Barren Island
Today I went with Jonathan Turer out to Bottle Beach which is on what was once Barren Island.
Here you can see the Marine Parkway Bridge which is at the end of Flatbush Avenue. Landfill has now made Barren Island part of Brooklyn.
There are disintegrating piles from old piers that indicate at one point boats stopped here.
The most amazing array of bottles from a bygone era cover the beach along the Rockaways side.
Of every shape and color, these bottles were dumped on Barren Island and covered with sand. That sand is now eroding and the bottles and other garbage is slowly moving towards the water.
Along the shore, in the roots of the reeds, you can see the garbage that was thrown in the dump much of it more or less intact.
Barren island, which is no longer an island is slowly yielding its treasure to Rockaway Inlet.
Not exactly a beach on which to walk your dog or bring your kid.
When you turn the corner and begin to walk away from the Rockaways towards Dead Horse Bay suddenly there is a lot more metal on the beach.
We found a newspaper dating to the 1950s indicating dumping continued at least until then.
When the wind dies down and there are no planes over head, you can hear the bottles tinging in the surf.
Is this place disgusting or amazing?
The longevity of much of the garbage is astounding and gives one pause.
Brooklyn Bridge to Red Hook
This is iconic Brooklyn. I started by walking out onto the bridge.
And then down into Brooklyn Bridge Park one of the few places where the public is invited to the edge of the water along Brooklyn’s edges.
The park has become a favorite spot for wedding photography. This hummer limo was parked on Washington Street while the wedding party took photos at the base of the Manhattan Bridge.
Tremendous progress is being made on the south side of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Furman Street.
Red Hook.
When you cross Degraw, the scale changes and you are in a neighborhood where people live.
There is a little bit of shipping left in Brooklyn.
It is not all ruins.
These old wharves, right outside Ikea, part of Erie Basin are part of the brownfield site called U. S. Dredging site. Ikea cleaned up its portion of the site. 25 additional acres are underwater.
Sheepshead and Plum Beach
Sheepshead Bay is named for a fish that no longer lives there. I assume can no longer live there due to whatever it is that we have done to the water.
Sheepshead Bay
The birds certainly seem domesticated. I had seen Natalie Jeremijenko speak on Friday night at Exit Art. One of the projects she spoke about was fish food that would help remediate the heavy metals in fish while taking advantage of people’s desire to feed the animals.
Recreational fishing seems to be a big business here. Even on this January day, there were a number of boats that were out. I couldn’t help wonder how far the boats go out, what they catch, and how safe the fish are to eat.
I am guessing that within my lifetime, Randazzo’s clamhouse served shellfish from Brooklyn and Queens. Or at least Long Island. My guess is that now they do not. Certainly, the industrial pollution was worse in the past say one hundred years ago.
If you keep walking down Emmons Avenue past the Knights of Columbus and all the empty condos, you get to Plum Beach. The fist thing I saw is that some people are eating the shellfish. or at least are digging for it.
Plum Beach
In someways, it is a lovely beach. There is a real sense of life. Birds are all around and clams spit water up from the sand.
There is also just a lot of garbage. Of every kind.
The Belt Parkway runs along the edge of the beach further undermining its integrity. In the past, there must have been wharves in this part of the bay. It is a strange place, at once filled with natural beauty and also very visibly compromised.
Coney Island
Coney Island Dangman Park MGP site
I went to Coney Island yesterday. Unsure of Toxi City’s continued relevance, I am revisiting some of the sites. This site is now a small shopping center. Very unremarkable. It was the site of a manufactured gas plant according to NYS DEC for about 20 years prior to 1906. So 100 years ago this ground was full of coal tar. And capped it is probably fine. Maybe there are vapor issues. That is what testing will determine.
However, who can predict what people will do. The lights need to be fixed and the electrical cables between them need to be dug up. So now there are the conditions for direct exposure to the soil. At least it is January and this man is wearing gloves.
Coney Island Boardwalk
I took a short walk on the beach.
I also got over to Shell road. There wasn’t much access to the creek. But I did see this heron take flight.
