J. Waldo Smith

In every uprising of the New York citizen army against the strangle-hold of a corrupt political cabal, the electoral campaign brings convincing evidence of waste, incompetence, and mismanagement. It is sometimes asked wonderingly how, with all this incubus, New York City could possibly have kept in step with the physical requirements of a great metropolis. The answer to this question, as to others which concern the machinery of existence for a city of seven millions, is that there are some municipal activities with which Tammany, in its capacity as clearing-house for graft, did not dare to meddle. During twenty successive years, Jonas Waldo Smith planned, contrived and constructed the city’s present extraordinarily complete system of water supply. Scarcely observed or discussed by New York’s political constituency, the task of damming and storing on the mountainside the waters of the Catskills, of carrying the huge flow by tunnel down to tidewater and under the Hudson River, then re-distributing the immense supply to the city’s population, was quietly effected. Considering the physical obstacles surmounted, the complexity of the purposes which had to be attained, scientific judgment has recognized the result as an achievement perhaps without parallel in engineering.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1934 Century Association Yearbook