Stanley Cloud's Blog

After 9/11, when working crews were still digging through -- and deep beneath -- the terrible wreckage of the World Trade Center, among the things they uncovered were what appeared to be two hollowed-out logs, each about 10 feet long. But what were they, and what were they for? When experts inspected them closely, they determined that the logs were wooden water pipes, dating from around 1800.

Once that was established, it was relatively easy to fit into place some more pieces of the puzzle. Almost certainly, the wooden pipes were originally buried under the cobblestone streets of old New York by workers employed by the Manhattan Company, which had been created in 1799 by none other than Aaron Burr, soon to be vice president of the United States. Burr described his new enterprise as a water company and pledged that it would provide the people of lower Manhattan with fresh, clean water pumped from the Bronx River by steam pumps through cast-iron pipes.

In truth, the Manhattan Company's main purpose was to be a bank -- the Manhattan Bank (later the Chase-Manhattan Bank, later still JPMorgan Chase) to compete with the Bank of New York, of which Aaron Burr's political enemy, Alexander Hamilton, was co-founder. Once Burr's bank opened its doors, he quickly cut back on his grandiose water plans, opting for, among other things, wooden pipes instead of the far more expensive cast-iron type he had initially promised. It was two of those wooden pipes that were uncovered during the post-9/11 excavations I described above.

Equally interesting, we know who made those wooden pipes: a successful local carpenter and builder (what we would call today a general contractor) named Ezra Weeks, who only recently had completed building a mansion on the northern end of Manhattan Island for a shipping magnate named Archibald Gracie. In the 20th century the mansion would become the official residence of New York City's mayors. Moreover, the same Ezra Weeks would soon build a new residence for Alexander Hamilton on the Harlem Heights.

As if these things weren’t coincidence enough, Ezra Weeks had a younger brother named Levi Weeks. In January, 1800, Levi was arrested and charged with the murder of his fiancée, Gulielma Sands, whose body had just been found at the bottom of The Manhattan Well. And it was that well, not the Bronx River far to the north, that turned out to be the main source of what little water was ever delivered by Burr's Manhattan Company.

All of this -- plus the famous duel during which Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton -- is the subject of my historical novel, The ManhattanWell.☐