Inside Third & Bond: Week 64

When you choose to live in NYC, you agree to live surrounded by a whole mess of things. Subways, neighbors, rats, and noise are the most obvious. But there’s also the invisible, like water tunnels. We all benefit from the water tunnels beneath our feet but we don’t see or feel them or even know they are there. Unless they show up on a tax map.

Such is the case with Third + Bond: a tax map clued us in early on that there was a permanent easement covering about 1/2 of our site. (See dotted parallel lines on tax map.) A little further research revealed it was a water tunnel easement. We don’t know exactly how far down the water tunnel is beneath us but a good guess seems to be 400 to 500 feet. We also don’t know for certain that the water tunnel is actually there, in use. It could be an easement held in wait for Water Tunnel 3, now in construction, that is supposed to go from Red Hook to Maspeth. (Anyone know exactly where they are on Water Tunnel 3, Stage 2?) Or an easement being held in reserve.

What’s Water Tunnel 3? It is a third water tunnel, started in 1970 and projected to be complete in 2020, that will run 60-miles from NYC to the reservoirs upstate that bring us our drinking water. The motivation for the third tunnel is to allow the other two water tunnels to be shut down for repairs as needed. Water Tunnel 1 was completed in 1917 and Water Tunnel 2 was completed in 1936. These are old tunnels in need of repair; we’re leaking 36 million gallons a day. (A Wikipedia entry states that a leak-repair project was started last month for which teams of 6 divers live in a 24-foot tube breathing 97.5% helium and 2.5% oxygen, repairing the parts of the tunnels 70 stories down, and playing Nerf basketball. This sounds too incredible to be true. Anyone know?)

The water system is pretty incredible because it relies on gravity to bring water to us from the Croton System (Westchester & Putnam counties), Catskill System, and Delaware River System. It’s like the ancient Roman aqueduct system. Except back then they probably didn’t have title insurance. We do and ours insures us only down to 100 feet below grade. No problem: our deepest piles don’t go past 55′.

So, once we worked out the title insurance issue we thought we could go back to being oblivious about the water tunnel beneath our feet. Not so fast, said the City’s Department of Environmental Protection. When reviewing our site connection application (which establishes where we’ll hook our project into the city’s sewer system and with what size pipes), the site connection unit insisted we provide them with a letter from the unit at DEP that deals with the water tunnel. DEP wanted to hear from DEP that our project wouldn’t be a problem for the water tunnel! Even though the people involved all work on the same floor over at Lefrak City, protocol is for the applicant to coordinate the different approvals, which we did. The water tunnel people gave confirmation that our project won’t be a problem for the water tunnel and the site connection people gave us our site connection approval.

We won’t be connecting the site for awhile yet but it’s important to have the site connection approval early on. Right now at the site we’re laying down the water proof membrane within the formwork we talked about in our last posting, putting in rebar, and excavating for the next set of foundations. And unless they tell us the water tunnel is paved in gold, we’ll forget about it again shortly…

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-60 [Brownstoner]

From our lawyers: This is not an offering. No offering can be made until an offering plan is filed with the Department of Law of the State of New York.”