The Ridgewood Reservoir, hardly a mile from Bushwick. — Photos by Paul Cox

“This is Bushwick, and there’s not much to see here. We just wanted to get some extra miles in.”

Lauri Hewie, our guide for the day, tried not to get any hopes up as she led a group of Shorewalkers and Appalachian Mountain Club members from the Gates Ave. J-train stop down Bushwick Avenue on a quiet, mild Sunday. Lauri is a local, however, and meant no hard feelings. She just knew that South Bushwick wasn’t the sort of place hiking clubs usually go in for. Nevertheless, even after we left the neighborhood behind we followed the conduits of its history far into Queens.

With the extra miles out of the way, the real meat of the interborough walk was a climb up to Ridgewood Reservoir, a piece of dead Brooklyn infrastructure that has aged into one of the city’s most important bird habitats. A familiar spot of retreat for many Bushwick residents but unknown to many more, the ruins have taken a long trip to obscurity from a one-time role providing almost all of Brooklyn’s water.

The dual tanks were first filled in 1858, built by the City of Brooklyn in a natural depression at the apex of the ridge on the Kings-Queens border. This ridge is, of course, the terminal moraine marking the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glaciers which shaped New York’s geography, and it offered a perfect elevated position from which to supply the booming city with water. In a borough that later took the water tower as its unofficial icon, this was perhaps the original natural prototype.

At first the reservoirs watered only the city’s steam-powered industry – and no doubt Bushwick’s breweries – but as wells dried up, more and more residences tapped into the lines. Planners had optimistically imagined that the reservoir would stay full naturally, with the occasional top-up from kettle ponds along the ridge, but as demand grew they reached out along the modern routes of Conduit Avenue and the Sunrise Highway to a series of ponds in Queens and Long Island, built by water companies in earlier decades. The most distant of these were some 24 miles away in Wantagh and were known as the Ridgewood Ponds.

An old pump house at the Ridgewood Reservoir.

The faraway ponds gave their name to the reservoir, which gave it in turn to the Queens side of our neighborhood. The area around the reservoir was cleared of trees, well guarded against terrorists and evil-minded Spaniards, and frequently visited by gawping picnickers. The integration of the five boroughs in 1898 allowed Brooklyn to share the waters of the mighty Croton, demoting Ridgewood Reservoir to a backup role.

It continued to receive visitors from bordering neighborhoods, who camped out next to the waters during heat waves in the 1930s and swam here in the ’70s. It was not drained until 1989, after which the basins filled in with birch, reeds, and a smaller natural pond. In 2004 it was turned over to the Parks Department, marking the start of a continuing battle over its future as either an important habitat for migrant birds or a bulldozed set of improbably sited baseball diamonds. Through the efforts of Save Ridgewood Reservoir the site has defaulted to the former use, for the time being, flourishing behind a perpetually perforate chain-link fence.

We reached the reservoir via a winding route taking in the Cemetery of the Evergreens – more active than South Bushwick on this Sunday morning – and a round of Italian ices in lower Highland Park. On reaching the perimeter fence, entrance was readily found and the walkers stepped into a pocket of New York wetland that looked far more than a mile away from Bushwick. Binoculars sought out Carolina wrens and red-tails as we explored the stone-sheathed walls and brick pump house. Silence was given up to nearby illegal ATV riders and the Jackie Robinson Parkway, but visually the pond was a soothing experience of nature on the ascendant. Whatever becomes of the spot in the future – and we hope for the best – the most interesting time to visit might very well be right now.

Leaving the sunny reverie we returned to the trail, following our guide down the far side of the hill and several more miles into Queens along the old Indian road known variously as Jamaica Avenue or the J Train. But far over the ridge in Woodhaven, one more footnote to our neighborhood turned up: a historical marker identifying the home of the Brooklyn Bushwicks. Dexter Park, now the site of a C-Town by the elevated J, was home to the great mixed-race baseball team, and saw every hero of the era from Ruth to DiMaggio playing exhibitions here. The team held little real affiliation with Bushwick or Brooklyn after their short-lived early home, Wallace’s Ridgewood Grounds at Halsey Street and Wyckoff Avenue, burned down in 1917. They remained Bushwick favorites nonetheless, playing just a short jaunt across county lines where blue laws didn’t restrict Sunday games. New York City neighborhoods never really stay to themselves, see, and Bushwick’s history isn’t all in Bushwick. Keep walking.

Check out the East New York Project’s page of photos and stories from the reservoir for more history, and next time you’re at the Queens Museum look for the enormous 1937 relief map of city water for Ridgewood’s place in the wider picture.