Urban Gadabout: Walking the Newtown Creek Nature Walk with its designer, George Trakas

A popular feature at the Newtown Creek Nature Walk is this long series of steps along the park's Newtown Creek frontage. Visitors are free to relax on the steps and look out on the Long Island City (Queens) shorefront opposite, or to peek at the view to the left.

by Ken

Some of life's sweetest rewards can't be planned; the most you can do is to position yourself in the path of possibly happy surprises.

I had signed up for Jack Eichenbaum's Municipal Art Society tour today (check out MAS tour listings here), "A Renaissance in Newtown Creek," even though I had done what looked to be basically the same walk with Jack before, when it was called "Crossing Newtown Creek": starting in the heart of Brooklyn's northwesternmost outpost, Greenpoint, then proceeding to the northwestern corner of the 53-acre site of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Management Plant to see the Newtown Creek Nature Walk designed by artist George Trakas installed between 1997 and 2007, then proceeding across the Pulaski Bridge over Newtown Creek to Long Island City, Queens. (Newtown Creek forms the western section of the border between Brooklyn and Queens.)

So why do the walk again?

First, when I first did the walk, some 15 months ago, the primary attraction was laying eyes on Newtown Creek, which to my knowledge I had never done before. You have to remember that like most industrial waterfronts it was pretty well closed off to civilian eyes and feet. But in that intervening year and a quarter I had done more walks around various parts of the creek than I can remember and also cruised the creek, mostly under the auspices of the Newtown Creek Alliance (it's definitely worth signing up for their e-mail list), and mostly with NCA historian Mitch Waxman (whose blog, "The Newtown Pentacle," is always worth checking out).

Second, there's the Jack Eichenbaum factor. In all the many walks I've done with Jack, I can hardly remember one where I didn't learn something of near-life-changing importance -- certainly a change in my way of perceiving the city, and likely the world around me. Walking with Jack, you learn to see how basic factors of physical and human geography have shaped the way regions and neighborhoods have developed and redeveloped.

Third, there's the "I forgot" factor. Even if today's walk turned out to be identical to last June's, the chances are that I haven't retained more than 10 percent of what I "learned" then.

BUT TODAY'S WALK TURNED OUT TO BE
FAR FROM IDENTICAL TO LAST YEAR'S


Here's George at another of his projects, Beacon Point 2007, a Hudson River-front space that provides waterfront access in Beacon, NY.

The first surprise as we gathered for the sold-out tour was that none other Mitch Waxman was on hand, recruited by Jack to share his particular knowledge of Newtown Creek and its surrounding areas. Then Jack, arriving fighting through a massive subway outage in Queens, bore news: Not only would our walk be coinciding, by happenstance, with Field Trip Day and the closing weekend of the "Newtown Creek Armada," a flotilla of little radio-controlled boats in the Whale Creek inlet side of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. More important, the park's designer, George Trakas, was scheduled to be on hand for the festivities, and had agreed to talk to our group about his handiwork.

-- from the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection's
PDF brochure on the Newtown Creek Nature Walk

Since this was my third or fourth visit to the nature walk (I figure that by the time you lose count, you qualify as a habitué), I already had a rich appreciation of the wonders of its design, incorporating into its particularly limited space the history of the area, its past and present natural history (all through the park there are sections of plantings featuring all sorts of indigenous trees and plants), and a record of the people who have lived and worked along the creek.

But what a treat to walk through it all and get a glimpse of it through George's eyes. He's been living with the project since he was first approached about it in 1996 or 1997, not just through its opening in 2007, but keeping abreast of it since then, and also in the planning of what he described to us as Phases 2 and 3 of the park, which I didn't know about at all. He's actively involved in the planning of Phase 2 (he said he had a meeting about it just yesterday), which has a whole list of steps to go through -- especially as a project that has city, state, and federal components and also community involvement -- as well as additional construction that has to be completed to the waste-water plant itself in order for construction on Phase 2 to begin late in 2014 with a view to a 2015 opening.

