By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the water of the Collect was unusable. A burgeoning population and northward-expanding city meant contamination by the tanneries, breweries, and other small factories that began to surround the fertile pond. According to Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, the authors of Gotham, the Daily Advertiser printed an article around this time suggesting that the source of much of the fifth was not more industry, but rather the everyday use of the pond by the mixed-race population that lodged nearby. “It’s like a fair every day with whites, and blacks, washing their clothes, blankets, and things….sudds and filth are emptied into this pond, besides dead dogs, cats” and other foul refuse. While such descriptions might have had more to do with social anxieties over an increasingly diverse urban population, the fact that the pond held stagnant, non-potable water was undisputed. After years of encouraging the city’s Common Council to drain the Collect and its swampy tributaries, the Health Commission won its case in 1803. Ten years later, the filled-in area was mostly dry land and the remnants of the ill-fated Collect were almost totally obscured.

Map of the Collect Pond.

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