Riverkeeper, which monitors the Hudson River and its tributaries, noted once that Newton Creek, the oil-choked body of water separating western Brooklyn and Queens,
fails to meet even the most basic goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Nearly the entire stretch of the creek is heavily industrialized, there is virtually no public access, and water dependent industries have stagnated. A boat trip up the creek is a journey into the heart of darkness, with the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline as a reminder of its real world locale.
This is a photo essay on the park that forces Riverkeeper to qualify “no public access” with the word “virtually.” Impose correspondent Nate Dorr stumbled on this practice in municipal surrealism on a pleasant day in October.