Everywhere we looked there was a design feature whose history George could share, generally involving collaboration and coordination with those various government and community groups. He explained how he arrived at the dramatic entrance, which required some sort of bridge or overpass over a portion of the plant. He talked about the nautical themes he had incorporated into the design to reflect the shipbuilding business that had once occupied the sight, and noted that he hadn't troubled the engineers with the fact that the walkway as finally built aligns with the distant Empire State Building, of which visitors get one of the city's great views!

George talked about the startled response he got when he disclosed his idea to put a "fragrance garden" underneath that entryway overpass. A "fragrance garden" alongside a waste-water management plant? The most startling fact about it is that there isn't, by and large, and fragrance of waste water!

There was also much consternation about George's idea for those long concrete "step benches" (pictured above) alongside the park's Newtown Creek frontage, which have become one of its most user-appreciated features. I can vouch for the considerable pleasure of just sitting on those steps and observing nature as it exists today along the creek. And as Mitch Waxman always stresses on his walks in the area, if we give nature even a sliver of a chance it can regenerate itself, and despite the creek's still-heavy pollution (it is a Superfund site, after all), it's teeming with life -- yes, there's marine life in the creek and its tributaries, and all kinds of bird life in and around the creek. (George pointed out that plants and trees for the park were chosen in part for their likely appeal to birds.)

George recalled that in the design process he was warned that the park was bound to be a gathering ground for homeless people and to be subject to graffiti. Based on its nearly five-year history, not at all. He thinks that the common sense and approachability of the design (he noted that the community groups frequently stressed the need to provide explanations for historical- and geographical-based design features) have produced an attitude of respect on the part of the people who visit. He also noted that for some presumably unknown reason, despite the appeal of the park to all sorts of birds, pigeons haven't had much presence, even though (or perhaps because) the waste-water plant itself has some rich feeding grounds for them.

One detail that especially delighted me, perhaps because I hadn't given it any thought in my previous visits, is the very surface we walk on through most of the park. It turns out to be a carefully chosen material, a version of what is known in trademarked form as "compressed gravel." It's very low-maintenance, George explained, and I suddenly noticed what an easy, cushiony surface it provides for walking. (It's much used in Europe, George said.)

George, by the way, seems to have become expert on all matters related to the waste-water management plant itself, and I kept wanting to ask if he had ever imagined -- in all those years he was building his reputation before being invited to take part in this project -- if he had ever imagined he would one day have this degree of expertise in this particular field!

There was so much more -- you had to be there, and I'm sorry you weren't. But I'm sure glad I was! Naturally the Nature Walk portion of our walk grew to unexpected proportions, and Jack kept tabs on people whose time situation didn't permit them to go beyond the original two-hour schedule. In the end, I'd gotten so much out of this portion of the walk that I accompanied the rest of the group as far as the base of the stairway onto the Pulaski bridge and then parted company.

As it happens, my terror of heights makes walking across bridges a nightmare for me, and after all I'd already done this crossing once. It had been on my mind the whole time last June when I first did this walk with Jack, and I wondered this morning whether it would be any easier the second time. It didn't escape my attention that as soon as I had an excuse, I wiggled out of finding out.


For a short film about the Newtown Creek Wastewater Management Plant, with its famous "digester eggs," click here.


DON'T FORGET JACK'S UPCOMING
"DAY ON THE J" -- SUNDAY, OCT. 21

In July I wrote with breathless excitement about the announcement of a date for Jack's first offering in eight years of his daylong exploration of the route of New York City's J train from Manhattan through Brooklyn to Queens, an even more exciting prospect than his now-famous (I hope) daylong "World of the #7 Train," a much more familiar train and route -- though I expect that most if not all of what Jack has to show on the #7 train outing is unfamiliar to most participants. (Translation: If you've never done it, you must watch for the next time Jack offers it.)

As I wrote in July:

Like The World of the #7 Train, A Day on the J is organized in the form of six walks in dramatically different areas, reflecting widly different geography and development histories, spanning the three boroughs through whichf the J runs: Highland Park, Richmond Hill, and downtown Jamaica in Queens; Bushwick and South Williamsburg in Brooklyn; and the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The walks are linked, of course, by rides on the J train itself (unlimited-ride Metrocard highly recommended). As with the #7 tour, A Day on the J has a lunch break built in, in this case in Jamaica.

