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City and state officials are discussing how to spend a substantial amount of new funding for Bronx parks, but the public doesn't have a seat at the table. The money - $243 million promised as mitigation for building a controversial water filtration plant underneath a section of Van Cortlandt Park - is nearly triple the capital funding the city allocated for parks in the Bronx over the last five years.
Legislation that takes over parkland to use for some other purpose requires state and city officials to sign a Memorandum of Understanding identifying, among other things, a list of eligible projects. The state legislature approved the water filtration plant last year. The City Council is scheduled to vote on the memo and its list of projects in September.
Last year, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said that the department had a long list of Bronx park projects it was circulating, and that it would be going to community boards and other community groups to solicit their input on projects. But park organizations and advocates say there have been no public forums to discuss what projects should be funded, and that the final decisions are being made by politicians behind closed doors.
Ari Hoffnung, chair of the parks and recreation committee of Community Board 8, which includes Van Cortlandt Park, said, "To the best of my knowledge, the community board hasn't been contacted formally for its input on the mitigation funds," although they had some "very tentative" conversations about how the money could be spent in Van Cortlandt Park. "I would certainly welcome a request from the parks department or other appropriate city agency that would involve input from the community," he said. Hoffnung envisioned a forum where "park advocates, park users, and the community at large can come together and really voice their hopes and aspirations for the parks in the community." He said, "To spend $200 million without consulting the community is outrageous."
In early 2003, before the legislation passed, the parks department met with board members and Executive Director Paul Sawyer of Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, which opposes putting the filtration plant in the park. Officials presented the projects the department wanted to do in the Bronx, according to Sawyer. "We were kind of taken aback," he said. The group told the parks department that it was not prepared to talk about projects that early in the process. Friends of Van Cortlandt Park is continuing to fight the filtration plant in the park, and is planning a lawsuit.
According to Sawyer, some people present at the meeting pointed out that the projects were presented on a map broken down by Assembly district - seemingly a fairly blatant indication of what had been promised to Bronx Assembly members in exchange for their votes to approve the taking of parkland. The legislation passed in an extremely close vote after midnight at the end of the 2003 legislative session, and broke the Assembly's tradition of never approving the taking of parkland over the objection of the member who represents the area.
Looked at less cynically, many Bronx politicians felt that the opportunity to fund much-needed park improvements in an era of declining public funds outweighed the environmental impacts and parkland loss for one densely populated neighborhood.
Four environmental and parks organizations, both supporters and opponents of the filtration plant, sent a letter on August 4 to the elected officials who must sign the Memorandum of Understanding, asking for more citizen involvement in the selection of park projects. The groups - New Yorkers for Parks, New York League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Defense - also called for "clear assurances" that the funding be in addition to the currently approved capital budget for Bronx parks and that the projects be chosen within a strategic, long-term capital investment plan. The letter cited a recent Ernst and Young study, How Smart Parks Investment Pays Its Way, which found that capital investment in parks had higher economic returns when it was part of a larger plan for the community and involved local residents and organizations.
Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, said that the groups had not gotten a response to their letter. "None of the elected officials seems to care what the public is thinking, but everybody looks to the public to maintain the parks," he said.
Will the money go to Yankee Stadium?
During the hearings last year preceding the legislature's vote, park advocates raised the possibility that the mitigation money could be used to pay for a new Yankee Stadium. Officials from the Department of Environmental Conservation and the parks department debunked that notion. At the time, Assembly member Scott Stringer, who voted in favor of the taking of the parkland, said, "That's absurd that it would be spent on Yankee Stadium."
Recently, however, The New York Times reported that the city and the Yankees are in discussions to build a new stadium at the site of Macombs Dam Park, adjacent to the current stadium. The Yankees intend to pay for the new stadium, now that taxpayers are losing patience with footing the bill for sports arenas. But the city would be expected to pick up the tab for a string of parks and ballfields leading down to the Harlem River to replace Macombs Dam Park. The plan fits in nicely with a plan for redeveloping the area being promoted by Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion.
The Daily News reported that, according to two Bronx officials close to the negotiations, the final agreement on how the $243 million would be spent has been held up by a last-minute effort by Governor George Pataki to earmark some of that money for the new Yankee Stadium plan. However, Jennifer Meicht, spokesperson for Governor Pataki, said, "That is absolutely not true."
Meicht said, "Negotiations are ongoing to determine how the money will be disbursed," but did not have any information on plans for public participation. She added, "We strongly support that the money should be used for parks-related projects only."
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
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Five days a week, Albert Ridley and Jesus Negron appear on the Upper East Side at 7 a.m. to sweep streets, empty litter baskets and scrape illegal leaflets off lampposts. It isn't easy: The two men must cope with illegally parked cars that block their brooms, bags of dog poop that have not been sealed, and news vendors who dump piles of heavy newspapers into litter baskets instead of bundling them. But, they say, their work is appreciated. "People stop you and thank you for keeping the area clean," Ridley says.
Ridley and Negron, who both served time in jail, participate in the Doe Fund's Ready, Willing and Able for homeless people and former convicts. It is part of the patchwork of government and private programs that try to keep New York clean.
Despite such efforts, New York does not seem to have shaken its long-time reputation for being filthy: In a poll in 2002, almost half the visitors to New York (and more than half of New Yorkers themselves) said that the city's streets were dirty.
This is not the way it has to be in a big city.
"The biggest difference between New York and Paris is the fact that Paris is clean," David Garrard Lowe wrote in City Journal in 1996. Every morning, Parisian merchants hose sidewalks, and city machines spray streets and remove litter from under parked cars.
"The fact that Paris is clean gives Parisians a sense that things are not falling apart," said Lowe, "that society is not doomed, that there is order in the universe and municipal government."
New York City has struggled over the past decades to overcome its reputation. Now, says the Bloomberg administration, it has largely succeeded. A recent city survey (in pdf format) found 89 percent of city streets "acceptably clean" -- a higher percentage than at any time since the city began keeping records 30 years ago.
But the cleanliness of the city remains a heated political issue, as a recent furor over debris on city beaches makes clear. Critics doubt whether the city really is as clean as the administration claims.
And they question whether the city can claim responsibility for any improvement there has been. Private groups, such as neighborhood and civic organizations, play an increasing role in sanitation, picking up trash, bagging garbage, and cleaning up graffiti (see related stories on Kew Gardens Hills and Riverdale.) Does the city rely too much on such groups? Or should it turn even more over to private agencies?
On one fact everybody can agree: The city is certainly cleaner than it was for much of its history. That is not difficult. For centuries the filth of New York streets was legendary, over-the-top, deadly. Efforts to clean it up had little effect, starting with the law banning the disposal of animal carcasses and other garbage in city streets in 1657. In the 19th century, residents dumped their garbage directly onto the street, attracting foraging dogs and pigs. By the end of the century, some 2.5 million pounds of manure fell in city streets every day, according to one estimate.
"Before 1895 the streets were almost universally in a filthy state," wrote George Waring, the man credited with improving the situation. "Rubbish of all kinds, garbage, and ashes lay neglected in the streets, and in the hot weather the city stank with the emanations of putrefying organic matter. It was not always possible to see the pavement, because of the dirt that covered it."
The city established the Department of Sanitation in 1881, but it remained mired in corruption. The situation came to a head when the blizzard of 1888 dumped 21 inches of snow on the city. Snow removal was haphazard at best, and once the snow melted, the city still had to take care of the garbage, including several hundred animal carcasses.
Several years later, Waring was named commissioner of the Department of Street Cleaning. He organized the department as though it was an army, cracked down on patronage and gave street sweepers white uniforms, leading to the nickname "whitewings." Two years later Waring would boast: "New York is now thoroughly clean in every part. . . ." "Clean streets means much more than the casual observer is apt to think. It has justly been said that 'cleanliness is catching,'and clean streets are leading to clean hallways and stair cases and cleaner living-rooms."
But as New Yorkers know, the city had not won the battle. Since the mayor's office began issuing ratings on street cleanliness in 1975, the results have fluctuated widely. In 1980, only 53 percent of the streets were considered "acceptably clean." Ratings improved steadily until they reached the low 70s in 1986 and remained there until the late 1990s.
But that was not clean enough. Garbage-strewn vacant lots and filthy streets blighted many neighborhoods. "New York is surely the filthiest of any major American city, the only one that does not have a single faultlessly kept area under city control," Julia Vitullo Martin wrote in City Journal in 1993.
But by the end of the decade, things had improved. Many areas seemed cleaner, and the rating rose to above 80 percent, where it remains today.
To reach its findings on street cleanliness, the mayor's office of operations rates selected streets and sidewalks on a scale (in pdf format) from 1.0 (no litter) to 3.0 (litter is highly concentrated). But the method is not totally scientific, giving the mayor's political opponents the opportunity to question the findings.
The results of the most recent report card "seem like Alice in Wonderland," Councilmember Christine Quinn, whose district includes Greenwich Village and Chelsea, told the New York Post. "The number one complaint I hear -- I'm not exaggerating it -- at every block association meeting is dirty streets and litter."
