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| Don Riepe, a suntanned 71-year-old who has lived on the bay since 1981 and has held the title of Jamaica Bay guardian for six years, since retiring from the National Parks Service. |
July 29, 2011
Jamaica Bay: Wilderness on the Edge
By ALAN FEUER
A giant salt water puddle, pooled over 20,000 acres beneath the leaky eaves of southern Queens and Brooklyn, the bay lies at the far end of the Rockaways A line. And to ride that line from Times Square to Canal Street to Broadway Junction, and then through Ozone Park to Howard Beach and Broad Channel, where suddenly there are marshes offshore and ibises and egrets in the sky, is to understand that with a simple 90-minute trip one can find a wilderness within the city limits.
The bay is “the one place in New York where nature is so dominant that it makes the city a backdrop,” Brad Sewell, an environmental lawyer and blogger, recently wrote.
Of course, that backdrop has caused the bay considerable trouble over the years. Since the industrial revolution, it has served as a dumping ground for items that the city does not wish to see: its garbage fills, sewage treatment plants and occasional dead bodies.
But in the past 10 years or so, as the greening of New York has taken hold, an alliance of officials, environmentalists and local advocates has emerged to save the bay from what makes it so distinctive — which is to say, from its condition as a wild place in the country’s biggest city.
Today, Jamaica Bay has reached a kind of inflection point, poised between what it is and what it could become.
The lush, green cord-grass marshes are still eroding rapidly, but terrapin turtles have returned in such force that just last month, a stubborn bunch blocked a busy runway at Kennedy. Seals have been spotted sunning themselves on shore rocks. Fleets of kayaks are available for day trips. Even Brooklyn hipsters — those self-conscious harbinger birds, arriving early at what’s soon to be in vogue — have been flocking to the summer cabanas that rest along its shores.
All this energy reflects a central fact: Jamaica Bay sits at the literal and figurative edge where the natural and the manmade worlds collide. “It’s just a beautiful, natural ecosystem in the middle of this huge metropolitan area,” said Don Riepe, a suntanned 71-year-old who has lived on the bay since 1981 and has held the title of Jamaica Bay guardian for six years, since retiring from the National Parks Service. “I love the smell and the sound of the bay, the calmness of the water, the marine life, the bird life, the seasons.”
It was 5 o’clock on a recent Sunday evening, and everything that Mr. Riepe described was serenely on display: the sea grass swayed, the horseflies buzzed, the bright blue buoys marking crab traps bobbed in silence on the darker, bluer surface of the bay. Mr. Riepe (pronounced REE-pee) had piloted his 22-foot motorboat, the Oystercatcher, through a reach of shallows called the cow patch and now began to putter beneath the Cross Bay Bridge. A peregrine falcon watched from an abutment. The air smelled humidly of salt. The public housing projects of the Rockaways loomed into distant view.
When Mr. Riepe arrived at JoCo Marsh, the largest and best preserved salt-grass section of the bay, hundreds of birds — Forster’s terns, laughing gulls, osprey, willets, herons — were revolving in a circle over the water, a great avian feeding wheel feasting on marine life. At the same time, from Runway 4 Left at Kennedy, birds of a decidedly different feather — airplanes bound for Europe: Finnair, Air Berlin, Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa — were taking off at two-minute intervals and screaming overhead.
“You really get a sense out here,” Mr. Riepe said, “how this beautiful thing, the bay, sits on the cusp of the huge, globally important thing at the airport.”
Mr. Riepe lives in Broad Channel, in a small house on the water, with a small back deck where he takes his morning orange juice and a private dock at which he moors his boat. As he returned and tied the Oystercatcher to a bollard, he smiled and said, “There’s Igor.” Igor is the egret who visits from time to time.
He opened his door and Igor stepped contentedly inside. The 4-foot-tall wild bird was soon enjoying canned sardines, fed to him by hand, in Mr. Riepe’s kitchen.
It was, it must be said, an improbable scene, one made even more so by the skyline of Manhattan visible — in the distance — through the window.