Paedegat Basin area
Nina and I went out to check out two brownfield sites near Paedegat Basin today. The first is in a strip mall. Called Bon Ton Cleaners in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it is now actually called Rebecca Cleaners. Remediation is complete as of last September and it supposedly reduced the effects of soil vapor levels of TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE).
Then we walked over to a site called Harbor Estates Property. It is a housing development built on the Ralph Avenue Truck Fill. The remediation measures included digging up two feet of soil and replacing with clean soil. The deed restrictions forbid digging deeper than 2 feet.
Across the street, Nina noticed this mobile synagogue on Avenue M. Several young woman came over to talk to us as we were photographing it. they wanted to know if we were Jewish, if we were lost souls that could be saved. It was sad to disappoint them.
Below is the 69th Street side:
On Bergen Avenue, we followed a dirt biker into the area along Paedegat Basin itself.
At the top of the basin is the Bureau of Sewers.
Gowanus
Nina and I walked up to the Double D pool this am. The Fulton Works Manufactured Gas Plant was on this site. It then became a park in the 1930s.
I know that there is a significant amount of contamination under the cement and the plastic of the pool liner. I don’t know if that means it is dangerous to use the park. How does one manufactured gas plant site become a public park without any remediation whatsoever while another like Public Place can have such a different fate? And yet that site hasn’t been remediated either. It is fenced off, without progess year after year.
The area underneath the handball courts is also toxic.
After checking out the pool, we walked one block over to the canal.
In the water, we saw a crab moving along this tire. There also appeared to be an air conditioner and an old bird cage in the water next to the tire.
Turning to go back up Degraw Street, it already felt really hot.
On the Union Street Bridge, I think I saw a Black-Capped Heron. Quiet a morning for nature watching.
Sunset Park
I went to Sunset Park this am to photograph the Empire Electric site at 5100 1st Avenue.
This building, now abandoned, originally housed an electrical power system for the city’s trolleys.
Then in the 1950s it was purchased by Empire Electric and used for reconditioning electrical apparatus.
The building itself including the floors, walls, and ground beneath the building is all thought to be contaminated with PCBs.
Peter explained to me that PCBs were chosen to insulate around electricity because they are so stable. This is also what make them so difficult to get rid of. They do not easily degrade so they hang around in the environment.
Right next to this site between 52nd and 54th is an oil installation over what was Kings County Works Manufactured Gas Plant.
Bush Terminal, Sunset Park
Nina and I photographed at the Bush Terminal in Sunset Park on Saturday. Manufactured goods used to move around the yards by rail to the piers and then out across the world.
Now things are pretty quiet. Quiet enough for raccoons.
As you come out to the waterfront, there is a monument to four firefighters that died on 9/11. In front of this statue is Upper New York Bay.
The old piers, rotting and contaminated, are now fenced off. In the 70s, hazardous waste was dumped there and now these old piers are in the State Superfund Program. This area is also in the Environmental Restoration Program and so appears twice on the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation Environmental Site Remediation Database.
Boats docked here in what must be relatively deep water.
A rail went all the way out to the end of the piers inside the now brownfield area. Another rail still operates on the 51st street side.
This area is now going to be developed as a park. At least so it was announced on July 22nd in the Sunset Park Waterfront Vision Plan as mentioned in Brownstoner.com. There were bulldozers there and it looked like work had started. Theoretically, there is $37 million is slated to build the Bush Terminal Piers Park, which will add 22 acres of open space for recreation. however, what happened to earlier money dedicated to remediating this brownfield? Whatever part of this plan that can improve the old rail system and reduce truck traffic is good. It is unclear to me what kind of remediation is planned. Digging up the soil a few feet and trucking it to Pennsylvania?
Greenpoint
Last Wednesday, July 22, I met Nina at the Nassau Avenue G train station. We started off down Nassau and were lured by the bright shine of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant to turn down Monitor Street. Looking an amazing aerial photo from 1954 of the area I found on the Newtown Creek Alliance website, Monitor Street would have run right through Mobil’s Oil Refinery. So why isn’t this defined as brownfield?