This summer's biggest clash over cleanliness came not over streets but beaches, the responsibility of the parks department. In early August, the City Council issued a report stating, "New York City beachgoers who expect sun, surf and sand might also find condoms, hypodermic needles, food wrappers and other garbage littering both shore and sea." To bolster the claims about dirty beaches, the report featured photos including one of what appeared to be a dead rat, covered in sand, on Staten Island's South Beach.
Similarly parks advocates often point to dirty parks -- from simple litter to larger amounts of garbage dumped in remote areas.
Disputes arise as well over how to clean the city. The mayor and some council members have disagreed over sanitation tickets -- fines issued to businesses and homeowners that do not keep their property clean. Many who receive the tickets say they are penalized for violations that are not their fault -- Big Mac packaging on their front lawn dropped by customers from a nearby McDonald's, say. Earlier this year, City Council unanimously passed a bill that would allow the city to issue fines only during two specified hours, so homeowners would not face fines for litter dumped on their property while they were at work. Bloomberg vetoed the bill, but the council overrode the veto.
To combat the dumping in vacant lots of garbage, furniture, appliances -- even cars -- the city has increased the fines, and offered rewards for turning in people who are repeat offenders.
The primary responsibility for keeping New York clean lies with the Department of Sanitation, which has a budget of about $1.5 billion. The parks department cleans city parks and beaches, with the help of private parks groups and hundreds of volunteers.
But in many neighborhoods, residents complain that these efforts fall short (see related story on the Lower East Side). And so, a number of City Council members use their discretionary funds to fund clean-up efforts.
Last year, James Gennaro spent $35,000 for trash baskets in his district. Several council members, including Gennaro, have hired Ready, Willing and Able to clean the street. The program hires homeless people and former convicts for the job, paying them $5.50 or $6.50 an hour (tax free).
"It's a two-sided page," explained Craig Trotta, director of work and training for the fund. The neighborhood, he said, gets cleaner streets, while the workers get jobs that can help set them on a path to a a job and a place to live.
And then there are individuals who wage a war against litter. In the Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn, a long-time resident picks up garbage in her community. "I do it because I love the neighborhood," she said, adding that the area's small size makes it possible for her to have a real effect. "It's not a Herculean task," she said.
A combination of efforts go toward keeping a neighborhood clean, said Fred Arcaro of Community Board 6 on the East Side of Manhattan, an area whose streets have been rated the city's cleanest. The neighborhood hires the Doe Fund to help. Community associations keep pressure on businesses to clean up. "You have a civic culture here to keep the sidewalks clean," Acaro said.
A public-private mix also removes graffiti. While the city has an Anti-Graffiti Task Force that has removed more than 16.3 million square feet of graffiti since July 2002, community groups such as the Glendale Civilian Observation Patrol fight the paint scrawls in their own communities.
The Adopt a Highway Program took on the daunting task of keeping highways clean in the 1990s. Run by the city Department of Transportation, businesses, organizations or individuals commit to keep a stretch of highway clean -- either by caring for it themselves or hiring a maintenance firm to do it.
Business Improvement Districts also take up some of the burden. Businesses in a specified area pay an additional tax, the revenues from which go to improving the area -- which often means street cleaning, as well as better lights and holiday decorations.
Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute has hailed the Business Improvement Districts as "one of the most important developments in local governance in the last two decades." In 1996, she credited them with "considerable responsibility for turning around once squalid neighborhoods -- from Times Square to East Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- and making them safe and attractive for shoppers and pedestrians."
And some call for a greater private role in sanitation. The city instituted private garbage collection for businesses in the mid 1950s. In the 1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani considered having private companies compete with the city to collect residential garbage. The plan lost steam when sanitation workers agreed to productivity measures. But the idea still appeals to some people, particularly political conservatives.
But some critics say government, not businesses or volunteers, should clean the city. Councilmember Eric Gioa, who hired the Doe Fund for parts of Woodside,Queens, told Newsday, "It's unfortunate we have to rely on a private organization to clean up our streets because cleaner streets should be a top priority of government."
The New York City Audubon Society has reservations as well. "There is a very unsettling trend in this city where city and federal government agencies have decided to abandon their responsibility to keep their facilities free of litter and dumping," the group's newsletter said.
One way to have less garbage to pick up is to produce less of it in the first place. As evidence, advocates point to the bottle bill, which set a mandatory deposit on beer and soda containers. According to one estimate, the measure has reduced litter in the state by 70 percent. A bill introduced in the state legislature seeks to expand the law to include containers for bottled water, iced tea, juice and sports drinks -- beverages that barely existed when the law was first passed in 1982.
The New York WasteLess Campaign offers tips to help individuals, businesses and government cut down on garbage that can turn up as street litter. These include simple steps such as buying products with less packaging and bringing lunch in reusable containers.
Streets and lots are dirty largely because people make them that way. For some, littering reflects self-interest. People and businesses improperly dump garbage in a public place because they don't want to pay to dispose of it properly.
But for some litterers, it is not that simple. Psychologists have researched why some people remain impervious to entreaties, dirty looks and common sense and continue to drop scraps on the sidewalk and dump everything from coffee cups to old sofas in vacant lots.
A 1980 study concluded that people are more likely to litter on dirty streets than clean ones. People also tend to litter when they feel no sense of identity with an area (see related story on East New York). And, concluded Thomas Herblein, a sociology professor, "litterers are people who are less likely to feel personally responsible for their action. And they are less likely to be aware of negative personal consequences that litter hurts others."
Some officials have set out to change those attitudes. Last year, Gary Giordano, district manager of Community Board 5 in Queens (which includes Middle Village and Glendale), launched a campaign to highlight the role of the public in improving the cities. "So often," he wrote in a mailing, "the problems that our city has to solve are mainly due to people behaving badly."
Similarly, James Vacca, district manager of Community Board 10 in the eastern Bronx, wants to affect his neighbors' behavior. "I don't want people to think that because we are the Bronx, we are any different from Chappaqua," he told the New York Times. "We are people who have standards."
It was 84 degrees in Manhattan with humidity just under 80 percent, but the hikers wouldn't know it standing in the middle of Inwood Hill Park.
With trees rising as high as 140 feet in the air, blocking out sunlight while leaving just enough head room to catch the occasional wind draft, they could feel the summer warmth, but didn't have to wear it like a blanket. Manhattan might as well have been a thousand miles away. But of course, it wasn't. Inwood Hill Park is in Manhattan.
"I'm pleased with it," said Tim Wenskus, a biologist with the New York City Department of Parks Natural Resources Group and the man in charge of making sure this forest in the northern tip of the island remains tranquil.
"You should be," said Mark McDonnell, associate professor and divisional director of the Australian Research Center for Urban Ecology. "You've done a great job."
Both Wenskus and McDonnell are urban foresters, a small but growing group of scientists who believe habitats such as this one are just as deserving of study and protection as anything you'd find in the Amazon rainforest.
The four men on the hike were having something of a reunion. In the 1980s, Mark McDonnell helped dig and document the many plots the group is now revisiting, in the city that provided a North American launching pad for the field of urban forestry 20 years ago.
"Traditionally, ecologists never looked at cities," said Richard Pouyat, who now works at the Forest Service. "We always looked at areas where people weren't living. Mark was really a pioneer of looking at cities as their own ecosystems. Twenty years later, people have come around to his point of view."
Trees do more than provide an aesthetic backdrop in city environments. Urban environments, once denuded of native vegetation, become dangerous heat conductors, a phenomenon called the "heat island" effect. Coupled with the heat displaced by air conditioners, urban environments like Manhattan average daily temperatures 10 degrees hotter than surrounding regions.
"If you want to see the effects of global warming, just look at any big city," McDonnell said. "At a local scale, it's just pure environmental change."
The first sign of change, notes McDonnell, is the rapid loss of native species evolved to survive in a more temperate climate. In Tokyo, the disappearance of birds and insects has prompted some businesses to install outdoor speakers to supply the missing sounds. Here in New York City, native hardwoods such as oak, hazel, sassafras and the tulip tree, a fast growing eastern giant that can age up to 300 years, are giving way to invasive immigrants such as ailanthus, Norway maple, and a host of exotic vines and worms.
Then again, the central paradox (and saving grace) of urban ecology is the fact that urban forests often provide the most faithful glimpse of what primeval forests once looked like before industrialization.
The reason is simple: City dwellers, starting in New York City, were the first to witness the consequences of rampant overdevelopment. To maintain a semblance of contact with nature, 19th century civic leaders pressed for parks development, effectively creating a museum of native ecosystems. In terms of species distribution, the trees you find in Central Park and Inwood Hill offer a more authentic glimpse at the pre-Columbian ecology of North America than most upstate forests, where logging and agriculture continued unabated until well into the 20th century.
"It's a worldwide phenomenon," says McDonnell. "All cities have older trees than the surrounding countryside because that's where the protection started."
This paradox is the chief explanation for the "Lord of the Rings"-like canopy here at Inwood Hill. Though its 200 acre habitat is microscopic compared to state preserves like Adirondack or Catskill Park, it exudes a majesty that puts other northeastern forests to shame, with towering trees that in upstate forests would have been cut down and hauled off to the mill a long time ago.
