Past issues
The Paper in print
RSS feeds
Print edition (PDF)
Email Alerts RSS Feeds
Up for a nature walk? The newest one is right there next to the sewage treatment plant.
This counterintuitive park project comes courtesy of the Department of Environmental Protection, which spent $3.2 million to build a gorgeous walkway next to the Newtown Creek sludge plant.
No, it’s not a joke — though some locals are treating it as such.
“I say we toilet paper their park — after all, they made our neighborhood smell like a toilet,” wrote one poster on Curbed.com, which labeled it “the crappiest park in Brooklyn.”
Other posts took advantage of the irony to use a common barnyard expletive that is often used as a slang term for feces.
The DEP wouldn’t dignify those kinds of potty-mouth comments, but did say that the park will be a wonderful amenity for the community and that most people will appreciate it.
The plant, which is known for those funky (both stylistically and, it must be said, odoriferously), egg-shaped domes, occupies a few dozen square blocks along the oil-filled creek north of Greenpoint Avenue.
Would-be nature walkers will enter the pathway from Paidge Avenue and Provost Street, and enjoy landscaping that includes trees, shrubs, waterfront seating, wetland grasses and perennial flowers and plants — plus a wall separating all that nature from the sewage plant on the other side.
The pathway is just the first phase of a DEP effort to provide access to the waterfront, the agency said. The next two phases will be completed over five years and extend the path all the way to North Henry Street.
It couldn’t come at a better — or worse time. The federal Environmental Protection Agency reported last week that a massive oil spill that has been seeping under the Newtown Creek area since the 1950s may be twice as big as once suspected.
The DEP will unveil the first phase of the Greenpoint Nature Walk along the waterfront that separates Brooklyn and Queens next week.
©2007 The Brooklyn Paper
By submitting this comment, you agree to the following terms:
You agree that you, and not BrooklynPaper.com or its affiliates, are fully responsible for the content that you post. You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening or sexually-oriented material or any material that may violate applicable law; doing so may lead to the removal of your post and to your being permanently banned from posting to the site. You grant to BrooklynPaper.com the royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content in whole or in part world-wide and to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or later developed.
Print this story
digg
del.icio.us