MORE or less since the development of lower Queens and Brooklyn in the 19th century, New Yorkers have been slowly destroying Jamaica Bay. On Mill Island, in the northern portion of the bay, there was an asphalt factory and a lead-smelting operation. Bone-boiling businesses and guano plants took root. According to a 1981 history commissioned by the United States Department of the Interior, the “disposition of refuse from New York became the principal activity” on the bay around the turn of the 20th century. On Barren Island, there were facilities for turning dead horses into glue. At 10 a.m. each weekday, the federal study said, a “horse boat” would arrive with up to 50 dead horses onboard, along with the bodies of cats, dogs, even cows.
In 1905, as the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts grew ever more congested, a wild plan emerged to turn Jamaica Bay into the world’s largest deep-water port. The shallows were to be deepened, manmade islands with slips and piers were to be built, a rail network was to be put in place, and the shoreline was to be covered in bulkheads. Some of this actually happened: the Rockaway Inlet was dredged; and Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first municipal airport, was created. According to the pictorial history “Jamaica Bay,” by Daniel Hendrick, it was no less than Robert Moses, the city’s master builder, who finally put an end to the plan.
Even in 1938, as Mr. Hendrick notes, Moses could complain, “Jamaica Bay faces the blight of bad planning, polluted water, and garbage dumping. Are we to have another waterfront slum?”
Fifteen years later, the city’s parks department established the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and Herbert Johnson, its first superintendent, had a crew of workers transplant more than 1.5 million individual clumps of beach grass from the nearby shore to a newly dredged plot of land. The problems in the larger bay persisted, however, even in 1972, when the federal government incorporated the bay into the Gateway National Recreation Area, which skitters across the mouth of New York Harbor, from Sandy Hook to the west, to the tip of Kennedy Airport to the east.
Now, through the efforts of environmental groups and city and state officials, Moses’s 60-year-old grievances are being answered. Just last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing smaller groups like the American Littoral Society and the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers, signed an unprecedented agreement with the city and state to cut in half, by 2020, the amount of nitrogen discharged into the bay from four city sewage treatment plants. Under the agreement, the city will pay $100 million to upgrade technology at the plants and will spend an additional $15 million to slow the erosion of the bay’s marsh islands
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“It’s big,” said Mr. Sewell, the blog-writing lawyer who works for the council. “The bay is the most nitrogen-polluted body of water in the world. There are a lot of people” — nearly 500,000, in the watershed, he said — “whose you-know-what partly ends up in the bay.”
Nitrogen is nontoxic but causes harmful algae blooms that render waters inhospitable to marine life, affecting not only fin- and shellfish populations but the local and migratory birds that feed on them. Mr. Sewell and his law partner, Larry Levine, said nitrogen might also be responsible for the accelerating loss of the bay’s marshlands, which control shoreline erosion and provide temporary resting grounds for the thousands of weary birds that pass through every year on the Atlantic Flyway.
“Improving water quality is the first step; everything follows that,” said John McLaughlin, director of ecological services at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. With the recent nitrogen agreement, Mr. McLaughlin said, “we’ve basically made a commitment to the long term.”
The other day, he was aboard the Osprey, the department’s water-testing vessel, as it took samples in the bay. From the wheelhouse, he pointed out a spot on Breezy Point, at the west end of the Rockaways, where the city was attempting to restore local eelgrass (it would, he said, attract menhaden and other indigenous fish). The city also has a program to replenish the oyster population in Jamaica Bay, which, a hundred years ago, boasted some of the best oyster beds on the East Coast. This is no mere act of nostalgia. A single adult oyster, Mr. McLaughlin said, can filter up to 35 gallons of water a day.
It is endeavors like these — combined with a separate effort to control sewer overflows, like the recent discharge of sewage in Harlem that closed beaches as far away as Staten Island — that have made Jamaica Bay a test case for the fragile relationship between the natural and urban worlds and have thrust it into the vanguard of environmental technology.
“In a sense, the bay is serving as a laboratory for the entire world when it comes to new nitrogen treatments,” Mr. Sewell said, “and as a laboratory for the city when it comes to storm-water overflows.
“It really is an incubator for progressive programs for New York and beyond,” he added. “It’s actually pretty cool.”