I noted that on request Jack will e-mail you a great information sheet, which includes a registration coupon, though you can register without it by mailing him the information specified in the description below along with your check.

I didn't have a chance to ask Jack how registration is going, but I can warn you that any places that remain going into tour weekend are likely to be snapped up in a flurry of last-minute registrations, when disappointed would-be tour-takers are likely to be turned away. Here's the official description.

A Day on the J
Sunday, October 21, 10am-5:30pm

This series of six walks and connecting rides is astride the colonial route between Brooklyn and Queens. We focus on what the J train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service (in part) in 1888. Walks take place in Highland Park, Richmond Hill, downtown Jamaica, Bushwick, South Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address) The full day’s program, registration coupon and other info is available by email: jaconet@aol.com. The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

Take the J Train: Jack Eichenbaum's Oct. 21 Day on the J will feature walks in Queens (Highland Park, Richmond Hill, and downtown Jamaica), Brooklyn (Bushwick and South Williamsburg), and Manhattan (Lower East Side), plus lunch in Jamaica and of course lots of trips on the J.

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Urban Gadabout: Walking Dutch Kills with Mitch Waxman, "Your Guide to a Tour of Decay" (NYT)

Mitch Waxman: "This would be a great place
to base yourself if you were a supervillain"

"You don't get to have Manhattan without having a Newtown Creek," Mitch says at 2:33 of this NYT video. "It's funny because the comic-book guy in me wants to find a villain. You know, I want to find a Lex Luthor. He's out here somewhere, I could tell ya. But the thing is that there is no villian here. The villain is us. We use too much and waste too much, and this is just a theme that you have to come back to continually -- that there's a price of those skyscrapers and that fabulous modern city, in this place."

by Ken

Mitch made this same point today at the end of the three-hour walk around Dutch Kills, the Queens-sided tributary of Newtown Creek which I mentioned earlier this week. The tour ended at the lovely Newtown Creek Nature Walk adjoining the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant on the Brooklyn side of Newtown Creek (opposite the mouth of Dutch Kills), the once-crucial industrial highway flowing into the East River which still provides the western part of the border between Queens to the north and Brooklyn to the south. Throughout the walk Mitch had emphasized the role the area around Newtown Creek played, not just locally but nationally, as a receiving ground for materials shipped in by water for the manufacture or processing of substances crucial to the country's supply of energy, food, and building materials, among many others.

Of course not a lot of attention was paid to the environmental impact of the way the Newtown Creek area was industrialized, leaving behind a waterway of EPA Superfund-level toxicity. And today, let me tell you, the creepy shade of green of the water of Dutch Kills looked as scary as chemical analysis tells us it is. Newtown Creek itself, however, looked surprisingly and quite deceivingly okay. And it's not just the water's toxic. Vast quantities of oil from the numerous storage tanks still highly present on the creek pollute the water table -- not just in Brooklyn's northernmost neighborhood, Greenpoint, as is well known, but through much of the Brooklyn side of the creek and (not at all well-known) the Queens side as well.

As it happens, as Newtown Creek Allliance Executive Director Kate Zidar happily informed us when we met her at one of the street bridges over Dutch Kills, Mitch is about to become a citywide celebrity, with the publication of a really good piece about him by Steven Stern which will appear in the Metro section of tomorrow's NYT (and of course is already posted online).

Mitch stressed that the NCA, which he serves as historian (Kate Zidar told Steven Stern, "Mitch got that title by proving it, over and over"), isn't trying to convert the area around the creek into an upscale theme-park-type environment (my words, not his). The city needs its increasingly lost industrial base. But industry can be brought back and new industry created in an environmentally sustainable way, and that's the kind of development strategy that NCA likes to champion.

CRUISING NEWTOWN CREEK WITH MITCH: JULY 22

Even in its present state of pollution, Mitch insists, the area around Newtown Creek isn't "dead." Give nature even a small opening, he said, and it will come back. We saw bird life in the mouth of Dutch Kills (there are nests all over the area, he said), and as I mentioned the other day NCA has a birding tour scheduled for June 24. It's free, but you have to RSVP (to rsvp@newtowncreekalliance.org).

