down at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where it crosses the Oral History 2: Scott Craven Scott Craven, a former student in Mr. O.’s class, is now a captain of the police force in Ossining. A lifelong resident of the village with a background in history, he “loves to speak about the aqueduct.” For him, the Croton 93 94 were down there before we closed the weir chamber. Unfortunately when I walked to the south, it was a couple of hundred yards to the gate, and by the time I turned around, it was a pinpoint of light. And I am claustrophobic on the best of days, and it was quite the experience getting back out of the aqueduct. I never volunteered for that again. That was tough. Years later, not too long ago, we were having an ongoing issue—people are assaulting or robbing our day laborers. Most of Ossining now, Ossining’s traditionally an immigrant community, always has been, and our current immigrant group is Ecuadorians from the province of Azuay in southern Ecuador around Cuenca. And we have a lot of folks here who are day laborers, and unfortunately, nothing new with immigrants, people have preyed on them, and robbed them, and because there’s a language barrier, we always have an issue of things getting so violent because there could be no demand for money, they just start beating them up and taking their money. And we had a difficult time getting people to come forward, we had a difficult time with people following through with prosecution because they couldn’t miss work. So what we did is we put our own officers out there dressed as day laborers, and then we put the SWAT team next to them, and when they came by and robbed the police officer, we’d arrest them, and then it got out that, hey, some of these people we think are victims are actually police officers, and we cut down on the crime. But what we did was, we went inside where we were going to do it, right outside the weir chamber, so we took our officer and we dressed them up as a day laborer, and we put them out there, sitting on the aqueduct. Inside the weir chamber, we lined up the entire SWAT team inside that door, and we had the two sergeants standing on a stool looking out through the sill, the transom, that’s open, above the door, watching our guy to make sure that when it happened, there’d be no problem. What they didn’t know was, that the aqueduct at that point’s filled with bats, and there’s a ventilation hole on top of the weir chamber. So as they were sitting there in complete darkness, what they later found out was a bat was coming, was flying between them, circling around, coming back through the vent hole, and flying between them again. And they kept thinking that they were speaking to each other. So they hear “Ssshhww!” “Hey what?” “I didn’t say anything.” And they hear “Ssshhww!” “Was that you?” “No, that wasn’t me.” And then they realize that there were bats flying between them though the transom; they decided to go to another location, they’d do better. They all piled out of there in an awful hurry. So, I mean, the Aqueduct is something we use and think about on a daily basis. I’m not so sure many people think of it in its historical context. But it’s just like an old road in Ossining, an old level road in Ossining, that people unfortunately take for granted, and is used tremendously by the cyclists and the runners and the walkers and things like that. And it doesn’t take much to look at it and see that it is, you know, worn ground. I was saying before, we run a 5K race on it today, we start right there at the double arch, run north, 2.5K and back, and it’s always a lot of fun. Originally we used to give bricks to the people who won the races, so that was a lot of fun. Oral Histories My name is Scott Craven, and I’m a captain here in the Village of Ossining Police Department, and I’ve been a police officer here for twenty-six years. I’ve lived in Ossining and the Lower Hudson River Valley for my entire fifty years, and I’m never gonna leave. I talk on various topics of the Hudson River to different groups, I have a master’s degree in American history, and I wrote my master’s thesis on the mouth of the Croton River and how it’s changed over the years. Growing up, I lived in Ossining, and everybody knew about the aqueduct, or at least they knew about the shaded path that ran through here. But in