River of Hope in the Bronx

The NewYork Times, July 2012

Perhaps the most unsung patch of heaven in New York City is a tiny sliver of riverfront parkland tucked between a metal-recycling yard and a giant wholesale produce market, on the far side of a six-lane highway and a pair of active freight train tracks. Hunts Point Riverside Park, a 1.4-acre speck in the South Bronx, opened a few years ago on what had been a filthy, weedy street end.

A garden path now winds from the front gate past rose bushes and flowering butterfly bushes, beyond a sprinkling fountain and shaded benches under a flowered trellis, to a pier on the Bronx River. Save for a couple of brick apartment towers rising over the treetops, the view is green across the river. The other afternoon teenagers from Rocking the Boat, a neighborhood organization that teaches boatbuilding were lugging rowboats to the muddy shore and launching themselves into the river.

For years one of the most blighted, abused waterways in the country, the southern end of the Bronx River has been slowly coming back and with it the shoreline that meanders through the South Bronx.

The New York waterfront is changing perhaps more than any other part of the city. For centuries the interests of big money and industry shaped it. These days the city’s old industrial waterfront is in many places giving way to parks and luxury apartment towers where money still talks, like along the Hudson.

Park by park a patchwork of green spaces has been taking shape, the consequence of decades of grinding, grass-roots, community-driven efforts. For the environmentalists, educators, politicians, architects and landscape designers involved, the idea has not just been to revitalize a befouled waterway and create new public spaces. It has been to invest Bronx residents, for generations alienated from the water, in the beauty and upkeep of their local river.

By the turn of the last century the Bronx River had already become an open sewer, prompting renewal efforts that galvanized around a parkway to cordon off the northern end of the watershed between Westchester and the Bronx Zoo.

The river’s southern end had to wait until the 1970s, when the Bronx was burning, before anybody started talking seriously about ecological restoration and green space. A local police commander, Anthony Bouza, joined forces with a secretary at Fordham University, Ruth Anderberg, to make restoration a cause. The commander lived in Westchester and was struck while commuting each day by how the river was “a bucolic, sylvan, beautiful place” up north, he once recalled, but “in the South Bronx it was a yellow sewer” and “a symptom of America’s attitudes toward the underclass, a powerful, physical metaphor.” Anderberg agreed, quit her job and started the Bronx River Restoration Project.

By 1980 the project had published the area’s first greenway plan, which in many respects mapped what, all these years later, is slowly coming to pass. By the late ‘80s proposals circulated for bike paths.

The ecological movement, urban restoration in Europe and a new generation of bike-riding urbanists moved the issue into the mainstream.

The pint-size Hunts Point Riverside Park cost just $3.3 million; Barretto Point Park, with its floating pool, its pier and beach, fields and playgrounds, cost $7 million; Concrete Plant Park, where I saw lovers necking and old men fishing in the river, cost $11.4 million, most of which went to removing 32,000 tons of contaminated soil.

Hunts Point Landing used to be the dead end of Farragut Street. Signe Nielsen, a landscape architect, designed the site, which occupies barely 100 feet of waterfront. She installed wetlands, bio-filtration pools and reef balls at the water’s edge for oysters and mussels to spawn, and a new pier.

What’s emerging in the Bronx is past and future. A new, more equitable vision for the city in the 21st century. And a river returned, at least partly, to its former glory.