Springs and Wells

Springs and Wells: Manhattan and the Bronx pairs Stanley Greenberg's photographs with the writing of James Reuel Smith. Smith was the amateur historian who spent the 1890s cataloguing New York's natural springs and wells, before city development buried or paved over most of them.

Smith's survey was published posthumously in 1938 by the New-York Historical Society. Greenberg, a photographer long occupied with the city's hidden infrastructure, returned to Smith's original sites more than a century later to see what, if anything, was still there. Fw:Books issued the 496-page volume in 2021, designed by Hans Gremmen, running Greenberg's photographs alongside Smith's original texts.

The book extends Greenberg's earlier work on New York's concealed water systems, including Waterworks and Invisible New York. Here he trades the reservoirs and tunnels of the built system for the springs the city grew over instead.