Such majesty puts pressure on forest managers like Wenskus, however. Every time a giant oak or tulip tree dies, there is a natural rush to fill the gap. Invasive species like Norway maple and porcelain berry enjoy an advantage in this race because they can smother out smaller plants' sunlight, killing off the plants that help make soil chemistry favorable to natives. Biologists and managers with the parks department's Natural Resources Group use a variety of tactics to keep invasive species at bay. Still, Wenskus says, they can only do so much. Forestry is not gardening, and even if the group had the resources to treat it as such, native species must ultimately fend for themselves.
As proof of that stoic philosophy, Wenskus pointed to a fist-thick porcelain berry vine running all the way up a middle-aged oak and shook his head sadly. Only two outcomes are possible at this stage: Either the vine will die on its own or the tree will succumb because of diminished sunlight.
"Porcelain berry grows so fast," he said. "It's a bad customer."
If invasive species share a common characteristic, it's their ability to grow fast and look good doing it. Porcelain berry, for example, is a relative of the grape and can quickly transform a backyard into a leafy arbor. Norway maple throws out a dense, low-to-the-ground leaf cover, perfect for sun baked sidewalks, less perfect for native woodlands. Lately, however, the tree has come under attack by yet another immigrant, the Asian longhorn beetle, diminishing migratory pressure on local woodlands.
Other young, upwardly-mobile plant species include European White Poplar -- "Robert Moses's favorite," grumbles McDonnell -- and ailanthus, a scrappy weedlike tree sometimes known as the "tree of heaven."
For a patient forester, however, the signs are encouraging. Twenty years ago, wrecked cars littered the undergrowth and periodic fires killed off promising adult trees in Hunter Island, part of Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, which was the next stop on the group's tour. Now the forest is protected by firebreaks and barred to vehicle traffic. Native plants are getting a chance to push the canopy upward, allowing room for a thick underbrush. It isn't Inwood Hill Park but in a few more years you might be able to find yourself visiting this corner of the city and wondering if it has been untouched since the 17th century.
"In all honesty, the best stuff is the stuff you can't tell apart from nature," said Wenskus, summing up his work and the general goal of the Natural Resources Group. "If it looks like nature made it, I figure I did my job right."
The city is moving quickly to build a controversial water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, now that a final environmental study just released by the city's Department of Environmental Protection has chosen that site as its preferred location.
If everything goes according to plan, the construction of the plant - which would be built underground in the southeast corner of the park beneath the Mosholu Golf Course driving range - would start this summer, said agency spokesman Charles Sturcken. But community groups and park advocates vow to continue fighting against the park site. They say that a park adjoining a densely packed residential area is the wrong place for an industrial facility, especially when another location is available. In addition, they say that the means used to obtain the parkland sets a disturbing precedent that puts other city parks at risk.
The city needs to build the plant because it is under a court order to filter the 10 percent of the water supply that comes from the Croton watershed to meet federal drinking-water standards. For nearly a decade, it has been trying to put a filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. After opposition groups sued, the state's highest court ruled in 2001 that the city could not take over, or "alienate," parkland for the plant without the approval of the State Legislature. Because such approval had never been granted before without the assent of the local Assembly member and because the area's representative, Jeffrey Dinowitz, strongly opposed the park site, many believed the Van Cortlandt site was out.
Last year, however, Mayor Michael Bloomberg brokered a deal with Bronx politicians to bypass Assemblyman Dinowitz by promising $200 million in additional funding for Bronx parks.
The State Legislature made its approval to change the use of 28 acres of Van Cortlandt Park contingent on a "Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement" examining the park site as well as two alternate sites, including city-owned land in a Westchester industrial park. It also required the legislative leaders and the city to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" specifying the amount of money that would go to the Bronx to "perform capital improvements to existing park and recreational facilities" and detailing a list of projects it could be spent on.
Opponents of the project say the city never seriously considered the alternatives, particularly the Eastview site in Westchester, which has almost no residential neighbors. "Very few people honestly believed that this [impact statement] was anything other than rigged," said Dinowitz, noting that the city let out contracts to bid for the construction earlier in the spring. "A close reading of the [impact statement] reveals that the impact of building in Van Cortlandt Park is much greater that at Eastview because it is surrounded by a densely populated community and we'd lose a significant piece of parkland."
ENGINEERING ADVANTAGES
The Department of Environmental Protection prefers the Mosholu site because of engineering, security, and cost advantages, among other considerations. It is closer to existing tunnels and other water infrastructure, necessitating the construction of fewer miles of tunnels. In addition, because it is nearer to the distribution system, filtered water would go directly to users without further chlorination. If the Eastview site were used, for a number of years until a new tunnel is built, filtered Croton water would be directed through the same tunnels as water from the Catskill/Delaware system, making the entire water supply vulnerable to one catastrophic event. Putting the filtration plant in Westchester would also consolidate the city's water treatment facilities in the same location, because the city intends to build an ultraviolet disinfection plant at that site for the rest of the city's water supply, from the Catskill/Delaware watershed.
Agency studies also estimate that a plant at the Mosholu site would cost less to build and operate, with total capital costs of $1.235 billion versus $1.247 billion at Eastview, although questions have been raised about the accuracy of those numbers.
Another factor in favor of the Mosholu site, according to the agency, is that the jobs and economic benefits would go to city and Bronx residents and businesses. For this reason, city construction unions have vigorously supported building the plant in the Bronx over Westchester. Their members have shown up in force at public hearings, including an event where they shouted down plant opponents. But, Dinowitz said, there are still no guarantees that "one single Bronxite will get any of the jobs." Sturcken said the agency could not comment on how it will assure that Bronx residents have preference for the jobs or whether there will be an effort to hire minority workers.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
Jerome Avenue, where the #4 train rumbles by on elevated tracks, is all that separates the filtration plant site from blocks of tightly packed six-story apartment buildings. About 25,000 people live within a half-mile radius, in the working class, largely minority Norwood area. The site also borders a worn corner of the park and a new playground. The city plans to bury the filtration plant underneath the current driving range. Construction would require tearing down a 1914 golf house, which was designed as a smaller version of the genteel suburban golf clubs of the time, as well as a grove of towering sweet gum trees.
The city has promised to rebuild the driving range on top of the underground plant and to put up a new golf house and maintenance building. Two acres would remain fenced off for parking and for buildings to receive and store chemicals. Rock walls resembling the existing walls along Jerome Avenue would incorporate louvers venting the underground heating and cooling systems and also function as vehicle barriers. Park users wonder, however, whether the city will really allow them back on the site because of security concerns.
During the expected five to eight years of construction, residents would be subjected to the noise and dust of construction, including blasting 85 feet into bedrock, and the pollution and traffic from trucks as well as hundreds of additional cars trying to find parking spots in the neighborhood. The city says it can reduce the impacts by using noise barriers and dust controls, restricting trucks to routes away from residential neighborhoods, improving a nearby highway interchange, and relocating the driving range so it can continue to operate during construction. It has allocated $43 million to restore the area and other parts of Van Cortlandt Park. The study also considered as mitigation the $200 million to be spent on other Bronx parks.
Building the plant in Van Cortlandt Park also requires substantial work at the nearby Jerome Park Reservoir, across from the Bronx High School of Science.
The Eastview site is grown-over farmland in an area of Westchester that is being developed as a commercial park for industrial, medical, and municipal facilities and has virtually no residential neighbors. The impacts to neighbors would be minimal, and the land will eventually be developed, whether or not the filtration plant goes there. The site lacks highway access, however, and the environmental study, which looked at 27 interchanges on local roads, determined that it was not possible to mitigate the combined traffic impact of constructing the filtration plant concurrently with the disinfection plant.
FOR PARKS, SOME TROUBLING PRECEDENTS
Whatever the pros and cons of the Mosholu site, park advocates have raised serious concerns about the process by which the city obtained the site. It sets precedents, they say, that could weaken protection for parks citywide.
Because parkland is held in the public trust, a city or town cannot take it away for another use, no matter how critical, without the approval of the State Legislature. In the past, the Assembly has traditionally deferred to the member representing the park area, giving the community a voice in the process. Now a precedent has been set to alienate parkland against the wishes of the local Assembly member. In the future, it could be easier for the city (or any municipality in the state) to take over parkland without regard to the concerns of local residents as long as enough other lawmakers get something for their constituents out of the deal.
The law also generally requires that when parkland is taken away from the public and turned over to another use, it must be replaced by new parkland nearby of equal or greater fair market value. When parkland is traded for money, however, it is much more difficult to guarantee that a fair exchange will actually happen. Will the money actually be spent to benefit parks in the affected area and not redirected to marginally related projects? And will it supplement, not replace, regularly budgeted funds?
There has already been an attempt to grab some of the money for other projects. A Senate bill introduced in June would broaden the types of projects eligible for the $200 million to include new recreational facilities. On a recent Bronxtalk television call-in show, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said the bill would "expand beyond parks to the kind of facilities that our young people need, like youth and recreation centers, sports facilities." Among the projects he said he would like to see developed are ice skating rinks and boathouses. The authorship of the bill is unknown - spokesmen for Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg claimed no knowledge of its source and the office of Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno was not able to provide the information. The general consensus is that the bill won't move, but park advocates are wary. "This pulls so far from the original intent of the mitigation funds, you really have to wonder if this is becoming a free-for-all with these funds," said Paul Sawyer, executive director of Friends of Van Cortlandt Park.
