The Lenape called it Mosholu. Smooth stones. A freshwater stream running south from what is now Yonkers through the marshes and tidal flats of the northwest Bronx, past salt meadows and cordgrass, down the valley between Riverdale and Kingsbridge Heights, emptying into Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The watershed fed wetlands that spread across the lowlands like a living map of where water wanted to be.
Between 1907 and 1912, the city erased that map. Engineers constructed a brick-lined drain at the south end of Van Cortlandt Lake to funnel Tibbetts Brook into the Broadway Outlet Sewer. The complaints driving the decision were specific and, by the standards of the era, reasonable: Kingsbridge residents recalled houses plagued by flooding cellars, mosquitoes bred in the marshes, and real estate developers were waiting for swampland to become buildable lots. The old course of Spuyten Duyvil Creek was already being filled for the Harlem River Ship Canal. The Putnam Division railroad had cut through the valley. Burying the brook was one piece of a larger project to replace tidal rhythms with train schedules. Tibbett Avenue was laid out over the old streambed. Wetlands filled. The stream vanished from the surface of the city.
Underground, it kept moving.
Tibbetts Brook still flows at four to five million gallons a day into the same combined pipes that carry household sewage and stormwater. That's 2.2 billion gallons a year of clean freshwater mixed with wastewater and routed to the treatment plant on Wards Island. Nearly a third of the Broadway sewer's combined sewer overflow, roughly 400 million gallons annually, comes from the buried stream. The marshes dried and the lots sold, but the water never stopped. It just became someone else's problem.
For families along the old streambed, the problem has been constant. Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, whose district covers Kingsbridge, Bedford Park, and Norwood, has testified that the brook's freshwater "overflows on the roadway and even up in our neighbors' bathroom." Dawn Ciciola, whose family has lived on Grace Avenue in Wakefield for fifty years, put it differently after Hurricane Ida flooded her home in 2021:
"I don't sleep at night. Every time I see it's going to rain, I feel like a nut because I feel traumatized."
Before Ida, the buried stream was a local grievance. On September 1, 2021, the hurricane's remnants dumped 3.15 inches of rain in a single hour on a system built to handle 1.75. Van Cortlandt Lake overflowed. Water routed along the Old Putnam Rail Trail and flooded south to West 225th Street. The Major Deegan Expressway filled with five feet of water, trapping drivers and stranding freight trucks. The flood zone mapped almost precisely onto the course of the stream the city had buried 109 years earlier.
This April, a study published by the New York Botanical Garden in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences traced the pattern at citywide scale. Researchers Lucinda Royte and Eric Sanderson overlaid more than 500 years of hydrological data and found that roughly 21 percent of New York City sits on former waterways, marshes, and floodplains that still flood according to their buried contours. They called these areas "Blue Zones."
Approximately 1.2 million New Yorkers live on former waterways that still flood along their buried contours. Thirty-one percent of the city's public housing projects sit on them.
Public housing residents didn't choose to live above buried waterways.
In the Bronx, the study identified Blue Zone 31: a roughly 33-acre stretch tracing the brook's former path along Tibbett Avenue from the Harlem River inland toward West 231st Street. The city's own projected flooding maps, Sanderson noted, "look a lot like our maps of the historic streams and wetlands of the city." The land remembers what was built over it.
The city is now spending $133 million to daylight the very brook it buried. The project will reroute Tibbetts Brook above ground for one mile along a former CSX railroad corridor, land the city purchased for $11.2 million. South of West 230th Street, the brook goes back underground, into a new dedicated pipe to the Harlem River. One mile of open air between two pipes. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has declined to release the rail yard that would extend the greenway further, citing operational needs. "Essentially, it's restoring a stream through a blue zone," Sanderson told the Riverdale Press, "and you're giving water a place to go."
Construction was scheduled to begin early this year. The project has been in discussion since 1997.
The engineers who buried Mosholu in 1912 were solving a real problem. Flooded cellars, mosquitoes, a landscape that wouldn't cooperate with the city's ambitions. The marshes dried and the lots sold and the trains ran. For the families who moved onto the filled land, into the homes and housing projects built above the old streambed, the solution never worked at all. The sewer overflowed. The basements flooded. The stream kept running exactly where it always had. Now the most ambitious green infrastructure project in the Bronx is an effort to partially undo the burial, at a cost that dwarfs the original intervention, routing the water through a new corridor that ends, once again, in a pipe.
- Blue Zones, citywide: The NYBG study found that both LaGuardia and JFK airports were built on former salt marshes, and that a third of NYC public housing sits in flood-vulnerable zones, raising questions about who bears the cost of building on buried water.
- The Hole, Queens-Brooklyn: New York City is now offering possible buyouts to residents of The Hole, a neighborhood that sits below sea level and continuously floods, in what may become a test case for managed retreat on erased wetlands.
- Spring drought, record scale: NOAA data shows January through March 2026 precipitation was the lowest on record for the continental U.S. since 1895, with conditions rivaling the Dust Bowl era and 97 percent of peanut and cotton production now under severe drought.
- Michigan dams, again: Thirty Michigan counties declared emergencies in April 2026 as rising water threatened aging dams, six years after the foreseeable and preventable failure of the Edenville Dam displaced 11,000 people and caused $175 million in damage.