Among the best things about summer are the remedies against summer. And nothing is better than those cool drafts of water that spring from our public drinking fountains. To satisfy hunger is pleasant, but to quench thirst, especially on warm summer days, is sublime.

Unlike Rome, which has drinking fountains on many of the busiest streets, most of New York’s drinking fountains are located in parks, especially in Central Park. The Romans draw their water from various sources, each of which has a different flavor, and the locals are divided in their loyalties to one over another. In New York, however, all the water is pooled in a central distributing plant that accounts for its greater uniformity of flavor. Nevertheless, the conditions of the actual fountain can, to a large extent, account for a specific flavor. While some emerge a little warm and metallic, the best of them are cool and pristine.

My favorite fountain in the city, however, is not in a park, but in the New-York Historical Society, on the ground floor, at the far left of the main hall, as you enter from Central Park West. Having grown up near the museum, I have always known about this fountain. Even though it has been reclad in aluminum – I am almost certain it was once covered in white porcelain – it was, on a recent tasting, exactly and dependably as I remembered.

The water has a cold, rich flavor to it, as though – in keeping with the purpose of the institution in which it is to be found – it had emerged not only from the depths of the earth, but from some great well of times past. It seemed like the potable projection of those cool terrazzo floors, those large silent spaces, and those austere Ionic columns that make the society the imposing institution that it is.