As for whether the $200 million will really be additional funding, "we're all going to wait and see," said Christian DiPalermo, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks, the citywide parks advocacy group. "We'll see in the next several years, if projects that weren't slated to be funded are now going to be funded." According to a parks department official, the city spent an average of $28 million a year in capital funds on Bronx parks over the last five or six years.
Opposition groups also charge that the city is ignoring its own zoning regulations in the effort to site the plant. They say that parkland is unzoned, so when the city takes parkland and makes it something else, it needs to create zoning that allows for the intended use. Furthermore, the kind of zoning required for an industrial facility includes a buffer area separating it from apartment buildings. Karen Argenti, a community activist who has spent the last decade fighting the plant, says that if the city doesn't go through the usual land-use process to get the appropriate zoning, "that means that every place in New York where there is a park where there are people living across the street, there could be manufacturing put in the park."
Charles Sturcken of the Department of Environmental Protection said, "I think all the appropriate approvals will be in place so that we can go ahead and build," but would not comment further on the zoning issue because of expected litigation.
"You are engineering major infrastructure in an urban environment, so you have normal land use issues, within a political context. It's a classic kind of dilemma for government," Sturcken said. "But at the end of the day, what you are doing, you're providing clean water that meets the standards of the federal government and the State of New York."
THE BATTLE IS NOT OVER
The next step toward building the plant is for the City Council to ratify the Memorandum of Understanding with Governor Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The memorandum will include a list of projects that could be funded, although community groups say there has been no public input on what these should be. The City Council is expected to vote on this soon. Once the memorandum is approved, the city must submit its plans to the federal court that has ordered the filtration plant to be built.
Opponents continue to fight to keep the filtration plant out of the park. According to Paul Sawyer, Friends of Van Cortlandt Park and several other groups are considering lawsuits on a number of grounds, including zoning and environmental justice issues. He said, "It's not exactly a done deal. This can still be stopped." Assemblyman Dinowitz said, "As far as I'm concerned, this battle is not yet over. While the Legislature and Governor have acted, the third branch has not. "
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
Elizabeth Blackmar, co-author of Park and the People: A History of Central Park and Gotham Gazette’s Reading NYC Book Club recently discussed the Central Park Conservancy, protests on the Great Lawn, and what lies ahead for the park. Read an edited transcript below (or click here for a full transcript.)
Elizabeth Blackmar: It’s not an easy issue. I was in Central Park the last time a million people gathered there, for the anti-nuclear demonstration in 1982. It was a very powerful demonstration. It had the expanse of Central Park for a million people to gather. But since then there has been a major restoration of the park, under the auspices of the Central Park Conservancy. The Conservancy has successfully restored the effects of the natural 19th century natural romantic design, and it is true that massive demonstrations are very hard on natural landscapes.
That being said, one can also observe that, of course, other public gatherings have been permitted in the park. These events have had either a cultural dimension or a commercial dimension, whether it’s the metropolitan opera or a popular concert – Dave Matthews, for example – that then raises money to be distributed to other sites.
So in part it depends on whether or not you think a million people will show up to protest the Republicans, in which case it will tax the park landscape. And if one hopes for that, then maybe the park isn’t the best place for that to happen. Now if it’s not a million people, it seems to me that the natural landscape probably could withstand a gathering on the Great Lawn. But I think that it won’t happen, because of the precedent that it would reopen. Basically, the rules have been rewritten to clearly keep political actions and protests out of the park, to make it unlikely that it would be open.
Betsey Grover McGrath: What other venues are available for that many people?.
Elizabeth Blackmar: Actually the plan that has been made has been to close off the streets south of Madison, basically in order to keep the protestors in the streets with boundaries.
Mickey Blum: A very, very small area.
Zoe Schneider: I was at the St. Patrick’s day anti-war demonstration and we were cordoned off into small pens. That was not just to be orderly, but so that when news and helicopters came to take photos, to show people participating in the protests, it would look like there were fewer people participating. They had these pens that were only one block long. And they only had a couple hundred people per pen. So each pen was virtually empty. So from above, it basically looked like an empty street. So they were trying to say, “nobody is protesting here!”
Elizabeth Blackmar: I think of the whole history of demonstrations and gatherings, from the 19th century in Tompkins Square and then in Union Square, such gatherings were centered on neighborhood parks. There was an “I am an American Day” in the late 40s actually, which was one of the first direct politicizations of Central Park’s use as a place for a mass audience. And I think that was because of the commerce. During the 1960s, the park was claimed by the anti-war movement, and was linked to the counterculture.
The idea with the Republican National Convention was to focus on the traffic, and how it would endanger the park landscape. Before there was a restoration it really seemed like they could manage it; it was in bad shape and now I think the Conservancy has really established a kind of plan of landscape design.
Joshua Brustein: You mentioned the difference in treatment between political events and commercial and cultural events. How differently are these treated in the park rules?
Elizabeth Blackmar: I’m sure the rules don’t read that way. But to have any large gathering in the park, you have to have a permit. Certain uses that can’t be managed have a kind of customary claim of the space. But commercial concerts are an interesting case. When the restoration movement came, one of its goals was to end commercial concerts in the park. It’s only in the last decade that they’ve come back, and they’ve come back with this kind of quid pro quo. Not only do the concert organizers have to promise to clean up, but they make a contribution to the Citywide Parks Foundation, which then can benefit other parks in the city.
And it’s a way of funneling the money out of Central Park because, of course, commercial concerts can sell the videos. They have another life on television and commercial media, so they are profiting even from free concerts. That seems to me to have been a shift in policy that came once it was decided, in effect, that the park could handle those special events.
Valarie Sarris: Is the land in Central Park owned by the city of New York proper or the Central Park Conservancy?
Elizabeth Blackmar: The land is owned by the city. The conservancy, most importantly, raises money for restoration. It’s an interesting problem in terms of preservation. The question is “Do New Yorkers value preservation?” If they do, then the issue is how you add that to the definition of the public good, and how do you raise the public money to maintain that kind of continuity with the past.
What the conservancy is doing is basically taking on the burden of historical preservation in Central Park. But it has to always do it in a political context. It’s publicly owned land, it is a public recreation site, and there are lots of features in it that do not conform to the original plan, which is also always a challenge. So we will see repeatedly questions about, for example, what will happen to the skating rink. We’ve seen Wolman, but Lasker skating rink has to become obsolete. Who makes that kind of a decision, when that’s a sort of public recreational facility that has nothing to do with what’s being preserved in the landscape? So what are different public places? I think we have lots of very interesting problems, in spite of what’s happened to the public domain in the aftermath of the 1970s.
Joshua Brustein: In terms of the conservancy’s role in management, is that different from how parks in other parts of the country are managed?
Elizabeth Blackmar: It has become the model for major landscape city parks around the country. In other words, the parks in Chicago, St. Louis, some of Boston’s parks, have moved into public-private partnerships of some kind. The problem with this is always that some city parks can have a constituency, and can divide the money that supports the partnership, and other city parks can’t. So the cities have to show a commitment to parks that don’t have a constituency with money to help support them. In a lot of cities, this is an ongoing issue.
The great landscape parks in the Olmsted and Vaux tradition have embraced this model, because it has worked as a tactic of preservation. I think the level at which parks are being maintained really varies widely in cities across the country right now. I haven’t been to Detroit, for example. I don’t know what shape the park is in, but my guess is that it is not so great.
Mike Miscione: Well you also have the wealthy people living on the perimeter of the park. The Conservancy, I think, goes beyond a money purpose. It manages the park and makes decisions. It is a key player in Central Park. It is unlike a foundation, which attracts the bucks and doles them out. I don’t think anybody denies the fact that they are attracting money, but with it goes that slavish, slavish relationship. It’s questionable.
Elizabeth Blackmar: We raise these questions in the book, as to who formed the conservancy, but the thing that I myself am not clear enough about is whether New Yorkers have a commitment to public spaces. Is there that same kind of commitment to public spaces today from the larger public as there was in the earlier period? Is there the democratic will of ordinary people to actually engage in things that involve public spaces? I’m not sure; there have been major cultural changes in our society. If there isn’t that will, then the question of who is committed becomes a different problem.
Elizabeth Blackmar: Well I don’t see there being a real change in the park.
Valarie Sarris: Despite how private interests might or might not try to affect it?
Elizabeth Blackmar: In other words, I think that the conservancy will reclaim governance of the park. I don’t see the political situation that would in effect restore the park to the department of public parks, Central Park or Prospect Park. That’s because of the fundraising. You could say that private fundraising could dry up, but when private fundraising dries up we'll be in another fiscal crisis as well, so I don’t know if I see the government taking back the park.
What do I see in terms of how different kinds of pressures to permit uses or not? I think that’ll always be in flux.
I am very interested that Christo is back. In 1980, they said “this is completely inappropriate, you cannot have Christo’s gates, this is not what a public park is for.” And Gordon Davis, the commissioner of the park at the time, wrote a very eloquent statement about why this is an inappropriate use of the park in 1979. Davis recently wrote a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining about how we are in a different moment, and Christo is not going to harm things.
