My Dream House and the Pond

I can’t talk about our house in the Bronx without telling you first about the pond out front. Given how much worse flooding can be elsewhere in New York City—even just two blocks to the east along the valley of Broadway, where the sewer is always at capacity—not to mention elsewhere in the world, I’m embarrassed to gripe about my personal pond. These days, such bodies of water are everywhere. Mine is not the only pond, but merely the pond I can’t avoid.

The pond dilates and contracts according to water levels. After a string of dry days, it may shrink to a puddle. After a storm, it may stretch to the length of a freight car, spilling into the middle of the street. It’s bad for curb appeal. Its sources are environmental, structural, and complex. On the rare occasion the pond dissipates, it leaves behind a residue like black mayonnaise.

The pond is almost always there. Our region is getting wetter as the climate changes. More rain, more storms, more often. The infrastructure of our city, at the edge of the rising sea, isn’t fit to handle so much water. Sudden, torrential downpours overwhelm our outdated drainage systems, especially at high tide; drench the subway system; and, in some low-lying places nearby, turn streets into sewers and basements into death traps.

In summer, the pond breeds mosquitoes and collects litter: cigarette butts, scratched-off lotto tickets. In winter, I worry the pond will become a slipping hazard. This is what I say when dialing 311, the city’s helpline, in hopes of remediation. An elderly neighbor could slip on the ice and break a bone. The pond could collapse into a sinkhole.

Tell it to the DOT, lady, says the Department of Environmental Protection. I do. Nope, says the Department of Transportation; because of the tree, this is a problem for Parks. I follow up. Weeks pass. The Department of Parks and Recreation directs me to the Department of Health. Months pass. What you need to do for ponding, says the DOH, is try the DEP. I write to my city-council member: I’m being given the runaround. Weeks pass without reply. Surely, this wouldn’t happen in the rich neighborhood up the hill. As a city worker myself, I know this dance well—this absurd, disjointed roundelay.

[Olga Khazan: Why can’t I just rent a house? ]

I ruminate over the pond. It has caused me not just embarrassment but shame. It has turned me scientific, made me into a water witch. I understand that the pond is beyond the scope of any one person, or any one agency, to handle, and that it’s perilous to ignore. The pond is a dark mirror; in it, our house appears upside down, distorted. It reflects deeper problems of stewardship and governance and the position of our house in relation to both. We are privileged to own a home. Yet we live on land that will drown, that is inundated already. The pond is a portal. Sometimes it smells, this vent hole of the netherworld. Beneath its surface, something lies concealed. Given the fact of the pond, why did we buy the house? Now that we dwell in the house, what to do about the pond?

Technically, the pond isn’t on our property at all. Our home inspector had no reason to suspect it. It belongs to the city, along with the street where it spreads. This is what we were told on the rainy day we arrived for the final walk-through before closing on the house in the deadly spring of 2020: The pond was up to the city to fix, with taxpayer dollars.

Plenty of folks were deserting New York then. I mean hundreds of thousands. That we were committed to staying in the city was both an act of necessity and a point of pride. For my husband and I, the house was a step up from the crowded three-room apartment in Washington Heights where we’d sheltered in place, away from the mad snarl of highways whose traffic had given our boys asthma: a place to stretch out, a sign of our upward mobility. The American dream. To a Black family without generational wealth, some of whose ancestors were property themselves, it signified even more: Shelter. Safety. Equity. Arrival. A future for our children.

We fell in love with the house as soon as we saw it, a run-down detached brick home in a working-class neighborhood with a little garden in back and windows on all four sides. The house had solid bones. We rejoiced when our offer was accepted. Yet until the day of the final walk-through, we had never visited the house in the rain.

That morning, the pond greeted us like the opposite of a welcome mat, giving shape to whatever latent misgivings we had about making this move. I felt hoodwinked. Buyer beware! I waded into the middle of that bad omen to gauge its depth. Murky water sloshed over the tops of my rain boots, drenching my socks. Good Lord. It was so much more significant than a puddle. I wondered what it was, how to name it, and why it was here. Was what I stood on actually land, or something less concrete? Could it have been a wetland, once? Why hadn’t the pond been disclosed? Because it didn’t have to be, said the tight-lipped seller’s agent representing the estate of the previous owner, an old man named Jeremiah Breen.

That night, my husband and I lay awake in bed, discussing our options. Sirens sounded up from the street. People were dying of COVID all around us. Purportedly, the house sat outside the floodplain. But what if the pond got bigger with worsening weather? Would it pour into the basement? Was the house’s foundation as solid as we’d been told? We doubted that the city would handle the underlying issues—not while hobbled by the pandemic. Would flood insurance be enough? Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater? Was it an asset or a millstone? How high would the waters rise? How soon? Did we even believe, deep down in our souls, of ownership of this kind? Why fake like we or anyone else could own the land?

