A City, An Island: Preserving NYC’s Post-Industrial Shorelines

January 24, 2024

“City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts!

City nested in bays! My city!”

Walt Whitman, Manahatta

The human relationship to the seas that surround us is a love story as old as time. The ocean confounds and astounds us, bringing us closer to the mysteries of the universe and to each other. But as climate change events imperil the livelihood of the ocean’s species, and U.S. policymakers continue to overlook the implications of rising and warming seas on the health of our planet, our history-long symbiosis with the global waters is threatened.

Nearly 40% of the United States population lives near a coastline. Historically critical inputs for industry, coastlines were home to maritime economies that attracted flourishing communities. With the advent of highways, some of these shoreline businesses were deserted in deference to cheaper vehicular transport. Though our economic relationship with the shorelines has changed, some of these industrial sites—and communities—still remain. 

These days, waterfront areas are less sought-after by manufacturers and shipping companies, replaced by real estate developers looking to build residential skyscrapers and seaside restaurants. The post-industrial shorelines of New York City are a prime example, and Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile long tributary of the East River that separates Greenpoint and Queens, is a case study for this national shift. 

Contamination warning at the Newtown Creek Walk. Credit: Lizzie Walsh

After Dutch and British settlers colonized the county of Bosjwick (which encompasses the present-day neighborhoods of Bushwick, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg), Newtown Creek’s surrounding marshland became a fecund area for European-style agriculture. As U.S. industry developed, Newtown Creek quickly transformed from fertile farmland to a major shipping hub, and the site of booming industrial development. By the 20th century, over 50 refineries and manufacturers built their home along the Creek—but as the economy thrived, urban waste and raw sewage accumulated. In lieu of modern-day environmental protection laws and sewage systems, shoreline manufacturers and developing residential communities were free to dump their waste into the creek. 

In 1978, a U.S. Coast Guard flying overhead noticed a thick oil slick on the surface of the Creek. The oil had sequestered just beneath the creek bed since the city’s industry boom, and as the creek’s wooden bulkheads (partitions between the water and the shoreline) degraded, the oil seeped into the waterway. After further investigation into the spill’s origins, two lawsuits against the responsible party, ExxonMobil, were filed. ExxonMobil paid out 25 million dollars to the state, 19.5 of which has been designated for the environmental rehabilitation of Newtown Creek. 

Since the settlement was reached, city and state environmental agencies have used these funds to successfully stop the oil seepage and remove millions of gallons of oil from the creek. In 2011, the United States Environmental Protection Agency designated Newtown Creek a federal superfund site, granting the cleanup effort even more resources to remediate contamination. But the work to undo the spoils of industries past is far from complete.

Even before the ExxonMobil scandal, environmental advocacy groups like the Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA) and Riverkeeper have worked with local communities to draw up blueprints for the creek’s future. Through the myriad efforts of these organizations to bring life back to the creek, the watershed is once again home to marine wildlife, including wetland plants, blue crabs, fish, and waterfowl. Though work is still very much in progress, Newtown Creek has become a beacon of hope for the environmental rehabilitation of our post-industrial shorelines. 

At an NCA meeting on March 19th, local environmental advocacy groups and landscape architectural organizations gathered to present some of the successful work and future plans for “greening” efforts along New York City’s post-industrial shorelines.

“At a minimum, we’d like the shoreline to serve at least one of four categories: public access, resilience, maritime industrial use, and ecological benefit,” said Willis Elkins, executive director at the Newtown Creek Alliance and co-chair of the Newtown Creek Superfund Community Advisory Group. “We want to focus on areas where water isn’t accessible, or even visible, to the public, and give it new life.”

Willis Elkins and the NCA have made great strides to this end. Recent rehabilitation work at Dutch Kills, a tributary of the Creek, replaced eroding shoreline edges with loose stone foundation known as riprap, forming a durable breakwater along low-lying shores that were at risk of erosion. 

“We want to create resiliency, but we want to make sure it isn’t sterile; we’ve got to encourage developers to think beyond the metal sheet pile and concrete breakwaters,” said Elkins of the hopes for new, greener reinforcements along the water’s edge. Sterile structures don’t provide habitats for wildlife that are beginning to return to the waterways, and can obscure creek access.