What that reminds you is just that there’s always constituency out there. So on that level, I think there will be negotiations, but I don’t think there will be a change in the government. I just don’t see what the political process would be to dismantle the authority. It becomes a very utilitarian argument, which says basically this is the best arrangement for the park that generates the greatest good.
After almost ten years of living in New York City, Kritsada Hancheewasin, 29, thought he finally hit the jackpot: a rent stabilized apartment in the West Village. It was, in his mind, at the center of everything. But he quickly learned what that meant: round the clock car honking, loud garbage trucks, drunken serenades and early morning construction.
"I have a hard time sleeping at night," he said.
Most New Yorkers seem to think that the city is too loud. The non-emergency number, 311, receives roughly 1,000 calls about noise each day. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said that noise is the number one quality-of-life complaint in New York City.
To combat the noise problem, the Bloomberg administration has announced a plan to overhaul the noise code for the first time in more than 30 years. Unlike the vague language of noise codes in the past, the new ordinance's targets are more specific, including construction noise and nightclub music, but also Mr. Softee ice cream truck jingles and even barking dogs.
"Most complaints about noise are not frivolous," said Bloomberg. "Our goal is to turn down the volume of noise complaints, while at the same time allowing construction, entertainment, and other business activities to go on in ways that are not as disruptive to New Yorkers."
While everybody seems to have a horror story about noise, many New Yorkers remain skeptical of the mayor's proposal, doubtful whether the law can be enforced effectively. Some say that the citywide plan will not help much to solve problems so neighborhood-specific as noise. Councilmember Gale Brewer says local officials and community board members should be allowed to do more to help curb noise level. (See "Using 311 To Combat Neighborhood Noise" by Gale Brewer.) Others, such as Fred Goodman writing in New York Magazine, wonder why the proposed code says so little about the "big boys" of noise, "especially the airplanes and trains that plague the outer boroughs. Just ask somebody who's suffering through a ball game at Shea while La Guardia's flights roar overhead if he's concerned about how loud Mister Softee is, and you'll see why Bloomberg is often seen as out of touch."
If you have to raise your voice while speaking to someone three feet away from you, then your immediate environment could be hazardous to your health, according to the Council on the Environment of New York City.
A normal conversation usually registers at about 60 decibels, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. (Every ten decibels higher, the noise seems twice as loud). Exposure to noise at 85 decibels -- roughly the sound of a noisy restaurant -- for more than eight hours could damage a person's hearing. Noise levels above 140 decibels – the sound of an airplane taking off -- can cause damage to hearing after just one exposure. A sound of a dog barking, depending on your location, could be as loud as 100 decibels.
One of the controversial measures of Bloomberg's new plan is that dog owners will be fined as much as $175 if their dogs bark for more than five minutes at night and 10 minutes during the day. Penalties for noise violations range from $45 to $25,000.
"This is out of control," Miriam Prussman, a dog owner, told the New York Post. "What is he going to do? Restrict dogs from having vocal cords?"
Other dog owners disagree. "If you can't stop your dog from barking in five minutes, then you probably deserve to be fined, "said Hancheewasin, who owns a Shih Tzu.
New Yorkers also puzzled over the regulation that would require the Mister Softee ice cream truck to replace its repeating jingle with manually operated bells by 2006.
"As for ice cream trucks, who doesn't love them?" said Bloomberg, but last month alone, he added, the city received 243 complaints about them.
"While Mister Softie is not terrible,hearing the song over and over again at 9:30 p.m. is a problem," agreed Chris Boyd from Queens,one of dozens of New Yorkers from throughout the city writing in response to our question "What is the greatest source of noise in your neighborhood?" on the Community Gazettes. [Scroll down to the bottom of the page for all the answers]
Hilliary Guishard, manager of the Mister Softee depot in Carroll Gardens worried about her job prospect. "If there is no jingle, there is no business," she said. "I would invite the mayor to ride in a truck for a day. We can use a bell, we can use the jingle, and he can see the difference." (See "Mister Softee and the Sound of Gentrification in Carroll Gardens" by Nuriel Adler)
Before the most recent proposed regulations, Mayor Bloomberg had announced a more modest effort in October, 2002 that he called Operation Silent Night, an initiative to curb noise level in 24 targeted neighborhoods. Since then, the operation has yielded almost 40,000 summonses. But noise complaints were still on the rise in many of the designated areas, such as Westchester Avenue in the Bronx. (See The Roar of the Crowd in Soundview by Khadijah Rentas). The new plan will cover every neighborhood in the city.
"We knew all along that Silent Night was only a band-aid to a serious problem," Bloomberg said.
The new noise code, for example, has tougher and more specific regulations on noise from air conditioners and construction.
The current code has a standard for an air conditioning unit of 45 decibels. But it has been interpreted to apply to a single unit. This allows people to cluster multiple units generating noise far higher than 45 decibels without violating the law. The new regulations close this loophole.
"I vote number one [source of noise are] big construction projects," said Lucy Koteern of downtown Brooklyn. "Jack hammers, cement mixing trucks, rubbish dumpster, delivery trucks all make too much noise."
Kelly Grigsby from Hell's Kitchen agreed."[The construction] starts at 7 a.m.on weekday mornings and 9 am on Saturdays. It wakes me up before I need to get up."
The new plan requires construction projects to be curtailed on weekends and at nights. It also establishes "noise management plans" that include portable sound barriers and noise jackets for jackhammers at all construction sites.
But by far, the majority of noise complaint calls to 311 involve partying neighbors and blasting music from bars and clubs.
This type of complaint is far from new. In the 17th century wealthy Dutch New Yorkers complained of "sea-shanty singing drunks carousing along the docks," according to the Washington Post.
"The noise from patrons to and from neighborhood clubs is by far the largest sources of noise in my neighborhood," said Kathy K. "Clubs need to assume some responsibility for the impact that their patrons have when exiting… Although I am happy to see people share the joy of music and dance, it was not appreciated at 4:30 a.m."
Many residents also complained of smokers, who, thanks to Bloomberg's anti-smoking law, flocked outside the bars to have cigarettes and, in a process, took the party to the street.
"This is supposed to be the city that never sleeps," David Rabin told USA TODAY. "It's now the city that never sleeps because smokers are huddled beneath a four-story walk-up talking."
With the support from the New York Nightlife Association, the new law will allow club owners to fix the noise problem instead of paying a $3,000 fine for the first violation. "They can use the money they would have to pay in fines to instead fix their noise problem, which might mean installing more noise-proof insulation," Bloomberg said.
Vibration or "bass level," which cannot be captured by conventional decibel scale, will also be subject to the new law.
Some people have questioned how police officers are going to enforce this new law. What happens if the dog stops barking by the time the police gets to the scene? Do dog owners have to turn themselves in?
In the past police officers have had to use the hand-held decibel meter to issue summonses for noise violations. This is a problem because the meter itself often needs calibration and has a margin of error of plus or minus three decibels. Many officers don't often have meters readily available and don't even know how to use them.
Under this new law, cops only have to use their ears to issue summonses using the "plainly audible" standard or, in another words, common sense.
Some argue that noise, by nature, is subjective.
Police Officer Kenneth Zorn, director of Community Affairs for the 106th precinct, said his precinct receives up to 30 noise complaints a night from 6 p.m. Friday to 2 a.m. Monday. Most callers complained about parties that at times can go on for two to three days.
"What's loud to one person may not be loud to another," said Officer Zorn.
Even with these restrictions, some argued that Bloomberg's plan doesn't cover enough. Just weeks after the mayor's announcement, the city council criticized his plan for failing to offer new limitations on the source of car alarms.
"With this legislation in the press, I decided to count this last weekend how many times a car alarm went off around my house," said Boyd. "I stopped counting at 35 separate car alarms."
More importantly, critics argue, noise is very specific to individual neighborhoods, and the mayor's plan leaves out many communities.
"Stopping ice cream trucks from playing their jingles and barking dogs is not exactly the problem in the middle of Manhattan," said Martha Vladymir.
That is why City Councilmember Gale Brewer has drafted legislation that would require the city to provide information from 311 to local officials.
"The city's 311 system provides only city or borough-wide data, which hides evidence of where local noise problem originate," Brewer said. "The mayor can tell us that noise complaints in Manhattan have increased from 5,000 to 5,050 in one month, but he can't tell us if 50 of those calls are coming from the same raucous bar or even a specific block."
The Bloomberg administration does not support the bill, arguing that it would be too costly.
Fed up with sounds of airplane taking off and landing from JFK airport, residents in Howard Beach, Queens, formed Sane Aviation for Everyone to combat airport noise in 1994. Since then they have been measuring noise level at various locations and found readings louder than officials claim. The group is now asking for funding to correct the noise problem from a new airport lease agreement between the city and Port Authority. (See "Enduring Half a Century of Airport Noise in Howard Beach" by Grace Hernandez).
In the Bronx, members of community board 9 have compiled documentations to try to prove that a local bar in too loud and dangerous to the community.