Such questions of capital consumed us deep into the night. The bottom line was this: If we pulled out of the deal, we’d lose our down payment, amounting to two years of college tuition for one of our kids. By dawn, we admitted our disillusionment. We’d already crossed the Rubicon, imbricated in the twisted system that brought about the pond. Or so we said because nevertheless, we still loved the house.

We renegotiated the purchase price; we moved in.

Later, I learned that many current maps for flood risk overlap with maps of historic housing discrimination. Geography determines a neighborhood’s risk and, this being America, so does race. Neighborhoods that suffered from redlining in the 1930s—when our house was built—face a far higher risk of flooding today. The pond suggested a submerged history beneath the daily surface of things.

The house was not just a risk but a wreck. Its rusty tanks sweated out oil that looked like blood onto the basement floor. Most of its windowpanes were cracked; its floors, uneven; its doors, out of plumb. It lacked adequate insulation. Under the creaky old planks, we discovered a newspaper dating back to the Depression. The front page addressed the use of antiques in home decoration. It featured a photo of a card room with an 18th-century Queen Anne table being used for bridge. How far back could I imagine? The paper flaked into pieces like the wings of moths when I tried to turn the page.

By the time Jeremiah Breen took possession of the house, bridge had fallen out of fashion. At the time the table was carved, this part of the Bronx was marsh. When I input our zip code into the online archive of the U.S. Geological Survey, I can see on a century-old map what this wetland looked like before it was developed into the grid of streets, shops, houses, schools, and apartment buildings that make up the neighborhood now. In 1900, the land is still veined by blue streams. A pin in the shape of a teardrop marks the spot of our present address, smack-dab in a bend of a waterway called Tibbetts Brook. The brook was named after a settler whose descendants were driven off the land for their royalist sympathies during the Revolutionary War. Before that, it had another name. The Munsee Lenape called it Mosholu. We live on the ghost of this rivulet, just one of the city’s dozens of lost streams.

[Hannah Ritchie: A slightly hotter world could still be a better one]

The teardrop confirmed what I sensed about the true nature of my pond, which was so much more than a puddle, and not mine at all, but rather a part of a much larger body of water.

Waterways like Tibbetts Brook were once the lifeblood of the city. As New York grew, in the 17th and 18th centuries, into the world’s supreme port, it counted on such freshwater streams for transportation, drinking water, fishing, and waterpower for grain mills and sawmills. The brook became polluted; eventually, railroad lines overtook waterways as transportation routes. Waterpower was replaced by steam. Steam was replaced by electric power. The banks of the streams became industrial wastelands, which became Black and brown neighborhoods. Plundered water bodies. Plundered peoples.

The works of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, and Herbert Kraft, a scholar of the Lenape, help me imagine a preindustrial, pre-European version of my home place. The Wiechquaeseck community of Lenape lived in a settlement nearby, around Spuytin Duyvil Creek, fed by the waters of Mosholu. They lived mostly out of doors and owned no more than they could carry. Wealth was being in communion with one another, and in balance with the abundant natural world, “filled with an almost infinite variety of plants, animals, insects, clouds and stones, each of which possessed spirits no less important than those of human beings,” according to Kraft.

All I have to do to see a remaining pocket of that natural world that was once my home is walk three blocks east to Van Cortlandt Park, where a narrow belt of lowland swamp forest still survives along a trail around open water. This small freshwater wetland is ecologically precious, home to many plant and animal species. It slows erosion, prevents flooding by retaining stormwater, filters and decomposes pollutants, and converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Hunting the swamp are barred owls and red-tailed hawks. Water lilies, swamp loosestrife, and arrowhead each grow at different water depths, thickening the open water by midsummer. Mallards and wood ducks feed, nest, preen, and glide among dense strands of cattail, buttonbush, arrow arum, and blue flag. Eastern kingbirds and belted kingfishers screech from the treetops while painted turtles sun themselves on the lodges of muskrats. These, too, are my neighbors.

The Van Cortlandt Swamp is fed by Tibbetts Brook, before the brook divides down into the concrete conduit, its tail buried. This little swamp is a patch of the 2,000 acres of freshwater wetland remaining in the city today, out of the 224,000 acres it boasted 200 years ago.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was,” Toni Morrison once wrote. From that point of view, the pond in front of our house is not a nuisance but rather the brook remembering itself. Mosholu. How might Thoreau have described my pond? The pond is a gift to the birds who stop there to bathe, and a place for wildlife to slake their thirst at night: possum, coyote, skunk. The pond is a lieu de mémoire, a reservoir. When the sun hits it at the right angle, the pond’s surface dances with jewels of light. When night comes, the pond throws back the orange glow of the streetlight. The pond is the paved-over wetland, reasserting its form.