The Sebago Canoe Club has for more than 75 years occupied a scruffily idyllic spot on Paerdegat Basin, an inlet of the bay in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. The club’s old photos show cocky local kids standing with their chests puffed out in matching tank tops. This month, there was a three-hour paddle from the clubhouse dock to a grassy patch of marshland a mile and a half offshore.
By 5 p.m. or so, a dozen members had arrived and set out in a loose pod on the water. The kayaks at Sebago are skinny, yellow things; they floated like bananas on the bay.
With three trip leaders showing the route, the paddlers traveled past the speedboats tied up at a neighborhood marina and then beneath a busy bridge into the gleaming pewter basin of the bay. Afterward, as always, the kayaks would be washed down with a hose; at a backyard picnic table, pizza would be consumed.
“It takes you away,” Tony Pignatello, the baseball-capped commodore of the club, said of these weekly trips. “It’s almost like you’re in the country. It’s just a natural, natural place.”
Mr. Pignatello, like most of the club’s 250 members, lives nowhere near Canarsie (he lives in Fresh Meadows, Queens) and commutes to the bay, which, in this section, is mostly populated by Caribbean immigrants. Between a third and a half of all people living on the bay are foreign born, local officials say, and their connection to the water can range from the religious (coconut shells, even cremation ashes, sometimes wash ashore from Hindu rituals ) to the nonexistent (“I tell my West Indian friends, ‘Come out, we’ll put you on the water,’ ” said Walter Lewandowski, the club’s kayak chairman. “They say: ‘Me? In a kayak? Forget it.’ ”).
This is important because Jamaica Bay, with notable exceptions, lacks a local constituency capable of arguing its merits to the confusingly diverse bureaucracy that oversees it, a list that includes the National Parks Service, the city’s parks department, the State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Army Corps of Engineers. One chief reason the bay has been neglected so long, said Mr. Hendrick, the historian, is that many residents live in the area because the housing is cheap or because they work at Kennedy and have no experience, or interest, in dealing with the miscellany of officials.
The exceptions are the residents of Broad Channel — people like Mr. Riepe or Dan Mundy Sr., president of the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers — who helped set in motion the current grass-roots resurgence. It was Mr. Mundy, a retired New York Fire Department captain, who more than a decade ago noticed the bay’s declining water quality and brought in the Army Corps for a boat tour of its marshes. (The corps is now involved in a multimillion-dollar project to restore them.)
Just this spring, after the Regional Plan Association, an independent research group, proposed expanding Kennedy by filling in a portion of the bay, 150 residents and civic leaders packed the American Legion Hall in Broad Channel to vociferously criticize the plan. Mr. Riepe showed up with photos of the birds and animals that lived, and thrived, beside the airport. Mr. Mundy rose and said, “The people in the back of the bay, they know the bay.”
Jamaica Bay’s conservationists — fishermen and firefighters, limousine drivers and owners of small boats — are not your typical tree-hugging types, not “Upper West Side, Park Slope, brownstone Brooklyn people,” as Mr. Riepe put it. They are people like Mr. Lewandowski from the canoe club, a transit official, who described the bird migrations on the bay succinctly: “The birds fly down from wherever in Canada. They, you know, take a rest. Then they fly on.”
This is appropriate and seems to have worked quite well, especially in the matter of the airport plan, which many on the bay assume will never happen, if only because it would require a gridlocked Congress to amend current law. While professional environmentalists like Mr. Sewell have provided the science and a certain intellectual heft to the fight to save the bay, the hard, early work was done by local residents themselves.
One hot afternoon, after leaving the waters near the airport, Mr. Riepe steered the Oystercatcher into Vernam Basin, a rank industrial inlet on the bayside of the Rockaway Peninsula. A large cement plant sat on the bulkhead. Derelict barges were covered in graffiti. A motorboat with a classic local name, the “How U’ Doin,” lay abandoned in the oily flats near shore
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Floating for a moment, not quite shaking his head, Mr. Riepe expressed the common and commonsense attitude toward saving Jamaica Bay.
“It just makes sense,” he said. “It’s just intuitive to protect it.”
He paused, then continued.
“Because it’s beautiful — and natural,” he said.
Great piece! The affects on the health of those living around the Bay has to be impacted. I wonder if there are any stats available.
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