Collect Pond

[1] Fed by an underground spring, it was located in a valley, with Bayard Mount (at 110 feet or 34 metres the tallest hill in lower Manhattan) to the northeast and Kalck Hoek (Dutch for Chalk Point, named for the numerous oyster shell middens left by the indigenous Native American inhabitants) to the west.

Collect Pond was used as a terms of boundary for night watch duties in 1731 under John Montgomerie's charter during the British rule in New York City.

He claims that both Fulton and Livingston were present during Collect Pond tests and in fact depicts both, as well as Fitch and himself, in a paddlewheel steam ship in the upper left quadrant of the broadside.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant proposed cleaning the pond and making it a centerpiece of a recreational park, around which the residential areas of the city could grow.

This was accomplished with soil partially obtained from leveling the nearby hills of Bayard's Mount and Kalck Hoek, and by digging a canal to the north to encourage the water to drain into the river.

The buried vegetation began to release methane gas (a byproduct of decomposition) and the area, still in a natural depression, lacked adequate storm sewers.

Houses shifted on their foundations, the unpaved streets were often buried in a foot of mud and mixed with human and animal excrement, and mosquitoes bred in the stagnant pools created by the poor drainage.

The neighborhood known as "Five Points", a notorious slum, developed near the former eastern bank of the Collect and owed its existence in some measure to the poor landfill job (completed in 1811) which created swampy, mosquito-ridden conditions on land that had originally had more well-to-do residents.

Most middle and upper class inhabitants fled the area, leaving the neighborhood open to poor immigrants that began arriving in the early 1820s.

[9] New York's jail, nicknamed "The Tombs", was built on Centre Street in 1838 on the site of the pond and was constructed on a huge platform of hemlock logs in an attempt to give it secure foundations.

When the original Tombs building was condemned and demolished at the end of the century, large concrete caissons were emplaced to bedrock, as much as 140 feet below street level, in order to give its replacement more secure foundations.

Garbati's work, a reversal of Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa, an Italian Renaissance bronze, was reimagined by MeToo movement advocates as a symbol of feminist triumph.