Third Assignment: Water & Newtown Creek

Note: This assignment is due on Friday, October 31.

1. Look at this interactive video for an explanation of New York City’s water supply and wastewater disposal system.

Question: Compare the water system in your hometown to the system in New York City. How is it similar? How is it different? (For example, what is the source of the water—and how does it get to your tap? How is wastewater and sewage disposed of?)

2. Newtown Creek is a 3.5-mile-long tidal estuary. Once fed by freshwater creeks (now paved over) in Brooklyn and Queens, it is now one of the most polluted waterways in the nation.

The wastewater treatment plant on Newtown Creek is the city's largest. It processes sewage for 1 million residents, mainly from the east side of Manhattan below 72nd Street—including the Williams Club. Although the plant was recently upgraded and can handle 50 percent more volume than in the past, “combined sewage overflows” (CSOs) cause untreated sewage to spill over into Newtown Creek after heavy rain.

When we pulled a cup of water from Newtown Creek on Monday, it looked surprisingly clear. But was it clean? Please view these statistics and note how the water quality changes dramatically following rain events at the location our class visited and even more so further up the creek and farther from the tidal action of the East River.

Now watch this PBS presentation on Newtown Creek. (Click “watch and listen on the right-hand side of the web page).

Questions:

a. About three weeks before we visited Newtown Creek, the water in the creek was tested (see here and here). What were the findings?

b. Did anything in the PBS presentation alter your perception of your field experience at Newtown Creek?

c. Why do you think people care about this profoundly polluted waterway?

3. The nature walk at the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant took 9 years and $3.2 million to complete. It uses motifs that are seen at many riverside parks in New York—erratic boulders, native plants, Native American words etched into stone steps, and nautical themes. It also provides public access to the creek’s waterfront for the first time in decades.

Questions:

a. How would you describe the park and its surroundings? (Feel free to use comparison, metaphor, and your own personal response. But also include details of what you saw, heard, and smelled.)

b. What did you think of the idea of a park/nature walk in this location?

Seventh Class: Fresh Kills Landfill

On Saturday, October 25, we're heading to the Fresh Kills landfill with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Please rendezvous at 11:15 am at the main entrance to the Staten Island Ferry terminal in lower Manhattan.

--To get there, you should leave the Williams Club at about 10:45 am.

--Head over to Grand Central station and take the downtown 4 or 5 subway to Bowling Green.

--Then walk three blocks south on State Street to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.

--We will catch the 11:30 am ferry to Staten Island to meet up with the Parks Department bus on the other side. (The ferry ride is about 25 minutes and we're meeting the bus at noon on the "taxi" level of the terminal in Staten Island.)

The bus tour will last about two hours, so we should get back into Manhattan at 2:30 or 3 pm.

Sixth Class: Newtown Creek

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It's a Gritty City . . .
We are meeting Monday, October 20, in Greenpoint at 10 am—and we’d like you to take a particular route to get there (see below), which will involve about 20-25 minutes of walking. You’ll be taking the subway to Queens and walking across the Pulaski Bridge into Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where you’ll meet us at the Ashbox Café at 1154 Manhattan Ave. We’ll talk a bit there and then head over to a “nature walk” alongside Newtown Creek, one of the most polluted waterways in the nation.

If you leave the Williams Club a little after 9 am, you should get to the Ashbox around 10 am.

Here are the specific directions.

--Head over to Grand Central Station.

--Take the Flushing-bound #7 subway to the Vernon Blvd./Jackson Ave. stop in Queens. (This is a very short ride—just one stop.)

--Exit the subway station on Jackson Ave. and walk up Jackson toward the blue Citi skyscraper.

--Very soon, you should see the entrance ramp for pedestrians to the Pulaski Bridge (at the intersection of Jackson Ave., 11th St., and 49th Ave.).

--Walk across the Pulaski Bridge until you reach the second set of stairs.

--Walk down the stairs above Ash Street (above the sign for Continental Auto Parts).

--Walk west down Ash Street to Manhattan Ave., turn left, and meet us at the Ashbox café, between Ash and Box on Manhattan Ave.

