Though they are little-known, hard to find, often harder to get to, there are at least a dozen “natural sand beaches” in New York City -- along the Hudson River, the East River and the Harlem River . That was the discovery of a group of walkers, boaters and especially kayakers who have started mapping them. These are not generally, and may never be, good swimming beaches; river currents and pollution would make swimming off most of them impractical. But the kayakers in particular see them as potentially wonderful landings.
There are ambitious plans for some of them. For others, their strongest advocates would prefer for them to remain obscure.
One stretch of sand -- the only one in Lower Manhattan -- lies under the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan. Debris covers much of the beach -- twisted metal from wrecked pier pilings, lumber, concrete. But at low tide, water laps a sandy shoreline some 200 feel long and 20 feet wide. A fence along the walkway/bike path under the FDR Drive blocks access, but there's quite a view with the shoreline below and the bridge rearing up overhead.
In May, at the Waterfront Committee meeting of Community Board 1, a proposal to make the beach more accessible met resistance. Rob Buchanan, an avid kayaker and magazine writer about the outdoors, was among a group proposing a boat landing and access to the walkway. There are so few places for boaters to launch and land, and the place under the bridge has the advantage of being on the lee side of the river in calm water, he said.
The plan includes access from the walkway. Board and audience members worried that easy access would lead to children wandering in and drowning. They tabled the proposal. Four years ago, they also reacted negatively to Lower Manhattan Development Corporation plans for access to the water as part of the development of the area.
After the meeting last month, the chair of the Waterfront Committee made her distaste for the project clear to Downtown Express, “I’m not a proponent of the beach, quite frankly. I do worry about children and drownings.”
Others say that there is little danger of this, pointing to a just a handful of incidents in the past. Gary Fagin, who has lived near the South Street Seaport for 20 years, remembers just one accidental drowning in the area.
Maggie Greenfield of the Bronx River Alliance, an organization that is working on developing greenways in the Bronx, says that more public access to the water will actually enhance safety. "We'll have more eyes down there," she says.
The other beach-like areas on the rivers are generally treated with benign neglect. But one proposal is likely to gain purchase. That is for a beach that may include swimming on the Hudson River west of the Meatpacking District. It's a long-term proposition, however. First sanitation trucks have to be relocated, and that won't happen until 2012, says Chris Martin of the Hudson River Park Trust.
David Snetman, bicycle campaign coordinator of Transportation Alternatives can think of only one area where water laps the Hudson shoreline in Manhattan. It is north of Riverbank State Park at 145th St. and continuing up past the George Washington Bridge. Along that stretch, cyclists and walkers stretch out on a grassy bank that slopes into rocky shoreline. That area provides the longest, most civilized and good-looking shoreline access in the city.
At either end of Dyckman Street in Upper Manhattan New York Harbor Beaches show places to get to the water. On the east, on the Harlem River, a muddy beach by New York Restoration Project's restored wetlands. On the West end of Dyckman Street, there is a parks department sign for a kayak launch site. That doesn't make the place easily accessible. "It's official, even though you have to crawl through a hole in the fence," says the caption to the picture of the lovely-looking natural area.
On the East River, Stuyvesant Cove (around 23rd St.) provides a view of water lapping a rocky outcropping.
In other spots along the river it takes some ingenuity to stick a toe in the water or park a boat. The New York Harbor Beaches Web site shows an aerial view of little beach areas in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Hallets Cove and Queens near Socrates Sculpture Park. In DUMBO, there are a few areas along the river with rocks, sand, and grass. One is right under the Manhattan Bridge. Another is in Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.
Greenfield of the Bronx River Alliance says the greenway will open up water access in several places in the long-neglected and closed-off area of the South Bronx. An old concrete plant is being remade into a park that will have access to the shore. Now, residents can get to the water along Soundview Park, West Farms around East Tremont Avenue and the Bronx River Forest.
