About

Croton Reservoir Tavern opened in 2003 at 108 West 40th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, one block from Bryant Park and a five minute walk from the Broadway theaters.

The restaurant is named for the Croton Distributing Reservoir, which stood on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets until the end of the nineteenth century. A hand painted mural of it covers 150 square feet of the dining room wall. Around it sits a fifty foot oak bar, brass studded leather chairs, wrought iron railings and leather banquettes.

Upstairs is a working Midtown tavern serving modern American food from lunch through late night. Downstairs is The Speakeasy, where the lights come down after dark, the music comes up, and a DJ plays on select nights. Happy hour runs down there Tuesday through Friday, four to eight.

For most of the nineteenth century, the block where the New York Public Library now stands held a four acre lake. The Croton Distributing Reservoir opened on the Fourth of July, 1842, holding twenty million gallons behind granite walls fifty feet high and twenty five feet thick, built in an Egyptian style that made it look more like a fortress than a waterworks. Before it existed, New Yorkers drew their water from wells, cisterns and rain barrels.

A promenade ran around the top of the walls, and the city climbed up to walk it. Edgar Allan Poe was among them. Writing for the Columbia Spy in 1844, he told readers to ride out Fifth Avenue to the reservoir, where the view took in the whole city down to the Battery, the harbour, and long stretches of the Hudson and East Rivers.

The reservoir came down at the end of the 1890s. The library and Bryant Park went up in its place. Part of the original foundation is still there, in the South Court of the library. We are two blocks west on the same street.