New Milford Plant of the Hackensack Water Company National Register of Historic Places Listing

Water used to kill. In the late nineteenth century, sewage dumped into the Hackensack River regularly triggered deadly typhoid outbreaks down in Hoboken and Englewood. The New Milford Plant stopped the dying. But it took a massive engineering shift to do it. Famous sanitary engineer George W. Fuller designed a pioneering rapid sand filtration system here in the early 1900s, proving that chemistry and mechanical filtration could purify water on a massive scale for hundreds of thousands of suburbanites. This wasn't just a local utility. It was a blueprint for modern American sanitation.

Look at the buildings. Architects designed the complex in the Romanesque Revival style, using deep red brick and arched windows that made a utility yard look more like a medieval fortress. Inside, they installed massive vertical triple-expansion steam pumping engines. Huge metal beasts. These behemoths, some standing four stories tall, hissed and groaned as they pushed millions of gallons of water daily through the county's veins. They ran until 1990. A staggering run for Gilded Age machinery.

Then came the wrecking balls. In the early 2000s, the water company wanted to bulldoze the entire complex to make way for re-development, triggering a massive battle between preservationists and corporate suits. The preservationists won. Bergen County stepped in and bought the site to prevent its demolition. But victory brought its own problems. Decade-long neglect left the roofs rotting and the interiors exposed to the elements, though the sheer scale of the brick masonry still dominates the Oradell Reservoir shoreline. It remains a gritty monument to the days when clean tap water was a miracle of iron and steam.