This well was just across the street from the Old Croton Aqueduct Gatehouse at Burnside Avenue and Phelan Place.

Croton Aqueduct gatehouse, 1897. Built circa 1890, this rock-faced granite gatehouse was constructed to service the second water supply system of New York, the New Croton Aqueduct. This system ran from the New Croton Reservoir in Westchester County to the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx, and from there it distributed water to certain areas of the Bronx and Manhattan. The Aqueduct itself is a 33-mile-long, 13-foot-diameter, brick-lined tunnel that was engineered to move (by gravity) up to 290 million gallons of drinking water each day from Westchester to the Bronx. The gatehouses were constructed to allow for access into the tunnel. In the 1990s the city ceased using Croton water because its quality had increasingly diminished. Between 2006 and 2013 a major overhaul and restoration of the system were undertaken. A new Croton Water Filtration Plant was built, the tunnels were stabilized and cleaned, and the gatehouses were restored. At the completion of the project, the Croton drinking water supply system was reactivated (an important step towards future work on the Delaware Aqueduct, which supplies more than 50 percent of the city’s daily water needs).

Messiah Home for Children, ca. 1910. The Messiah Home was founded in 1885 as a home for orphaned children, or those dependent on working mothers. In 1902, Henry H. Rogers — the philanthropist who underwrote Helen Keller’s Radcliffe education — donated land for the construction of a new facility. The new building, a Jacobethan Revival design by Boston architect Charles Brigham was constructed between 1905 and 1908. However, the Messiah Home soon moved operations to Spring Valley in upstate New York. The Brigham building was sold to the Salvation Army in 1920. Since 1975, it has been owned by the City of New York.