The next big event is a Newtown Creek cruise with Mitch, in association with Working Harbor Tours.

On July 22nd, Mitch shares his unique point of view and deep understanding of the past, present and future conditions of the Newtown Creek as the narrator and expedition leader for this years Hidden Harbor Tours: Newtown Creek exploration.

Our NY Water Taxi leaves from South Street Seaport at 11 a.m. sharp on a three-hour tour of the Newtown Creek. From the East River we’ll move into the Newtown Creek where we’ll explore explore vast amounts of maritime infrastructure, see many movable bridges and discover the very heart of the Hidden Harbor.

Limited seating available, get your tickets today.

AND SPEAKING OF WORKING HARBOR TOURS . . .

Don't forget the new walking tour of the northern shore of Staten Island which Mitch is doing, from the Ferry Terminal along Kill Van Kull to Snug Harbor, offered on three Saturdays -- June 30, July 28, and October 13, from 11am to 1pm.

NOW HERE'S THE NYT PIECE

Your Guide to a Tour of Decay


By STEVEN STERN
New York Times, Metro section, June 17, 2012

Stand on the pedestrian walkway of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, and you might notice a vaguely ominous red brick tower on the Queens side of the Newtown Creek, looming over the railroad tracks and asphalt plants.

If Mitch Waxman is your guide, he will identify it as the derelict smokestack of Peter Van Iderstine's fat-rendering business, which first set up shop in 1855. But he won't stop there.

He will expound on the archaic waste-disposal operations that once flourished on the creek, conjuring scenes of putrescent horse carcasses floating in on barges from Manhattan and docks piled with manure three stories high. The narrative will extend to Cord Meyer's bone blackers and Conrad Wissel's night soil wharf -- the gothic names of these forgotten businesses rattled off in a distinct Brooklyn accent.

At some point, he will start in on the horrors of the M. Kalbfleisch Chemical Works, eventually making his way to the sins of Standard Oil.

If the city's dead industries leave ghosts behind, Mr. Waxman is an adept medium.

The Newtown Creek watershed, his field of expertise, is a place where such specters are all too real. In the murky depths of the 3.8-mile estuary, the past haunts the present. Since the creek was designated a Superfund site in 2010, contractors from the Environmental Protection Agency have been dredging and testing in search of that past. The sludge acid that the Kalbfleisch factory sluiced into the water back in the 1830s is of more than academic concern.

Not that Mr. Waxman is any sort of an academic. While the Newtown Creek Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, lists him as its resident historian, his credentials were earned on the street and the Internet, through countless solitary walks and countless nights poring over obscure archives. ("Mitch got that title by proving it, over and over," said Kate Zidar, executive director of the organization.)

Formerly a comic-book artist and writer, Mr. Waxman earns his living doing photo retouching out of his apartment in Astoria, Queens. Since 2009, he has documented his passion for the creek -- in oddly beautiful photography and beautifully odd prose -- on his blog, The Newtown Pentacle.

Lately, he has been leading public walking tours of the waterfront for the alliance and other groups, as well as personally guiding anyone else who comes calling. He has lectured to local politicians and environmentalists, shepherded documentary filmmakers around Calvary Cemetery and taught German industrial ecology students a thing or two about sewage. Somehow, almost everyone interested in the polluted waterway seems to find his or her way to Mr. Waxman. He's become a docent of decay, the cicerone of Newtown Creek.

Mr. Waxman begins his tours with a well-rehearsed opening line: "This is not the world you know."

For most visitors, that's probably true. The Newtown Creek area was once one of the nation's great manufacturing centers, the waterway carrying more freight than the Mississippi River. Walking around the massive factory buildings of the Degnon Terminal in Long Island City, Queens, now mostly repurposed as warehouses, you catch a glimpse of a lost working-class city only blocks from the gleaming condominiums now rising by the East River.

After World War II, that industrial greatness faded, just as its environmental cost started to become apparent. A 1950 sewer explosion in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was the first indication of the huge quantities of petroleum poisoning the water and leaching into the soil. But the full extent of the damage wasn't discovered until the late 1970s: At least 17 million gallons of oil spilled over the previous century (more than the Exxon Valdez), much of which, after years of legal wrangling and recovery efforts, is still there.

