As the population of New York City swelled in the 19th century, the city's reservoirs were built to supply a growing population with a safe and reliable water supply.

High Service Pumping Station, March 5, 1938. The origins of this building date to 1901 when the new consolidated city's Department of Water Supply laid the foundation for a pumping station near the planned East Basin of the Jerome Park Reservoir. The "high service" facility was meant to provide increased water pressure to new taller buildings. While the East Basin was never constructed, the 1906-completed building did find a use as a pumping station, with underground pipes attaching it to the West Basin of the reservoir. The red brick, Romanesque Revival building is low and long with 42 uniform two-story arch-topped windows on its facade. The long and steeply pitched roof once had a tall brick water-tower jutting out from the middle of the building (seen here). The tower has since been dramatically shortened, though the facility still functions in its original purpose. Interestingly this pumping station differs stylistically from other, earlier waterway infrastructure. The early work, rendered in stone and often completed in Renaissance Revival and Italianate styles, was completed by the Aqueduct Commission, a state-appointed panel. This building was designed by George W. Birdsall, of the city's Department of Water. In the case of new aqueduct infrastructure, the city and state agencies often clashed in the early years after consolidation. The red brick Romanesque look of this building "can be interpreted as defiant or hostile," according to architectural historian Robert Kornfeld.

When you’re planning to build some of the world’s most spectacular and challenging tunnels, you need to know ahead of time what you’ll be digging through. Is it soil, sand, or stone? Is the stone strong and secure or friable and likely to collapse? To know what the bedrock is like, you need a drill rig to dig it out from hundreds of feet below the surface. The drill extracts geological core borings, cylindrical samples that provide a cross-section of subsurface conditions and let engineers know whether the area is good for tunneling and what construction methods should be used. The drill bits are tubular and loaded with shot or embedded with diamonds to cut around the core, like a drinking straw plunging into a milkshake (except really, really hard!).