In the late eighteen-nineties, when the New Croton Aqueduct was just beginning to pipe water into the Bronx from Westchester, James Reuel Smith, a wealthy classicist with a passion for cataloguing, used a bicycle to survey the springs and wells of Manhattan and the Bronx. The tone of the resulting book, “Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx,” published posthumously in 1938, shifts between romantic reverie (“The water is cold and very pleasant”—a spring in West Harlem) and, as the street grid expanded, apocalyptic dread. The old water sources were, Smith wrote, “disappearing from sight with such celerity that it is merely a matter of months when there will be none whatever left in view upon Manhattan island.”

“When I first started to read his book in the library, I thought, This guy is a nut job,” Stanley Greenberg, a Brooklyn-based photographer, said the other day. “But then I thought, I have to do the exact same thing.” Which was why Greenberg, who is sixty-eight, was standing on the corner of Clifford Place and Walton Avenue, in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx. He had on black shorts, a black shirt, and a black cycling hat, and he was zip-tying a poster-size copy of one of Smith’s old photos to the crossbars of some scaffolding. Since May, he’s put up nearly a hundred of Smith’s photos, in upper Manhattan and the Bronx, “near the spot where each spring was,” he said. Smith’s 1897 Walton Avenue photo shows a pool encircled with stones; his caption reads, “The overflow from these springs finds its way into the marsh which is about to be drained by a sewer now under construction.”

Hanging the photos is the second part of a project that Greenberg began in 2016, when he set out to rephotograph the locations of all the springs and wells described by Smith, on foot or by bike. In 2021, Greenberg published a four-hundred-and-ninety-six-page book that combines Smith’s befores with his contemporary afters, the overlap offering provocative serendipities: a drain where a well once was, a fire hydrant at a former water-pump site. Naturally, most of Greenberg’s pictures show dry land, though not all. “There’s still a spring in Central Park, near Eighty-second Street, and I did find some other springs in the northern part of the Park that Smith had photographed,” he said. “Up in St. Nicholas Park, the springs were rearranged when they built the modern water tunnel in the nineteen-teens. But when you see a stairway and there’s water flowing down it, if it’s not right after a rain, then that’s a spring.”

On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. “The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,” he said. Many of the photographs have already disappeared, though a friend recently spotted one that had been posted in June, at Broadway and 108th Street, outside a closed bagel shop. “I don’t care,” Greenberg said. “I just want to post them all.”

“Can you not talk to me until dinner? I don’t want to burn through any good conversation at home.”

Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

As he walked the hills of Morris Heights, he described growing up in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn and attending Stuyvesant High School in the seventies; his father dropped him off at the subway, then drove on to Fort Hamilton High School, where he was an art teacher and an administrator. The elder Greenberg taught his son photography in their basement bathroom; after college, the younger Greenberg entered city government, first in the Parks Department and later in the Department of Cultural Affairs. After his father died suddenly, of an aneurysm—“He was about to retire and intended to return to painting,” Greenberg said—he took up photography full time, making images of overlooked spaces, locations gleaned though his city work. With “Waterworks,” a book published in 2003, he became the James Reuel Smith of today.

“There’s a willow,” Greenberg said. (Willow trees often indicate underground streams.) He was pointing to a community garden on the way to Jerome Avenue, where he attached another Smith photo near a car-repair shop. “When the aqueduct first went in, not everybody was able to get water from it,” he said. He posted a photo of a well surrounded by forest. Outside a laundromat on West Burnside Avenue, an open fire hydrant made a Las Vegas-worthy fountain that cooled passersby. Greenberg hung an image of a spring that, in 1898, was, by Smith’s account, preferred to the newly introduced Croton water. “Children may be constantly seen making pilgrimages from the surrounding houses with pitchers, milk cans, and what not,” Smith wrote.

A man walked out of a shelter down the street with some questions. “¿Qué es esto?” he asked. There was a rush of gesticulations, with Greenberg speaking in English. “Ah,” the man finally said, “¡Agua natural del mundo!” ♦