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 g

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