Cold Spring, Inwood, 1897.

This is what photographer James Reuel Smith wrote about this water source:

"The “Cold Spring” is some eight hundred feet south of the most northern point of Inwood, and on the east side of it. It is about one hundred feet from the shore of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or as it has come to be known as in it’s enlarged and modernized condition, the Harlem Ship Canal. It is some six feet long east and west, and three feet wide north and south. Its water comes out from under a piece of rock, and a spring house is built over it of just the dimensions of the spring and some six feet high.

This is the largest spring within the corporate limits of the City of New York.

With the exception of the cottage of an old boatman, Abraham Seeley by name, there is not a house within a mile of this spring, but it pours forth as copious a stream as though its duties were to supply a city’s needs."