The task of holding back 19 billion gallons of water at the New Croton Dam in Croton-on-Hudson fell to a melting pot of European immigrants decidedly tilting toward Italians with a bent to settle down.
A century after 2,000 Italian men came to build the dam ”“ men like Mariano Palmietto and Donato Ottaviano ”“ fully 25 percent of Westchester County boasts Italian roots, including Palmietto”™s and Ottaviano”™s descendents.
Construction lasted Sept. 20, 1892 to Jan. 17, 1906. The engineers in charge lured Italian men from their villages for the task. Their families would come later.
“That was the normal process,” said Carlo Sclafani, a Sicilian, professor of Italian language and culture at Westchester Community College and president of the Westchester Coalition of Italian American Organizations. “Their families stayed behind. And after the dam was finished, they got jobs in construction, in landscaping, as caretakers at mansions.” Some moved on to the construction of the Kensico Dam in Valhalla, built 1913-1917.
“They created a future for themselves,” Sclafani said. “They built ”˜Little Italys.”™ They formed churches. And many of their grandsons and granddaughters are prominent citizens today.”
One such descendent is Mark Franzoso, principal of Franzoso Contracting in Croton-on-Hudson. His great-grandfather Mariano Palmietto came with his friends from Italy to build the dam.
“He purchased a little lot in the center of town and built his house there, carrying the stones there one at a time after work,” Franzoso said. The home is still in the family.
True to the formula, two of Palmietto”™s children and his wife were left behind in Italy when he emigrated. After his family arrived, four more children were born in America. The economics of his decisions reverberate today: Franzoso identified his company as the largest remodeling contractor in the county with 80 employees.
Lineage in stone
With 72 million cubic meters of water in 20 square miles of reservoir behind it, lower Westchester remains very much beholden to the men who built the New Croton Dam. The original Croton Dam is three miles upstream and now inundated. It delivered about a third of the 300 million gallons the new dam shunts to New York City every day. The present dam is 266 feet wide at its base and 297 feet high. It cost $7.7 million. The primary dam blocks are gabbro, a course igneous rock. Granite was also used, with a small train system built to haul stone from nearby quarries; the granite reportedly was harvested five miles away.
Workers earned $1.25 per 10-hour day prior to a 1900 sit-down strike, according to one account. But dam buff and Ossining resident Alfonso DeCesaris said the pay rate was just 65 cents per day.
“The conditions were unbearable,” Sclafani said. “The cabins they lived in were on stilts. Both the working and the living conditions were unbearable: unsanitary conditions, freezing weather, sleeping stacked three high in bunks.”
In the TV show “The Sopranos,” popular with some Italians for its top-notch writing and scourged by others as stereotypical bushwa, Tony Soprano believed his grandfather had been a carpenter.
Tony”™s Uncle Junior corrected him. “He never cut a board in his life ”“ he was a stone mason.”
The exchange is telling and rooted in history. Irish stone workers had built the first Croton Dam in 1845, but those workers by 1892 were old, if living, and the younger Irish stone men had moved on to tunneling as sandhogs. The source of labor for the New Croton Dam would come largely from Italy.
Certainly, Italian craftsmen had mastered every craft ”“ Uncle Junior”™s disparaging take on carpentry notwithstanding. But the Junior Soprano character was rightly proud of his lineage in stone and knew it was the Italians ”“ far more so than any other ethnicity ”“ who cut stone like butter and then built with it in a manner that would last ”“ already had lasted in Italy ”“ thousands of years.
A long journey
At the turn of the last century, America was booming and New York City was thirsty. That combination proved the impetus to build the dam, which houses the New York water system”™s granite-and-brick gate no. 1 and where the city”™s water is chlorinated before gurgling via the New Croton Aqueduct to the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx.
“Croton was only a hamlet of 200 people in the 1800s,” said Joyce Ottaviano Finnerty, historian for Croton-on-Hudson and granddaughter of Donato Ottaviano. She is a student of the dam. She calls the 1976 “History of the New Croton Dam” by Mary Josephine D”™Alvia “a terrific source” on the subject and cites it as the wellspring for much of what she knows. She also knows many of the families who came to build the dam and stayed on, including one-time village clerk Joe Zerello, whose father Pasquale Zerello was a stone mason. She said other families who remained include: Manco, Gigliotti, Paonessa, Pettinato, Scozzafava, Scalzo, Giglio, Anesi and Konco. Finnerty notes Croton mayors James and John Loconto were both second-generation dam children, as was postmaster William Devitto.
“My grandfather Donato Ottaviano was born Sept. 1, 1865 in Sulmona, Italy ”“ AbruzziProvince,” she said.
Ottaviano became a U.S. citizen in 1901. Finnery believes he may have been one of the “padrones,” or bosses, on the site. She said that when dam work was finished, Ottaviano formed his own contracting company called Dean & Ottaviano.
“When Donato left Italy to work in the United States, he left behind his wife Anna and three small children in Sulmona,” Finnerty said. “Anna followed almost eight years after her husband left to work on the New Croton Dam. Their family increased after the long separation and four more children were born in the United States. They lived on Quaker Bridge Road near the dam, where my father was born.”
Life after the dam
Alfonso DeCesaris has painted the dam (on canvas), as well as other local scenes. He is 80 now and retired. In his work life, he had a penchant for repairing TVs and steam engines and owned a TV repair shop. He said, “The very dam and water system in place today that are to last centuries are material examples of the suffering and challenges that those 2,000 stone masons went through, earning less than 65 cents a day ”“ not even a subsistence wage at the time ”“ this should merit them some sort of niche in history.”
DeCesaris noted a new book is to be published this month ”“ Italian Heritage Month ”“ called “Journey of the Italians in America” by Vincenza Scarpaci (Pelican Publishing) that includes the history of the New Croton Dam.
“There was not a lot of money when the dam was finished,” D”™Alvia writes in her book. “Most of these people did not go back to Italy, choosing rather to remain in America and raise families here. Many of them went on to build roads and bridges all over the county. Many entered governments and professions, another seasoning in America”™s great melting pot.”
The dam was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The road across it is accessible now to pedestrians and emergency vehicles, a post-9/11 development that looks to become permanent when temporary barriers become structurally integrated in the next several years. The dam is also known as the Cornell Dam, a reference to early Croton farmers E.W. and Aaron P. Cornell, whose land was purchased (along with 29 other farms and scores of smaller parcels) to build the dam and fill the reservoir.
