Pump House - from southeast
May 27, 2002
The New Rochelle Water Company ruins are part of a 120-acre property along the Pocantico River in the Town of Mount Pleasant. The site consisted of a stone pump house, a wood frame caretaker's cottage (burned on or about early 2006), a smaller service building with concrete retaining basins and a large metal water tank.
The company was providing water
to local residents in the 1880s, when it contracted with North Tarrytown
to install the first water system in the village. The nearby Pocantico
Lake was also the site of an ice harvesting operation in the winter. North
Tarrytown connected to New York City's Croton Aqueduct system in the 1920s.
Purification of the Pocantico water was improved after litigation between
the village and New Rochelle Water Company at that time.
The New Rochelle Water Company
was servicing about two dozen homes in the neighborhood when the property
was sold to Westchester County in 1992. A license to operate the pump house
was maintained by the company, but it appears the facility has not been
in service since then. Legislation to authorize a perpetual easement over
part of the property and buildings to the Village of Briarcliff Manor was
approved in 2000. The legislation also called for the County Parks Department
to remove the "unsightly former residence," while transferring maintenance
and operation of the pump station to Briarcliff Manor.
The pump house and other functionally related structures
still exist as of early 2007. The caretakers residence burned to the ground
sometime between July 2005 and July 2006.
Pump House - west entrance
>
Caretaker's Residence
This industrial relic reminds me of the
skeleton of another dinosaur, the coelecanth.
The water tanks can be seen through
the windows of this machine room.
More Photographs:
New
Rochelle Water Company - July 2005
New
Rochelle Water Company - January 2007
Ruins of
Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow and vicinity
This page and all photographs copyright © 2007 by
Robert J. Yasinsac.
Copying or reproducing images without the permission of Robert Yasinsac is
prohibited.