India, Pakistan, Mali, Maine... You Know... Everywhere

When I got to India the first time, having driven my VW van across Asia, I was just getting out of my teens. I entered in the Punjab, drove to Delphi, Bombay, Goa, through Kerala, took the ferry across to Ceylon for a few months, then drove to Pondicherry, Madras, north through Andhra Pradessh and Orissa (where Tom Wolf, probably the next governor of Pennsylvania was serving in the Peace Corps at the time), on to Calcutta, Benares and up into Nepal for a couple months, Oh, and what fun it was! I'll spare you the unsavory details of what the Kabul Runs entails, but I can still remember the first time I realized that the slab of dead animal hanging from a hook in every (unrefrigerated) marketplace across Asia was black because it was covered in flies.

Around a decade later, one of my closest friends, at least in part inspired by my stories of India, the painter Eveline Pommier, traveled to India, contracted cholera and died, not yet 30. India has never been-- and never will be-- at least not in our lifetimes-- a walk in the park. Anyone who forgets this a trip to India is a serious undertaking, vacation, business trip, spiritual pilgrimage or what-- is putting their health and even their life in jeopardy.

Years later, Roland and I were driving around Rajasthan when we stopped for dinner at a high-end restaurant in Jaipur. Yum, yum. Afterwards we were walking around town and we wound up back behind the restaurant, where we saw some small boys filling up the bottled water they had been serving from a hose. I keep traveling to the Third World-- we were back in India last Christmas, for example-- and the hygiene everywhere is... spotty. On our way to a wonderful restaurant in Bamako a few years ago, perhaps the only really "wonderful" restaurant in the whole country, we counted a number of people using the public sidewalk to squat down and... well... #2. You get used to it. Or you go to Disneyland or, maybe, London and Paris, instead.

A couple days ago I was driving around L.A. listening to Terry Gross interview Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid about his new book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Hamid isn't some Pakistani bumpkin or, despite his previous book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a fundamentalist, a movie version of which opens next month. He spent a lot of his childhood in Palo Alto and earned degrees from Princeton and Harvard. How to Get Filthy Rich seems to be set in his hometown (and where he lives now), Lahore, a city I first visited in 1969 (when it had a million people; today it has 10 million). Wonderful place!

The main character in Filthy Rich, which is actually written like a weird How-To book, feels his best way to get rich is through a series of scams, a tried and true tradition across cultures, as we've seen in the History Channel series, The Men Who Built America. Hamid's character doesn't seem all that foreign when he takes goods that have expired and makes labels for them with longer shelf lives. Eventually he strikes it rich by boiling tap water and selling it as expensive mineral water. When I mentioned it to Roland, he seemed relieved. "At least," he said, "he was boiling it."

"[T]he marketization of water, the sort of application of a kind of uber-capitalism that you see really all over the world and certainly in Pakistan, is in some senses you can see it most clearly in water because water used to be almost free. You could get water, you know, from a river, from a canal, from a well, from wherever. And now, of course, we're running out of clean water in most of Asia and much of Africa and much of Latin America. And so people don't have clean drinking water. And we can live for a month without food, but we can't last more than a couple of days without water. So people are selling water, and both at the luxury level, where you have these high-end mineral waters and also at the level of just poor people needing something to drink. So his scam is to take mineral water bottles that have been consumed at high-end restaurants, buy the empties, take tap water, boil it a little bit, pour it into these mineral water bottles and reseal it so it looks like it's an authentic water bottle and sell it back to the exact same restaurants, who probably suspect that it's a scam product, but because it's so much cheaper than the water they buy normally are happy to take it on." The book, Gross explains in her introduction "is both a satire of self-help books and an examination of life in an Asian city with a growing middle class and an infrastructure that can't support it, except for the crime infrastructure, which is thriving."

This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia, and to do that, it has to find you huddled, shivering on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning... I originally didn't want to write it as a self-help book. I was trying to write this as a straight novel, and as usually happens with me, I did that for a couple of years and failed and eventually stumbled across this self-help book form. And what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself.

...I think it's a story that is a type of story that is common in Pakistan, but more than Pakistan in the entire world, because something like half the world's people now live in cities for the first time in human history. But in the course of the next generation, 25, 30 years, that number is going to go to 80 or 90 percent, which means a couple billion people are going to move to cities in Asia and Africa and Latin America, all over the world. And I think there's a lot of similarity between going from a poor countryside to a Third World megacity, which is a journey that these billions of people are on. So in a sense this is a story of that mass migration in Pakistan but also elsewhere.