Second Assignment Part I: Rats

Here is your second assignment:

1. The rat has been called Homo sapiens’ doppelganger—a dark twin that shadows humanity wherever it goes. But not everyone has the same view of the genus Rattus.

Watch the following 4 videos on YouTube and then answer the questions:

Rats invade KFC/Taco Bell in NYC. Fox News reacts:


On the Travel Channel’s “Culture Shock,” Shenaz Treasurywala journeys to the Karni Mata temple in India, where rats are revered, not reviled:


Accompanied by a rat puppet named “Brownie,” Filipino journalist Howie Severino arrives in New York to explore the Year of the Rat. (This year—2008—is the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac). Note: The narration is in Tagalog—but most of these 2 segments are in English. Part 1 (Celebrating the Year of the Rat in Chinatown):


Part 4 (Howie Visits with Rat Lovers):


Question: How are rats portrayed in the different videos, and how do you think the different narrators’ and newscasters’ feelings about rats might influence those portrayals? What is your own response? Do any of the videos alter your ideas or feelings about rats?

2. Why do you think that rats are frequently used as a motif in literature, art, and film? And as a metaphor in everyday language, e.g. “He ratted on me” and “You can’t escape the rat race”?

For examples, you might consider:

--this excerpt from George Orwell’s 1984

--Robert Sullivan’s nonfiction work Rats from the assigned reading

--this recently completed mural at Grand and Wooster in SoHo by the street artist, Banksy

--the following teaser for the animated film Ratatouille


3. Name 3 characteristics of urban inquilines (rats, feral pigeons, cockroaches and other creatures that share the human “nest”).

4. What were the 2 most significant things you learned from Randy Dupree, the former director of New York City’s rat control unit, when he came to speak to the class on September 22?

Second Assignment Part II: Pigeons

5. Reflecting on the class's visit to Anthony and Tony’s pigeon loft in Coney Island:

a. What fact or statement about pigeons, the sport, the loft, or the owners on the visit struck you as most surprising?

b. Was there anything you learned or saw that disturbed or bothered you?

c. Anything that impressed you?

d. What is your overall reaction to the sport of pigeon racing?

6. Read this New York Times article (written by your instructors) about pigeon racing, entitled an “Odyssey of Homing.”

a. How is the chico used in the race?

b. In a pigeon race, there are 3 important sites: the home loft, the club house, and one other. What is the third site, and what happens there?

c. In this article, the pigeon racers use a clocking method that is different from the one you saw at Tony and Anthony’s loft. Very briefly, what is different about it?

d. Why do you think the number of participants in the sport of pigeon racing is on the decline in New York City?

Second Assignment Part III: Jamaica Bay

7. Describe Jamaica Bay as you saw it from the water. (This can be a snapshot look at one area, or an overview.) Use detailed descriptions of both natural and human-made features. What was your reaction to this scene? How does it fit into your ideas about the city?

8. Jamaica Bay is home to both JFK Airport and a wildlife refuge. At times, bird strikes have posed a danger to aircraft. In fact, an Air France Concorde jet once “ingested” some Canada geese as it was landing at JFK, causing two of the engines to blow out. Although the plane landed safely, the incident caused $7 million in damage.
Question: What are some things that Don Riepe (the Jamaica Bay guardian) described that have been done at the airport to reduce the possibility of bird strikes? Does this dramatic clash between nature and the city remind you of anything?

9. New York City was once surrounded by salt marshes like the ones you saw in Jamaica Bay---emerald green patches of cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) underlain by peat. The early Dutch colonists called cordgrass “salt hay” and used it as feed for their cows on farms in Brooklyn and Queens. Since colonial times, the area of salt marsh in New York City has declined by nearly 90 percent—largely due to urban development and landfilling. The story is similar up and down the East Coast: Boston has lost more than 80 percent of its salt marshes, whereas New England overall has lost nearly 40 percent. It is only in recent decades that the biological value of salt marshes has been recognized.

