Free the Collect!
Posted in A Tribute, admit it -- it sucks, at least hippies get laid, boognish, Buster's Mustard, BWTF Luxury Tours, Chafed, Chapped, Corporate Fly Fishing Still Sucks, Ditch Fishing, Down the memory hole, Fish Local, fuck you you fucking fucks, Lower down on the foodchain, Orwellian Clownshow, Politics, Sack up, soul, sticking it to the man, strange water, Think-global-fish-local, THIS is gonna be painful, Time for Action, uppity mountain hippy extravaganza, Us vs. Them on September 30th, 2011 by Wook“On the lower end, two fair-sized streams drained the interior. One rose from a series of springs that poured forth from hillocks around today’s 20th Street and Fifth Avenue. The Saponickan band living there called it Ishpetenga. It flowed southwest into the Hudson near the mouth of another trout stream. This one had its origins in a deep, fair-sized pond where Worth and Centre streets now cross. It flowed northwesterly, almost in a straight line, and became the course for today’s Canal Street. The pond was known as The Collect. The Dutch name for this trout pond was derived from one of its beaches, which they which they called Kalk Hoek – Chalk Point or Chalk Hook. It was given the name because the early Dutch settlers came here to collect the shells of freshwater mussels, which were ground and added to the mortar used to build their homes. When the English took over management of Manhattan in 1664 they assumed many of the Dutch words already in use for geographic features. Their inelegant pronunciation of Dutch turned the monosyllabic word “Kalk” (or “Chalk”) into the dissylable “Kal-leck”- hence, “Collect.” The pond’s name had nothing to do with collecting water in the area, as some writers have suggested, although it did have two small feeder streams. For decades, in the 1600s and 1700s, it was the source of drinking water for all of lower Manhattan’s residents. The Collect and its associated streams contained brook trout as late as 1740.”
- from Brook Trout by Nick Karas
