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 New York City puts the "treat" in "sewage treatment." June 2001
Greenpoint is teeming with civic organizations, many of which have conflicting visions for the area's development, but it's reasonably certain that none of them ever included an homage to wastewater treatment. Ten years ago, however, when the DEP began planning the long overdue upgrade required to bring the plant into accord with the Clean Water and Clear Air Acts, the department learned that a decades-old initiative required one-half of one percent of the project's cost to be allocated to public art at the site. Enter George Trakas, waterfront designer, who won the Percent for Art commission and charmed the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee--the group that oversees the plant's renovation--with his plan to open up the adjacent land to the public and convert the plant into a didactic tool, if not exactly a source of neighborhood pride. "He's got so much enthusiasm; he's like a force of nature. It's really infectious," says Bob Gormley, former community liaison officer for the committee. Indeed Trakas, who has navigated local waterways in a homemade kayak and built parks through-out the United States and Europe, is somewhat of a waterfront park evangelist. "Greenpoint is desperately in need of assistance to access some public waterfront," Trakas says. "I've seen the changes happening on the Newtown Creek since the early seventies with the demise of a lot of the polluting industry there. Since the water quality has upgraded tremendously and the wildlife has come back, I thought it would be neat to make a waterside park on the edge of a treatment plant." The Waterfront Nature Walkway, stretching alongside the plant, will grant landlocked residents their first public access to the surrounding water. On the other side of the plant--where the egg-shaped domes of its new disinfection facilities, designed by the Polshek Partnership, abut defunct factories--Percent for Art commissioned installation artist Vito Acconci to create another olive branch for nearby residents. Acconci's Edge of the Plant/Edge of the Neighborhood installation, a ten-block stretch of chain-link fence with a playful tribute to the municipal water system, appropriately features squirting and pooling water. Meant to integrate the plant with the neighborhood, it also serves as an entry to a new visitors' center with educational exhibits on the titillating process of sewage treatment. Once the community became aware of the renovation, a deeper appreciation for the history of sewage treatment emerged in some quarters. One group is seeking to honor the plant's ambivalent legacy by attempting to landmark the original 1967 sludge tank (to be decommissioned in 2003), which they hope to turn into a community center, with the upper level to be converted into a swimming pool. It may be impossible to avoid the unpleasant juxtapositions that arise from the scarcity of water resources in highly populated areas. Sewage-treatment plants are unwelcome additions to any neighborhood, but at least the thoughtfully renovated Newtown Creek facility will give proper respect to a public service that helps bring New Yorkers such modern luxuries as a pot to piss in. |