LOUD CITY
A city-by-city comparison of decibel levels around the world, New York came at the top at 80 decibels. No wonder some New Yorkers have had it. "Enough already" Boyd said. "Pass the bill and let us have some rest."
But not every New Yorker seems so annoyed about noise.
"I think that if you're going to live in New York City, you should realize that it's not going to be like Kansas," said Mary Anne Syre who works in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. "It's going to be loud." Â
A city employee by day, Jim Scarcella begins his second life as a volunteer beach monitor the moment he reaches his Midland Beach home on Staten Island. At least once a week, you'll find him patrolling the local sand, picking up trash and filling out litter surveys for the Department of Environmental Protection.
"You name it, I've probably found it on the beach," says Scarcella with a laugh.
Scarcella, who also happens to serve as the head of the Natural Resource Preservation Association, a New York City group dedicated to improving the aquatic environment, knows that not everybody shares his zeal. Still, he is happy to report some notable signs of progress. Gone are some of the problems of the past , the algae blooms that shut down city beaches in 1976 and the medical waste scares that kept bathers away in 1987. Barring the occasional bacteria advisory from the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, things are good and getting better, at least from the perspective of a guy who first started volunteering in 1990.
"I think we're making strides," Scarcella says. "I'm fortunate in that I like doing this, though. I went to the beach today with my son and his friend and picked up another 30 pounds of litter."
In a city with few environmental success stories, the improving state of local beaches is worth celebrating, if not too loudly. Sure, the city, state and federal agencies that oversee water safety have had their occasional differences. In a recent issue New York magazine article, for example, representatives from the mayor's office grumbled about the new EPA bacteria standards -- standards which went into effect this April and which force the city to test for enterococci, a class of pathogens that thrives in untreated animal feces. Still,when you compare water and beach monitoring with other hot-button issues such as national air pollution standards and World Trade Center toxic sampling, the level of inter-agency cooperation is striking.
"It's a priority," says Helen Grebe, head of the Environmental Protection Agency's regional coastal monitoring program, one of at least five local agencies looking to reduce beach pollution. "People want to preserve the region's reputation as a place that still remains in close contact with the water. That's hard to do when you're closing beaches."
For Grebe, keeping the region's reputation in tact means sending out regular helicopter sorties up and down the coast. Each morning, her New Jersey-based monitoring team performs an aerial survey from Cape May to the east end of Long Island, for "floatables" -- waterborne litter -- and oil slicks. If her team finds anything, they quickly report the sighting and location to aquatic cleanup crews.
In New York State, reports of oil are given to the U.S. Coast Guard and floatable pollution to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Within New York City waterways, the city's own Department of Environmental Protection, operating under its dual authority as guardian of the city's incoming water and chief guarantor of outgoing wastewater quality, has its own fleet of "trash skimmer" boats. Circling the harbor, Jamaica Bay and other, smaller waterways, these funnel-shaped craft vacuum up trash before it gets a chance to reach the beach.
The three-level defense, while effective, is still far from perfect. Like most American cities, New York employs a combined sewer and wastewater treatment system. That means the rainwater hitting streets and the sewage exiting bathrooms both head for the same place: underground catchment basins that serve as a channel to the city's 14 water pollution control plants. According to the Department of Environmental Protection, however, the city's water treatment system is currently equipped to treat only 40 percent of city rainwater. To keep the remaining 60 percent from overloading the system, the city employs combined sewage overflows, essentialy giant underground bathtubs that dump their excess contents directly into local waterways in the event of a major storm or flood. Because floatable pollutants rise to the top and exit the quickest, the clearest indication that local sewers have hit their maximum capacity is the number of plastic items bobbing on the surface of local waterways in the wake of summer storms.
To curb this problem, the Department of Environmental Protection has installed numerous hoods and nets to keep floatables trapped. It has also relied heavily on the six-year-old beach monitor program.
As a member of that program, Scarcella lays out the duties: Volunteers must visit their assigned beach once a week within two hours of high tide. Equipped with stakes and rope, they map out a 200 foot stretch of beach parallel to the shore and count the number of items deposited just below the high water mark. Using a survey sheet provided by the department, volunteers keep track of how many plastic, paper and styrofoam floatables fall within their survey zone. They also take note of living and dead animals in the vicinity and fax the survey results to Robert Gans, program manager for the Department of Environmental Protection's Volunteer Beach Floatable Survey .
"Last year we did a comparsion of 24 beaches," says Gans. "We saw significant increases in waterfowl and fish, which we're taking as a sign of increased water quality and clarity. And we saw significant decreases in plastics and very little medical waste noted."
Gans says he hopes to up the number of monitored beaches to 30 this summer. He also expects to see the number of reported floatables decrease. The spring relaunch of citywide plastic recycling should reduce the number of plastic bottles and bottle caps finding their way into city sewers, he says.
More importantly, the Department of Environmental Protection's own ongoing efforts to upgrade city pollution facilities are starting to pay off in increased water clarity, which is in turn drawing more visitors to the beach. Like many in the beach clean-up game, Gans sees anything that gets New Yorkers to view the local coastline as a recreational destination as opposed to a neglected dumping ground as a "win/win."
Not all volunteers share the same level of optimism, however. Ida Sanoff, a beach monitor in Brighton Beach, says the water at her favorite beach is the cleanest she's ever seen it. Still, it's the growing number of cigarette butts above the tideline that has her concerned.
"People don't realize that clean streets equal clean beaches," she says. "Now with everybody standing outside restaurants and smoking, I can see that that's going to get worse."
Whether or not last year's smoking ban has led directly to more cigarette butts on the beach, one thing is for sure: Cigarette butts are the predominant, individual component of floatable litter. Last September, the American Littoral Society sponsored its annual beach cleanup. After pulling in 334,000 pounds of trash (of which New York City accounted for 152,000) and 220,000 items, volunteers sampled the resulting contents. Their findings: Cigarette litter accounted for 18 percent of all items collected.
Such data highlight the limits of litter policing. To stem the problem at the source, the Department of Environmental Protection has taken to sponsoring a "Clean Streets/Clean Beaches" program with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The program runs ads on city trains reminding New Yorkers that sidewalk litter often goes directly into local waterways. Still, the message doesn't always go through.
"A volunter can count so many cigarette butts it's unbelievable," says Gans, acknowledging the problem. "If they're really diligent about it, they can get up to 150, 160 and still be counting."
Fortunately, many of the volunteers who help the city patrol its coastline are the same people helping to bolster its educational efforts. Joel Banslaben is chairman of the Surfrider Foundation of New York City. He says his organization is planning to launch a storm drain stenciling program. Modeled on successful efforts in California and around Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, the program spray paints "drains to bay" advisories directly onto stormwater basins and city culverts, explicitly reminding passersby that whatever they drop in the gutter might be waiting for them the next time they visit Coney Island or Orchard Beach. Another Surfrider education program already experiencing success is the Respect the Beach program, which brings school-age children from Manhattan and Brooklyn out to the Rockaways to help with Clean-up, learn about stormwater runoff and finish the two day camp taking surf lessons.
"You need to establish programs that lead people to treat the water with the respect it deserves," Banslaben says. "People want to get reconnected with the waterfront."Â
Given the united political disdain Staten Islanders once reserved for the Fresh Kills Landfill , you would think there might be a similar, collective antipathy for litter, blight, and illegal dumping.
Not entirely. A trip down Victory Boulevard, Forest Avenue or any one of a dozen major thoroughfares reveals the sad truth: Staten Islanders can be just as messy, if not messier, than their crowded counterparts across the harbor.
"You see it every day," grumbles Councilmember James Oddo. "Whether it's somebody rolling down the window and throwing out the cigarette butt or dropping trash on the sidewalk, people do it without thinking."
Population growth has only added to the problem. According to the U.S. Census, Staten Island grew from 380,000 residents in 1990 to 445,000 in 2000, a 17 percent growth rate -- higher than any other borough in the city or any other county in the state.
Though bigger than most U.S. cities, the Staten Island response to pervasive trash remains quaintly small-town in nature. Each spring, the Staten Island Advance, the borough's lone daily newspaper, conducts a series of "trashbuster" volunteer pickup gatherings. Meanwhile, the Staten Island Source, a free weekly distributed to ferry riders, has opted for a more Puritan tactic: Shaming politicians and property owners. Since the beginning of the year, the weekly has been publishing photos and addresses of the island's dirtiest lots and sidewalks under a bold "Fix It!" headline.
"We've been getting about three or four [photo] submissions a week," says publisher Alan Bauer.
The outrage has reached the ears of local politicians such as Borough President James Molinaro. On April 21, Molinaro issued a "Dirty Dozen" list of targeted trouble spots around the island. Within days, the list had grown to 28 sites as residents phoned in their own candidates. Using both a newly purchased street sweeper and a crew of hired inmates from the local Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, the borough president's office reported full cleanup of the 28 sites on May 12.
When it comes to keeping this cleanup going through the summer, Molinaro says his office has no choice but to scale things back. "We don't have the money," Molinaro says, succinctly. "We can focus on the boardwalks and a few parks during the summer, but that's it."
One year-round remedy employed in other corners of the city, the business improvement district, has been slow to catch on in Staten Island. New York City currently boasts 46 such districts located in every borough but Staten Island.