Gross mentions the rotting water pipes and how "the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that while for the most part clear and often odorless reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery and typhoid." Hamid's wife was diagnosed with hepatitis the day after their wedding. "And it was the second time she had had it," he said. "Virtually everybody in my family has had either hepatitis or typhoid or something of that sort. You know, water-borne illness is everywhere. It affects the poor, and it also affects the affluent in a place like Pakistan... [Y]ou get it from either drinking water, you know, brushing your teeth with tap water, or perhaps somebody prepared your food, and they had washed their hands in that water or touched the water or hadn't washed their hands at all. I mean it's-- the mode of transmission is what's called oral-fecal, and that sort of unsavory term really sums up how you get it." His character, the bottled water scammer millionaire had hepatitis too.

[H]e has it as a boy, and so many of us had it, and it's a strange situation. You know, living in America, where in most cities you can drink tap water, and even so, people do have bottled water, but the tap water is perfectly safe to drink almost all the time, there is an enormous difference in a society where you can do that and a society where you cannot do that. And most of the world actually you cannot do that. So the government, the state, hasn't performed the basic, basic service of taking this most common of all commodities that we use and making it safe for everybody to drink as they please.

Not even in Poland Springs, Maine.

Low wage workers at the Poland Springs Bottling Plant in Maine, which is owned by Nestlé, are so angry with the way the company treats them that they're doing pretty disgusting things to pollute the water-- not that Nestlé gives a damn. Nestlé settled a law suit accusing it of using water under a former trash and refuse dump, and below an illegal disposal site where human sewage was sprayed as fertilizer for many years. Nestlé paid $10 million in the settlement but continues to sell the same Maine water under the Poland Spring name.

And they make a lot of money selling that crap too. People are trying to get their hands on money now... everywhere. And many will do anything to get it.

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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: Out on the water on City of Water Day

"Come see the sights," said he.
"New York in lights," said he.
Said I, "It might be amusing."
Next thing I knew we were cruising
on the SS Bernard Cohn.

Chilly and shivery,
out on the river, we
found us a corner to chat in,
as we were circling Manhattan,
on the SS Bernard Cohn. . . .

Barbara Harris, plus Barbara Monte, William Reilly, and Gerald M. Teijelo, vocals; Theodore Saidenberg, musical dir. From RCA's 1965 Original Broadway Cast Recording of Alan J. Lerner and Burton Lane's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

by Ken

Okay, it wasn't the SS Bernard Cohn, and the city wasn't in lights this afternoon, and we weren't circling Manhattan, but still . . . . (It was kind of overcast, if that counts. That made it maybe a little less hot than it might otherwise have been, but not exactly "chilly and shivery.")

Today was New York's annual City of Water Day, presented by the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, a celebration all over the area of the city's roughly zillion miles of waterfront. (Oh, I could look up the number, but would that improve any of our lives?)

City of Water Day is the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance’s way to bring together everything about the water that is exciting and fun, from port commerce to environmental education to active recreation. The event is a celebration of the potential of the waterfront.

MWA works to transform the New York and New Jersey Harbor and Waterways to make them cleaner and more accessible, a vibrant place to play, learn and work with great parks, great jobs and great transportation for all.

Through our work, the New York and New Jersey harbor and waterways will be alive with commerce and recreation; where sailboats, kayaks and pleasure craft share the waterways with commuter ferries, barges and container ships; where beautiful, cared-for parks are connected by affordable waterborne transit; where there are dozens of exciting waterfront destinations that reflect the vitality and diversity of the great metropolis that surrounds it; a waterfront that is no longer walled off by highways and rails, or by private luxury residences; a waterfront that is a shared precious resource and is accessible to all. MWA is a leadership organization that will make this vision real for our region.

Over 650 organizations that make up the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance can participate and play a major role in putting on City of Water Day.

When the schedule of events was finally announced, for most people it represented an embarrassment of riches. It was a little dicier for me, since by then I had registered for Matt Postal's Municipal Art Society walking tour "New to New York: Broadway's Cultural Corridor" at 11am, so I needed an event that I could get to in time from the Upper West Side starting somewhere between 1:15 and 1:30. To my relief and delight, I actually found one: the second sailing of the day of a river-eye tour of Hudson River Park, the still-developing park that consists of the immediate shoreline plus an ever-growing number of repurposed or rebuilt Hudson River piers over the five-mile span from Tribeca up to about 59th Street. (North of 59th Street Riverside Park begins its river journey.) The tour was narrated by Nicolette Witcher, vice president for environment and education at the Hudson River Park Trust, which oversees the development and maintenance of the park.

The lovely celebration of City of Water Day provides a striking reminder of the growing role our waterfront has come to play in the lives of more and more New Yorkers. Of course, once upon a time it played an essential, if barely visible, role in the lives not just of New Yorkers but of much the country, when it was one of our leading industrial plants, and city dwellers. While it's still very much a working waterfront, it's nowhere near the not-fit-for-human-habitation miasma it once was.

This week's Time Out New York has a useful little roundup of upcoming waterfront-themed tours on MAS's summer schedule, and if I could find an online link on the magazine's next-to-useless website, I would offer it. In any case, tomorrow I'm going to do a roundup of my own, including a number of other offerings in addition to MAS's.

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