Other creekside projects, like man-made mussel molds, focus specifically on furnishing these habitats. Along with tension rods and steel fasteners, these molds were installed in the crevices of sheet pile bulkheads along the Dutch Kills tributary. Because mussels like to grow on themselves, the naturalistic shape of the molds encouraged the water-filtering invertebrates to return to the water’s edge. 

These same crevices can also be used to host other wildlife species. Partnering with students at Laguardia community college, the NCA has designed basket structures of marsh grasses that live within the bulkheads at the intertidal level. These grasses once grew in the natural salt marsh of the pre-industrial waterway, and their reintroduction could facilitate the revival of a fragmented marine ecosystem.

These projects, among others, set a standard for low-investment rehabilitation along the 520 miles of New York’s shoreline: working with pre-existing structures and using inexpensive materials can allow these green rebuilds to come to life quickly. 

Not all of these shoreline projects are small-scale. Gina Wirth at SCAPE, a landscape architectural firm that works on urban aquatic ecology, presented updates at the meeting on an award-winning development that grew out of an art exhibit. 

“Oyster-tecture was a MOMA exhibition that became reality in a very different context. This exhibit proposed a living reef composed of “fuzzy rope” that produces substrate to support marine growth, like oysters, that clean our harbor water through biotic filtration,” said Wirth of the 2009 exhibit.

“The success of this exhibit led to something very real that is under construction today, ” said Wirth with a grin. 

Living Breakwaters, a climate-adaptive green infrastructure project, is made up of 2,400 feet of stone and concrete breakwaters surrounding Tottenville, a low-lying coastal neighborhood of Staten Island that was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. These breakwaters are protective barriers that shelter upland areas from waves and storms, and are designed to slow and eventually reverse decades of erosion around Tottenville.

“We’ve also created what we call ‘reef streets’ in these structures that extend from the breakwaters like fingers, and provide a habitat for oysters, mussels, and juvenile finfish,” elaborates Wirth. 

Wirth’s “reef streets” include man-made tide pool casts, an invention from the company ECOncrete. Founded by marine biologists, ECOncrete has created a variety of technologies that work to decrease ecological footprint and enable the growth of marine life in concrete infrastructures. Unlike traditional concrete or quarry rock, ECOncrete is porous and heterogeneous, allowing oysters, coral, and tubeworms to grow. Their molds, like the tide pools used at the Living Breakwaters site, are ecological niches that mimic protective organic habitats. Inventions like their Admix product can be mixed with traditional concrete at a 1:1 ratio to create a chemically-balanced structure that supports marine ecosystems. These kinds of innovations in infrastructure can be revolutionary for our waterways, but can be costly.

Proprietary technology like ECOncrete isn’t the only part of green infrastructure that comes with a hefty price tag. Like most cities, urban development in New York is fueled almost entirely by financial incentives. With only 1.4% of the city’s rentals vacant in 2024, property developers are motivated to build as quickly as possible, with residential buildings near the water being some of the most valuable properties. Getting property owners, development firms, and public agencies to sign off on “green” elements is a complex dance of collaboration and pricey permit acquisition.

“It’s a challenge,” explains Jennifer Norton of COWI, a Danish engineering consultancy firm that works on public and private marine builds. “Marine infrastructure is very expensive. When you add an ecological element to your project, the state wants you to monitor it, which is great because we want that data. But it’s an expensive task.”

“In many cases, property owners don’t want to spend the extra money to incorporate these additions when they are building. But we want them to understand how beneficial [these elements] can be in preserving the foundations they are building upon,” Elkins agrees. 

Elkins, like most of the experts gathered at the event, are optimists. It is their belief that bringing attention back to these often-inaccessible and overlooked industrial areas can help uplift our marine ecosystems and allow us to reconvene with the world’s largest—and arguably, most important—natural resource.

“There are so many ways to engage with the water around us. We don’t want to turn our backs on the water, and we don’t have to.”