This was a place I had pinned on my map years ago, but always kind of brushed it off as not worth going to, however my friend had factored it in to the day trip he planned and I actually didn't realise it was the same place until later on.
There isn't much in the way of information out there about this place. It was built some time in the 1880s at the foot of Lake Pocantico, near Sleepy Hollow (yes, that Sleepy Hollow) which is not far outside of New York City. The works consisted of a stone built pumping station, a service building beside two large concrete basins, a large storage tank and a caretakers house (which burned down in the mid-2000s). It supplied the North Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow areas with their first running water supplies, with Pocantico Lake also being used for ice harvesting during the winter months. Due to water contamination, in the 1920s the North Tarrytown area was connected to New York City's Croton Aqueduct system, which was a massive 41-mile long gravity fed aqueduct system linking the Croton River north of the city, with storage reservoirs in Manhattan, and after this the purification methods used at New Rochelle were improved following periods of litigation. By the early 1990s, the water works was only servicing a couple of dozen homes in the area. In 1992 the whole property was sold to the county, who retained a license to operate the pumping station but it appears that it was never brought back online after this, and has sat derelict ever since. For years it was wide open, but within the last decade it has been made more secure/less unsightly. The pumping station sits on a relatively new park trail and looks really out of place completely covered in vegetation and undergrowth.
The building is composed of the central pumping station room which contains a large steam driven pump, a connected room with six large metal tanks, and a room nearly totally buried under debris with more pipework in it. The lighting in here was horrible, the roof is missing a lot of wood on one side meaning there is some really harsh lighting inside, but I did the best with what I could.
Cheers for looking
There isn't much in the way of information out there about this place. It was built some time in the 1880s at the foot of Lake Pocantico, near Sleepy Hollow (yes, that Sleepy Hollow) which is not far outside of New York City. The works consisted of a stone built pumping station, a service building beside two large concrete basins, a large storage tank and a caretakers house (which burned down in the mid-2000s). It supplied the North Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow areas with their first running water supplies, with Pocantico Lake also being used for ice harvesting during the winter months. Due to water contamination, in the 1920s the North Tarrytown area was connected to New York City's Croton Aqueduct system, which was a massive 41-mile long gravity fed aqueduct system linking the Croton River north of the city, with storage reservoirs in Manhattan, and after this the purification methods used at New Rochelle were improved following periods of litigation. By the early 1990s, the water works was only servicing a couple of dozen homes in the area. In 1992 the whole property was sold to the county, who retained a license to operate the pumping station but it appears that it was never brought back online after this, and has sat derelict ever since. For years it was wide open, but within the last decade it has been made more secure/less unsightly. The pumping station sits on a relatively new park trail and looks really out of place completely covered in vegetation and undergrowth.
The building is composed of the central pumping station room which contains a large steam driven pump, a connected room with six large metal tanks, and a room nearly totally buried under debris with more pipework in it. The lighting in here was horrible, the roof is missing a lot of wood on one side meaning there is some really harsh lighting inside, but I did the best with what I could.
Cheers for looking
