RESEARCH

BOOK

The Sixth Borough: Regulation and Remembrance in the New York City WatershedBetween 1905 and 1965, New York City’s Board of Water Supply used eminent domain to take land across the rural Catskill Mountains. Across those sixty years, the city displaced almost six thousand residents, twenty-three villages, and over ten thousand graves. This rural water supply system became the largest unfiltered surface water supply in the United States. Managing it transformed both the city and the countryside in the decades after the valleys were inundated dams built. 

In The Sixth Borough, I show how decisions about environmental regulation, land use, and government services have been shot through with historical memories about the meaning and lost futures of the rural watershed. This is the story of how place knowledge and historical memory helped make New York City rural, and how it helped make the western Catskills New York City’s sixth borough.

DISSERTATION

Land After Technology: Collective Memory and the New York City Water Supply
My dissertation  explored the history of how people living in the region that supplies most of New York City’s drinking water  reckoned with and mobilized the histories of displacement, land loss, and resource management in the Catskill region. Looking at regulatory practices, intergenerational agricultural knowledge, and memory practices such as scrapbooks and local histories, I argue that the meaning and impact of infrastructural and technological systems are best understood from the standpoint of the communities who have lived with them, rather than the communities which they serve. 

Drawing on theories from science and technology studies, memory studies, disaster studies, and critical infrastructure studies, I use historical methods, ethnography, and oral history.