On November 1, 1898, photographer James Reuel Smith recorded an unidentified boy working the pump well outside Weissbein’s roadhouse on Caton Street in Brooklyn. The scene preserves an everyday task easily overlooked in histories of the growing city: obtaining water not by turning a household faucet, but by working a pump.
Smith made such overlooked places the subject of a remarkable documentary project. Traveling by bicycle, principally through northern Manhattan and the Bronx, he photographed springs and wells and carefully recorded their locations and conditions. His smaller group of Brooklyn photographs extended that record beyond the areas at the center of his survey. Together, the images documented water sources that continued to serve New Yorkers even as urban development and expanding municipal supplies made many of them obsolete.
The photograph does not tell us when Weissbein’s pump disappeared, or what the boy’s connection to the roadhouse was. Its power lies in what Smith chose to preserve: a working well, an unnamed child, and a small routine that once connected daily life to the water beneath the ground. As the city changed around such places, he ensured that at least their images would remain.
