By 1796, a city engineer deemed Collect Pond to be stagnant and foul. A plan emerged to cleanse the pond and reconstruct it as a ship harbor with a channel to the Hudson River, but that plan was rejected. Instead, in 1803, the city decided to bury the pond.
At first, the pond was filled with clean soil cut from the hills around it. But as the years passed, the spring-fed pond refused to disappear, so carters were paid to dump anything, including garbage, into the pond site.
By 1808, mud and rubbish formed a mound of several acres that loomed over the remaining water. An 1812 grand jury determined that the pond contained "great quantities of stagnant water...dead animals and filth of all kinds."
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