One person hoping to change that is Susan Meeker, executive director of the West Brighton Local Development Corporation. Her group has submitted an application with the city Department of Planning and hopes to have the project up and running in the autumn.
"There's still time for us to get smacked on the nose," says Meeker. "But we're further along than any other group on Staten Island.
In selling local merchants and representatives on the business improvement district concept, Meeker has had to step gingerly around the dreaded "t" word: taxes. Although West Brighton falls within the generally liberal-voting 49th council district on Staten Island's north shore, its businesses tend to be less prosperous than those in the more conservative-voting, southern sections of the island. To pay for supplemental cleanup and beautification costs, business owners pay a percentage-based surcharge on their annual property tax assessment. To keep the district within the comfort zone of local merchants, Meeker is proposing a minimum assessment of $350 per year.
Similar attempts to form a business improvement district in St. George, the island's most heavily trafficked neighborhood, have foundered on the tax issue. "There's too many state and federal buildings," says Molinaro. "The Library, court system, D.A. building: none of those are on the tax roll, so we didn't have enough businesses to pay for it."
As for illegal dumping, a problem that tends to affect the borough's less-developed portions, Oddo, whose district includes much of the Greenbelt park system in the middle portion of the island, is seeking to patch up the borough's historically dysfunctional relationship with the Department of Sanitation.
Though opposed to anything that would reopen Fresh Kills Landfill, Oddo says he has lobbied Sanitation officials to reopen its drop-off facility for bulk waste. Currently, the department accepts drop offs only for hazardous items such as used car batteries at its Special Waste Disposal site on Staten Island's Muldoon Ave. Officially, city residents are entitled to six bulk items per curbside pickup. Judging by the number of rusted dishwashers and sinks located around the island's western side, not all residents are living within this allotment.
"I know the [household dump] facility costs money, but the amount of money they're saving is being eaten up by the amount of locations they now have to go out and clean," Oddo says.
Oddo has also invited Sanitation Department representatives to participate in the recently reconvened Midland Beach Task Force. First launched in the mid 1990s by former Councilmember John Fusco, the task force has performed three monthly tours through Midland Beach, a neighborhood beset by derelict lots and homes, since March.
During the latest sweep, representatives from the Department of Sanitation and Fire Department issued more than 30 citations for illegal dumping and improperly-stored hazardous materials. The next sweep is scheduled for mid-June.
Such efforts, while helpful, have only driven home the primary, underlying cause of Staten Island's mounting trash problem -- Staten Islanders. Like most virtues, litter cleanup begins at home, Oddo says. Until residents find a way to turn outrage into sustainable, behavior-changing action, sweeps, cleanup campaigns and other political remedies will provide little more than a short-term remedy for what is already shaping up to be a long-term problem.
"Staten Islanders love to point the finger at the city and other boroughs, saying 'We took your trash for 50 years. We're the forgotten borough,'" says Oddo. "But the litter problem we have was created and is created daily by Staten Islanders. This isn't people flying in from Pluto or driving in from Brooklyn and dumping on our streets. It's people from Staten Island. We need to look ourselves in the mirror and admit it: We're the ones doing this."
The local forecast calls for a monster tidal wave to crash into Manhattan, then temperatures to plummet, and by late afternoon, the entire Northeast to be frozen beneath a freshly spawned glacier.
That is the scenario in director Roland Emmerich's $125 million disaster flick, "The Day After Tomorrow," which opens this week. The culprit is global warming. In the movie, the polar ice caps are melting, which sends fresh water pouring into the Atlantic. This overwhelms the ocean currents that normally warm the northern latitudes, triggering worldwide catastrophe.
New Yorkers need not fear that global warming will set off such a sudden and spectacular natural disaster in real life, but "The Day After Tomorrow" has already inspired some to fear what they would consider a political disaster. NASA officials reportedly ordered their scientists not to answer questions about the film (though subsequently changed their minds after some bad press), while a spokesman for the Bush campaign told the New York Post -- perhaps more hopefully than factually -- "People know what they're watching is entertainment, and not grounded in basic scientific fact." Corporate lobbyists have been hinting that the film and the hoopla surrounding it is a conspiracy to pass the global warming pollution bill due up soon in the Senate.
Whether they like it or not, though, there are some kernels of truth behind the sci-fi storyline of "The Day After Tomorrow". Global warming really is a threat to New York. The question is, what kind of a threat?
In reality, experts don't know all the details yet -- global warming is one of the most complex scientific challenges we've ever known -- but we're quite confident about the basic facts.
We know for certain that global warming is happening now, and that it is happening faster than natural variation can explain. Since 1990, the Earth has experienced the ten hottest years on record. Satellite images show that the North Pole ice cap has shrunk by 20 percent since 1979. Spring is arriving earlier throughout the world.
Researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, and others recently completed a comprehensive assessment of the stakes in New York if global warming pollution is not curtailed. They conclude that the effects will be widespread across the region.
Average temperatures in the Metro region have already increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the 20th century. They're likely to rise as much as 6.5 degrees more by the middle of this century. As a result New York summers will go from occasionally muggy to persistently torrid. As many as 60 days a year, the National Weather Service Heat Index -- that's temperature combined with humidity to measure the discomfort -- will exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
That means significant health risks, particularly to vulnerable populations that are not prepared for them. For example, last summer more than 20,000 people died in Europe due to an unprecedented heat wave. New York has more air conditioners than Paris, but there are many poor and elderly in this city without them.
Health effects of heat and humidity are exacerbated by smog, which itself is elevated by higher temperatures. If all that isn't bad enough, higher carbon dioxide concentrations directly promote the growth of ragweed and other opportunistic plants that produce allergenic pollen.
The combination of heat, humidity, smog, and pollen, is the perfect incubator for asthma attacks, already a leading health threat in the city.
Rising seas will accompany higher temperatures as water expands (like mercury in a thermometer) and glaciers melt. During the lifetime of a child born today mean sea level will likely increase by as much as 3½ feet.
That may not sound like a lot, but it spells costly trouble for low-lying parts of the city, such as Coney Island and Southern Manhattan. Areas that currently flood once a century could see flooding every 20 years, or, according to researchers, even as little as once every four years.
Vital transportation links including many subways, all three airports and the Holland tunnel, are also vulnerable.
The National Academy of Sciences and most other scientists say the cause of global warming is pollution, and the two major sources of that pollution are automobiles and coal-burning power plants. The pollution collects in the atmosphere and acts like a blanket, trapping the sun's heat.
This is a problem that has a solution -- reducing polution by focusing on alternative energy such as wind and solar power, improving the technology of our vehicles, and requiring specific emission standards.
The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this spring on a bill that would for the first time make such standards the law, rather than relying as we have on voluntary measures. The bill, called the Climate Stewardship Act, came within seven votes of passing last fall, when it was introduced by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman. This time around, it could hit the Senate floor as early as June.
Meanwhile, New York's Governor George Pataki is part of a growing trend toward state action. A year ago he called on eight neighboring states to create a regional solution, at least promising to take a leadership role to cut power plant emissions, and to invest in cleaner, more efficient energy technology.
"The Day After Tomorrow" is an extreme scenario, one that no climate scientist is predicting. But the real-life consequences of global warming are bad enough -- and it's time for us to do something about them.
Daniel Lashof is a climate scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council
Resources:
Global Warming Ignites Tempers, Even In A Movie, NY Times
The Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman
Global Warming Page of the Environmental Defense Network
Two Articles On Global Warming by James Hanson of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Article 1) (Article 2)
7 Crazy Things That Are Going To Happen As Sea Levels Rise
Few corners of the city exemplify the political inertia that can delay environmental remediation as well as Willets Point.
Nestled in between Shea Stadium, Flushing Meadow Corona Parks, and the Flushing River, this 16 block enclave of pock-marked streets, auto body shops and junkyards known locally as the Iron Triangle has long been a magnet for trash and a generator of toxic runoff for decades. One need only pass overhead on the Flushing-bound 7 train to witness the resulting blight: Wind and rain patterns have pushed the trash and oil so deep into the Flushing River watershed it's hard to tell where the human devastation stops and the natural ecosystem begins.
Though an obvious target for cleanup, Willets Point has to date defied all attempts to do so. The reasons generally boil down to economics: To get the land, the city would have to pay to relocate existing businesses. Throw in remediation costs and whatever legal fees might accrue in the process and it isn't too surprising that most redevelopment plans have rarely made it past the planning stage.
For David Oats, former editor of the Queens Tribune and current chairman of the Queens Olympic Committee, a group dedicated to reshaping Flushing Meadows Corona Park into an Olympics-worthy venue, it's hard not to memory the spirit of Robert Moses when discussing the stubborn parcel. It was here, after all, that Moses, political architect of Flushing Meadows, the Cross Bronx Expressway and dozens of other public works projects, met one of his most humbling defeats. As president of the 1964 World's Fair, Moses sought to condemn local properties and integrate Willets Point into an expanded Flushing Meadows park complex. To defend their interests, junkyard owners hired a young Queens attorney named Mario Cuomo. For both men, it was a turning point. Cuomo won the case and went on to the governor's office. Moses lost and went into grudging retirement.