The Lenape believed that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be given thanks, and asked permission before taking from it. I doubt Jacobus Van Cortlandt, landowner, enslaver, and mayor of New York, asked permission when he had the Black people he owned dam up Tibbetts Brook in 1699 to install a sawmill and gristmill on his plantation. Some of the skeletons of those he enslaved were unearthed by construction workers laying down railroad tracks in the 1870s. The mill operated until 1889, when the city purchased the land for its park. At that point, the millpond became a small, decorative lake. Sometimes I walk to this lake, next to the African burial ground, to watch the damselflies and contemplate what lies beneath.

At the lake’s south end, in 1912, the brook was piped into a storm drain and rechanneled into an underground tunnel that merged into a brick sewer below Broadway. This enabled the construction of streets and buildings south of the park, including our house, on top of backfill and city trash. What does it mean to live in a place where rivers are harnessed to carry our waste away, so we don’t have to think about it?

According to the Department of Environmental Protection, 4 million to 5 million gallons of water flow into the Broadway sewer on a dry day from Tibbetts Brook and the millpond alone. That water runs through the sewer, where it mixes with raw household sewage, and then on to Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. But when it rains, the amount of water can be five times that. At least 60 times a year, the treatment plant gets overwhelmed by rainwater and shuts down. Untreated sewage and rainwater are then discharged into the Harlem River, in violation of federal law.

Now there are plans to “daylight” the subterranean stretch of Tibbetts Brook, bringing it back to the surface. This restoration will alleviate flooding by rerouting the buried section of the brook directly into the Harlem River, not exactly along its historic route, upon which our house sits. Instead, it will flow slightly to the east, along an old railway line that accidentally reverted to an urban wetland after the freight trains stopped running in the 1980s. This gully runs behind BJ’s Wholesale Club and the strip mall with the nail salon and the Flame hibachi and the Staples—already rewilding with tall marsh grasses and reeds.

There is talk of undoing the past, of giving some of what was taken from nature back to nature. There is talk of a bike path along a greenway costing millions of dollars. If the project comes to pass by 2030 as planned, it will be New York City’s first daylighting story, and we will be in the watershed. Unburying the brook seems like a good thing. I hope, when it beautifies the landscape, that my neighbors can still afford to live here.

We were still living out of boxes in early September 2021 when the National Weather Service declared New York City’s first flash-flood emergency. Our boys were by then 8 and 10. More than three inches of rain fell in just one hour, shattering a record set by a storm the week before. Was it even correct to call it a 500-year rainfall event when the past had become such a poor guide to the present? The remnants of Hurricane Ida turned the nearby Major Deegan Expressway back into a river, stranding cars, buses, and trucks in high water. That image, from our new neighborhood, became an international symbol of the city’s unpreparedness. Every single subway line in the city was stalled. A thousand straphangers were evacuated from 17 stuck trains. “We are BEYOND not ready for climate change,” a city-council member declared on Twitter.

The pond in front of our house was whipped into waves by the wind. It was as sure a sign as any that we were living on borrowed time. But in the weeks that followed Ida, against our better judgment, we had Con Edison connect us to the gas line under the kettle in the street where the water gathers. We’d have preferred to heat the house with geothermal energy, but couldn’t find anybody yet trained to install it. At times, the house feels like a snare. I mean to say, if I remain embarrassed as a homeowner, it is not on account of the pond.

Just as remarkable as the pond out front is the garden out back. Down on my knees with my hands in the soil, I weed and tend the beds. My mother has given me a Lenten rose. It is the first thing to bloom in spring. I marvel at the shoots coming up from the bulbs planted before me by Mary, wife of Jeremiah, whose name was not on the deed but was told to me by our neighbor Eve. Daffodils, peonies, hyacinths, and tulips.

I live in Lenapehoking, the unceded territory of the Lenape people, past and present. Generations before we bought this land, it was stolen. I believe we have a responsibility to honor them by becoming better stewards of the land we inhabit. I want these words to be more than words; I want them to be deeds.

I’m learning to grow food for our table, sensing that the truest sacrament is eating the earth’s body. I have planted lettuce, tomatoes, sweet peas, and beets. I collect water in a barrel under the gutter spout. I see that our land is a quilt; that our house is only a structure among structures among pollinating plants visited by bees.

The pond is part of the place where we live. To prevent stagnation, I sometimes stir it with a stick. Through the front windows, I watch it swell when it rains. I observe the birds who stop there to bathe: warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, sparrows. Some of them are endangered. A small reparation: I am teaching our children their names.

This essay has been adapted from Emily Raboteau’s forthcoming book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse.”