Some of these values were outlined in a report issued in 2007 by the Jamaica Bay Watershed Protection Plan Advisory Committee:

--Jamaica Bay’s marshes provide critical wildlife habitat for more than 80 fish species and for nearly 20 percent of the continent’s species of birds that visit the bay every year as they traverse the Eastern Flyway migration route to their breeding grounds further north. Saltwater marshes not only serve as nursery sites for finfish and shellfish, but also for feeding, spawning, and refuge from predators.

--Endangered and threatened species like peregrine falcons, piping plovers, and the Atlantic Ridley sea turtle reside in or visit the bay, along with more than 325 kinds of waterfowl and shorebirds (62 of which are confirmed to breed in the bay).

--Jamaica Bay’s wetlands mitigate flooding and provide shoreline erosion control for homes and businesses in Brooklyn and Queens. The neighborhoods surrounding Jamaica Bay are home to more than 500,000 New Yorkers and the marshes serve as coastline buffers from waves, tides, winds, and floods, and can help reduce coastline erosion and property damage during storm events. Marsh grass can decrease wave energy 10-fold and, due to its unique properties, even trap sediment instead of eroding during storm events.

--The bay’s wetlands act as the ecosystem’s kidneys to filter out pollutants in the water. Wetlands act as nutrient buffers for coastal waters, capable of transforming large quantities of organic pollutants, suspended solids, and metals from runoff and wastewater effluent into organic matter, and thus act as sinks as organic matter is buried through marsh accretion and as bacterial denitrification releases nitrogen gas into the air. This cycling is important because overabundance of nitrogen and organic matter spurs the growth of algae blooms that turn the bay’s waters murky. As the algae die, sink to the bottom, and decompose, the water’s oxygen levels drop, killing any aquatic life unable to swim away.

--The four city sewage treatment plants that surround the bay discharge more than 250 million gallons of treated wastewater containing 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of nitrogen into the bay every day. This is far too much nitrogen for the bay’s current wetlands to assimilate – one estimate puts the removal capacity of existing marshes somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the total nitrogen inputs.

--Salt marshes have the highest primary productivity of any floral community; moreover, the algal and phytoplankton communities they support significantly contribute to overall rates of carbon fixation, which helps reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Each acre of Spartina grass produces ten tons of organic matter annually, which then enters the food chain to provide fuel for higher orders of organisms.

--The marshes serve as a recreational haven and living laboratory . . . Groups like the American Littoral Society provide educational programs about the bay’s resources to schools and civic groups.

The report went on to say:

For at least a decade, it has been recognized that Jamaica Bay’s tidal wetlands are rapidly disappearing. In 2001, analysis conducted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) showed that between 1924 and 1999, half of the bay’s vegetated marsh islands disappeared.

Even more alarmingly, DEC determined that the rate of loss had been increasing over time.

Between 1994 and 1999, for example, the rate of loss had nearly doubled from that of 1974-1994; assuming that rate of loss continued baywide into the future, it was calculated that the marsh islands would completely vanish by 2024.

Please read "Nitrogen and the Rapidly Dwindling Jamaica Bay Marshes" from the New York Times and then answer the following questions.

Question A: Compared to rain forests and coral reefs, the ecology of salt marshes is not widely known. In fact, most New Yorkers are not even aware that salt marshes exist here, let alone the threats they face. Why do you think that is? Based on your trip through the bay (and any other experience you have), what might you tell people about salt marshes to explain their significance?

Question B: On the surface, the article from the New York Times describes a debate about the causes of the salt marsh decline, but there is also an underlying debate about resources—for example, how much money can or should be spent to keep the bay clean. What is your take on this? Can the conflicting demands on Jamaica Bay be reconciled? How definitive do you think research on the causes of marsh decline should be before action is taken?

Fifth Class: Jamaica Bay

We are meeting in the field and traveling via boat through the Jamaica Bay ecosystem. Please plan to meet us on Monday, October 6, at 9:30 am in Queens at the Broad Channel station on the A train line.

To get there, take the F train to Jay Street/Borough Hall and switch to the A train on the same platform. (Note: Before you board the A train, make sure the signs say it's going to Rockaway, not to Lefferts Blvd./Ozone Park.) If you leave at 8 am from the Williams Club, you should arrive at Broad Channel around 9:30.

See you then!