Mr. Waxman calls the area a "municipal sacrifice zone" -- the urban equivalent of the bomb test sites of Nevada. And his tours are meant in part to expose the unsavory infrastructure that has been shunted there. He can name the 19 waste-transfer stations lining the creek and point out each of the 23 combined sewer outflows that disgorge their contents into the water. The lurking danger of the creek's emanations is a constant undercurrent. He will intone: "The very air you're breathing is a poisonous fume!"

But despite the toxic atmosphere, Mr. Waxman is clearly in love with the place. Based on the enthusiastic groups that show up for each tour, that perverse attraction is shared by others.

The journalist Andrew Blackwell, who traveled to some of the world's most polluted places for his recent book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, seemed unsurprised that such a blighted area would hold an aesthetic appeal. Ravaged industrial sites, he suggested, might actually fulfill a longing for nature.

"Part of what people are looking for in a wilderness experience," Mr. Blackwell said, "is the sense that it's not a mediated thing, that it's not made for them. A place like Newtown Creek isn't a product. It's supposedly a place that no one wants to go. That almost makes it more wild, makes people feel like they're discovering something about the world."

Mr. Waxman's own discoveries began, strangely enough, as an effort to improve his health.

Until 2006, his life was sedentary and circumscribed, revolving around wife, dog and (primarily) computer. "My friends called me ‘veal,' " he said, "because I never left the little white room."

That led to a heart attack at 39, a weeklong hospital stay and a command to exercise. So he began walking. Headphones blasting Black Sabbath, camera at his side, he circled out from Astoria, exploring colonial graveyards, abandoned factories and, eventually, the Newtown Creek waterfront.

"I started to see all these things I couldn't explain," he said. So began the cycle of wandering and research that continues to this day. "The more time you give it, the more stuff you find, and the more questions get asked," he said.

These questions brought him in contact with a circle of like-minded seekers: amateur urbanists and self-taught historians, railroad enthusiasts and infrastructure aficionados. In their company, Mr. Waxman distinguished himself as someone equally comfortable on the street and in the archive. "Mitch is the type that will go up to a stranger and ask things," said Kevin Walsh, creator of the popular urban history blog Forgotten New York. Mr. Waxman's social ease, combined with a willingness to share the knowledge he was acquiring, helped him "make allies among the people who work along the creek," Mr. Walsh said.

One day, Mr. Waxman signed up for a boat tour narrated by Bernard Ente, a maritime devotee from Maspeth. They hit it off, and Mr. Ente, a founding member of the Newtown Creek Alliance, became a sort of mentor. When he died, in April last year, Mr. Waxman essentially stepped into his shoes.

The distinctively apocalyptic spin he brings to his newfound role, however, is his alone. That "sense of looming menace" comes to full flower on his blog. An oddball mix of history, reportage and genre pastiche, it is written in a self-consciously florid prose modeled on H. P. Lovecraft, the cultish writer of pulp horror fiction. Slipping in and out of the voice of a demented antiquarian, the daily posts portray the creek as home to unspeakable, possibly supernatural, terrors.

"You have these buried secrets," he said, explaining the thinking behind the occult conceit. He's spotted early-19th-century terra-cotta pipes protruding from bulkheads, antique masonry sewers connected to who knows what. He added: "There really is no telling what's in the ground there."

The more Mr. Waxman discovers about the creek's hidden past, the more he has become an advocate for its survival. Last summer, while out on the water surveying bulkheads with the crusading conservation group Riverkeeper, he discovered and documented a previously unreported oil spill on the Queens side.

His fascination with the darker aspects of the landscape has made him a fitting counterpart to the environmentalists working toward its future. As E.P.A. scientists begin the long process of rehabilitating the waters, Mr. Waxman is engaged in a parallel effort. His work is a kind of historical remediation, reclaiming the waterway's forgotten role in the life of the city.

"It's an odd thing," he said. "The creek has been waiting for me all this time. And I've been waiting for it."

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