stacks of concrete blocks and everything else needed for such an ambitious undertaking. The album records the period up until December 31, 1913, and construction would continue into 1915. Overall an important and exhaustive documentation of one of New York City’s most important public works construction projects.