"To his dying day, Moses was frustrated that there were still junkyards in Willets Point," says Oats, who remembers running into an elderly Robert Moses. "In the last conversation I had with him, I mentioned Willets Point at one point and his first question was 'Are those damn junkyards finally gone?'"
Undaunted, Oats and the Queens Olympic Committee have taken up the Moses-worthy challenge of redeveloping Willets Point. In doing so, they've hitched a ride on a national wave of municipal stadium projects not to mention the growing political resistance to the mayor's own West Side Jets stadium plan. Billing a Jets stadium in Willets Point as the ultimate kill-two-birds-with-one-stone bargain, Oats sees a chance to pull off what Moses never could: an Olympics-worthy park complex stretching from La Guardia Airport in the north to the Jamaica Railyards in the south while cleaning up the Flushing River in the process.
"This site eliminates every problem we've got," he says. "You can reclaim the air, clean up the trash, combine water quality, and build a stadium with better access to major transportation resources."
Oats punctuates the pitch with a flourish: "It's even got the globe sitting there."
That "globe" would be the Unisphere, a relic of the 1964 World's Fair and a symbolic reminder of the world-hosting ambitions that built Flushing Meadows in the first place. With the city angling to play host to the 2012 Olympics, Oats and other community leaders see Queens as a natural launching point.
The plan is a long shot, of course. The mayor's office, which has invested heavy political capital into the proposed $1.4 billion West Side stadium project ($2.8 billion if you factor in expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and extension of the No. 7 subway line) has already dismissed the Queens stadium plan as unworkable. Still, in the two years since Oats first started ferrying newspaper reporters out to Willets Point in an attempt to drum up media interest, other community leaders have jumped onboard. According to the West Queens Gazette, members of Community Board 3 endorsed plans for a Willets Point stadium in February. Last month, Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-Queens/Brooklyn) threw his own support behind the Oats plan. Weiner dismissed the west side stadium with its proposed $600 million taxpayer subsidy as "staggeringly expensive" and suggested Willets Point as a "better, cheaper, more transparent alternative."
"It just makes sense," says Queens attorney Corey Bearak, a participant in past studies designed to assess the feasibility of a Queens-based NFL stadium. "I have not visited a stadium or a stadium site anywhere in the country where you have an interstate coupled with a major limited access highway (Northern Blvd.) coupled with subway and light rail (Long Island Railroad). Throw in the opportunity for ferry access, it's a unique situation."
Not all Queens leaders have bought off on the plan, of course. Councilmember Hiram Monserrate from Corona finds it hard to justify any proposal that would replace a thriving, albeit ugly economic district, with a taxpayer-subsidized home for a team that abandoned the borough only 21 years ago.
"I have concerns," Monserrate says. "Are we merely insuring profits for corporations that are already doing well on their own? Secondly, are we providing a place for displaced businesses? The last thing we need to be doing is replacing good, sustainable jobs with entry level positions selling peanuts at football games. "
From an environmental perspective, Paul Graziano, a Green Party challenger for the District 20 council seat in 2001, is leery of any deal that would link stadium construction with environmental cleanup. Environmental advocates need only visit East Rutherford New Jersey to get a glimpse of how poorly a three stadium complex can blend in with a local, aquatic ecosystem. What's more, should the stadium plan fall through, Queens activists will have lost yet another step to their counterparts in the Bronx and Staten Island, places where sustained community pressure is finally yielding a turnaround for distressed waterways such as the Bronx River and Fresh Kills.
"It shouldn't take the Olympics to clean up things," says Graziano.
Such sentiments may be true in principle, says Oats, but as recent history has shown, especially in geographically divided Queens, an attention-getting solution and a deadline to match are quite often the "only way" to break through political gridlock.
"If you don't have a big plan, you're going to get mired in the minutiae," says Oats. "Moses learned that early on. When the 1939 Worlds Fair came along, he saw a chance to get rid of the (Flushing) dump and suddenly heaven and earth moved. Then the war came and he couldn't finish his park off, so he waited for the next chance. When the idea for the second Worlds Fair came around, he became the president and built the park."
Oats, a Moses admirer, hesitates to compare himself to the man whose earth-moving ambitions once sank in the morass of Willets Point. Still, even for those with a fraction of the Moses political will, the current Olympics bid is emerging as the latest "once in a lifetime opportunity" to clean up a piece of the borough and have the rest of the world help pick up the tab.
"Willets Point has gone through so many cleanup attempts and for some quirky reason or another, they've all failed," he says. "I don't want my grandchildren dealing with this problem because we couldn't get it done when we had the chance."
The Department of Sanitation has resumed both glass recycling and once-a-week collection of residential recyclable material, thus ending the latest, and most harrowing, chapter in New York City's 20 year-old recycling saga.
Once a week, residents are now expected to put their non-paper recyclables -- metal, plastic, and glass -- in blue curbside containers, and their paper recyclables -- junk mail, bundled newspaper and cardboard -- in green containers. Residents who don't have blue or green containers can use clear plastic bags or can order stickers, free, by calling 311 or visiting the city's Web site.
That glass is now being recycled once again is, some say, little more than a symbolic victory. Sure, it is an improvement over simply sending empty bottles to the landfill. But the Department of Sanitation trucks currently collect all different kinds of glass together, regardless of color, and this reduces the resale value often to the point of worthlessness.
This explains why Hugo Neu Schnitzer East, the Jersey City recycler that offered to pay the city for its metal and plastic last year, has drastically revised its bid. The city now pays Hugo Neu $51 per ton to process all non-paper recyclables. This is still about 50 percent less than what it would cost to dump the material in a landfill, but, coupled with the added labor costs for weekly routes, recycling has decisively shifted to an expense rather than a revenue source.
However, not everybody sees the victory as just symbolic. Some say it is a strategic victory, helping build the momentum for recycling.
"I am a firm believer that the more that we recycle the better it is not only for the environment but also for the city's economy," argues Staten Island councilmember Michael McMahon, chairman of the council's Solid Waste Committee.
Such arguments have gained added weight in recent weeks thanks to the Independent Budget Office's recent report analyzing the Department of Sanitation's budgetary math. Yes, the report concludes, recycling costs more than ordinary garbage collection, $47 million more in fiscal year 2002, but only as long as the amount of recyclables collected remains less than the amount of ordinary garbage collected.
The reason: hidden overhead costs. When department budgetmakers divide general and administrative costs, they do so by routes, not tonnage. Because recycling routes yield less weight on average -- 6.3 tons vs. 10.3 tons for ordinary garbage routes in 2002 -- recycling carries a disproportionate share of overhead burden when the numbers are reassessed on a cost-per-ton basis.
"It's the relative inefficiency of (recycling) collection that makes it more expensive," summarizes Preston Niblack of the Independent Budget Office. "Right now the comparison is swamped by the collection inefficiencies associated with recycling pickup."
In other words, says Niblack, shifting glass from the waste bin to the recycling bin is more than a symbolic gesture. Increase the amount of recyclables and you increase the average weight, and overall efficiency, of each recycling route. If the weight of recyclables became equal to the weight of ordinary garbage, you could conceivably eliminate the disparity in costs.
Virali Gokaldas, policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, agrees, noting that, because of space concerns, New Yorkers tend to throw out more food waste as a proportion of their daily trash -- 15 percent, while the national average is nine percent
"Food is one of the greatest untapped opportunities for cost savings," Gokaldas says "Composting is the next step if the city wants to save money on its trash bill."
So far, the Department of Sanitation's attempts to integrate kitchen waste into the recycling stream have yet to move past the pilot project stage. Without a robust aftermarket or a Hugo Neu-style benefactor willing to take bagged items directly out of the trucks, compost remains a long term prospect at best.
"At this point we are not looking to add other recyclables," says Kathy Dawkins, a Department of Sanitation spokesperson.
Niblack sees education as the best way to bulk up city recycling bins. Though long chided by local critics, the Department of Sanitation's Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling had been earning praise for its educational programs prior to the 2002 plastic and glass suspension. To prepare residents for the resumption of glass and once-a-week service, the bureau orchestrated a series of Sunday newspaper inserts and a direct mail campaign aimed at four million households. All in all, it expects to spend close to $4 million within the next few months.
"That's a pretty good starting point, but the jury's still out," says McMahon. "I'd like to see more public service commercials. I'd like to see more advertising, especially in less traditional media, Web sites."
Robert Lange, president of the Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Reycling, didn't respond to calls for comment, but Dawkins said the Department of Sanitation is "committed to making recycling work" and has spread its $4 million advertising budget across a variety of media, including radio and television, as well as direct telemarketing.
McMahon, meanwhile, says he would like proof that Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself is a member the "strategic victory" camp as well. In a joint statement with Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty last month, Bloomberg described the current recycling program as both more "cost effective and environmentally-friendly" than the one it has now replaced.
"I call upon the mayor to continue using his bully pulpit to call for recycling like he does for 311," says McMahon, citing the increasing popularity of the city's telephone information program. "We have to get the message out: Eight million people can't just landfill this stuff anymore."
For links to sites concerned with Garbage in New York, check out Gotham Gazette Suggests.