We walked down Greenpoint Avenue and saw the Water Pollution Control Plant construction and some of the recycling activity. Paper. Metal. Then we walked back and over the JJ Byrne Bridge. The images can’t convey how deafening the truck traffic is.
Petroleum still has a visible presence.
As does just the old waterfront.
Then we walked back down Kingsland past the ExxonMobil “Greenpoint Remediation Project.” This I guess is the center of the huge spill in Greenpoint. From the bridge, the site looks completely innocuous.
315 Kingsland Avenue is the address of the former Spic and Span Cleaners and Dryers which is in the State Superfund program. TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE). The site is part of the Meeker Avenue plume.
East New York
On Sunday, I went to 5 brownfield sites in East New York. I asked Maurice Freeman, a former City Tech student and East New York resident to come with me. We started at the Belmont Holder site, 290 Belmont which is still an active Con Ed site. This site is not on the state remediation list which makes it just like the Plymouth Street Holder site in Dumbo. The building is well maintained and relatively new and on this beautiful Sunday, it was sealed up as tight as a drum. For some unknown reason, there is a school crossing sign painted in the street.
I don’t know why coal gas would have been stored here.
There were no nearby manufactured gas plants of which I am aware. There is a railroad a few blocks away however. Maybe that made it easy to transport the gas. It is possible that the the gas was used by industries in the area. We walked over toward the railroad. We saw mounds of metal and unsorted recycling on the other side. Must be Gershow Recycling at 1885 Pitkin. Just like the metal recycling places along the Gowanus, the metal is piled high these days. A sign of the recession.
Next, we took the 20 bus to Loring Avenue and Eldert Lane. When we got off, we were both surprised by how nice the new developments there were. The Spring Creek site at Emerald is a remediated site with housing that was theoretically built in 1990. The paint looked very fresh and the townhouses were in really good shape. From the info on the NYSDEC web site, the area had been used as a dump. It was cleaned up before the housing was built. On this particular block, drums of more noxious stuff were observed so this block made it onto the state’s superfund list. This seems so arbitrary. Kids were playing on a paved parking lot between the houses. I thought maybe that’s best. Some of these kids did ask us what we were doing. I really didn’t know what to say. Who wants to hear,”I am photographing your home because it was built on a toxic dump.” Maurice had a great answer: the catch-all “school project.”
The next site was the former Majestic Garment Cleaners at 740 Pine, now an empty lot with plywood around the perimeter.
The google map shows a building at this site so it was probably razed fairly recently, meaning in the last few years. The site is contaminated with TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE) from the dry cleaning business. This sounds fairly nasty and hard to clean up. On the outside, there is a sign that says Danrich Family Homes.
Then we walked down Fountain.
We turned on Flatlands. The side towards Jamaica Bay seems to be undeveloped land, the other side various kinds of industrial yards. Further up, there is a sports facility in which there was an ongoing soccer game. We walked towards the site which is called S & S X-Ray Products but is actually a Stop & Stor. There was a rabbit on the lawn.
I asked him to move so I could photograph him with the logo.
This was another example of how because the brownfield sites are often not well populated, nature moves right in. We had just walked by two long blocks of unused land, here was a rabbit.
Around the corner, it was back to warehouses. A woman in a short yellow dress was unceremoniously let out of a car. Unlike rabbit, this was the of kind of thing, I suppose I expect on deserted streets.
This site was used by Art-Lloyd Metal Products and was polluted during the manufacture of various metal goods. It has been remediated but you still can’t dig in the ground here or use the groudwater. Self-storage seems like a pretty decent solution for the site.
Back on the 20 Bus to the last site on Atlantic Avenue, the Union Station Holder, between Ashford Street and Liberty. 
This site has been used as a parking lot by Con Ed since 1965 according to NYSDEC. There is a lovely old building on the corner of Cleveland that at least corresponds to where a building stood in the 1921 map.
The shape of the back of the building was slightly different though. On Cleveland on the sidewalk, we saw this pile of crab shells. A block or two away is a store live crabs are sold. I imagined someone eating the crabs on this block in their car.
Anyway the holders were on this side of the block where the parking lot is now on the other side of this wall. No real testing has been done yet of this site. Across the street is a schoolyard.
