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.