Not everyone wants to remake bits of the shoreline into official parks. Gary Fagin, who leads the Seaport Community Coalition, which is involved in historic preservation and quality of life for the neighborhood around the South Street Seaport, says that cleaning up the debris to make the beach under the Brooklyn Bridge more conventionally attractive would be useless. The tides would just bring back more detritus. "I scratch my head when I think of other ways for it to be of use," he says. He'd like to see it just left alone with the remnants of the old pier that once went out to the base of the bridge. "You can see water lapping against the beach. It's an evocative vista." He worries that attention to the scruffy spot could lead to some kind of reconstruction that would obliterate the little shoreline. For him, no news is good news. "The further under the radar, the better for the area," he says.
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In 2002, when a severe decline in winter snow and spring rainfall forced the city to declare a drought emergency, gardeners throughout New York City faced a new twist on an age-old dilemma.
Unable to tap city fire hydrants -- the traditional irrigation source for community gardens -- garden managers looked to the skies for respite. Taking a cue from early farmers, they gathered as many jars, barrels and cisterns as they could find and set them out to capture and store a portion of every summer downpour that passed over the city. By the end of the year, at least seven gardens had created elaborate rainwater harvesting systems channeling water from neighboring rooftops and downspouts to 55-gallon drums and underground cisterns.
Four years later, the pressure to capture each precious drop of water may not be as high, but the rainwater harvesting continues. A loose-knit coalition of environmental groups calling itself Water Resources Group has helped community gardeners install water retention systems in 25 local gardens. The group has even secured a $45,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to finance systems in at least four community gardens, starting with the Bedford Avenue Block Association Garden in Brooklyn near the corner of Bedford and De Kalb avenues.
Some of the larger sites use 1,000 gallon tanks, says project coordinator Lenny Librizzi of the Council on the Environment of New York City, a group member. But others use 55-gallon olive barrels donated by a Queens olive distributor.
As assistant director of the Council on the Environment’s open space greening project, Librizzi sees rainwater collection as an easy way to fulfill that project’s agenda to expand and enhance comunity gardens. For now, most community gardens rely on free city water from fire hydrants. This makes the gardens beholden to the whims of a city government that, for at least the last 10 years, has taken note of the value of the land underlying most community gardens and considered putting the acreage to more financially profitable use. For security's sake, many of the green spaces would prefer to have their own back-up water supply, free of city control.
But there are additional environmental benefits. Last year’s grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, came about because the group was able to show that recycling rainwater reduces demand on the city’s storm sewers and so can help cut water pollution. Although the city is overhauling its aging combined sewer overflow system, many neighborhoods still send storm water runoff and household waste into the same sewers. Catching rainwater reduces the demand on the sewers, giving city pumps in these neighborhoods more time to work before the sewers reach the overflow stage and send untreated sewage into local waterways.
“It’s a win-win for the environment and for gardeners,” says Robin Simmen, manager of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s GreenBridge horticulture program. “First of all, rainwater is better for plants than chlorinated tap water so you’ll get bigger, healthier plants. Also, by harvesting rainwater, we reduce the amount of storm water that we are currently flooding into our sewer system.”
Or as Librizzi puts it, “In collecting rainwater, we’re not only making the city greener, we’re making it bluer.”
Granted, it takes more than a few dozen community gardens to put a dent in the city’s storm water runoff problem. The Water Resources Group estimates that its 25-garden network currently captures a little more than 250,000 gallons of rainwater annually. Compare that to the average family’s use of an estimated 100,000 gallons a year and it’s hard to resist the punning drop-in-a-bucket metaphor.
But rainwater harvesting can also produce a change in the way New Yorkers think about water. Once New Yorkers stop seeing water as something they can take for granted, they start appreciating what it truly is: a fickle resource that takes time to capture.
“We happen to be kind of lucky in that we just turn on the tap and have all the fresh water we want, but that may not always be the case,” Librizzi says. “The educational aspect is a big part of this.”
Just as community gardens have taken the lead in bringing nationwide issues such as open space preservation and solid waste composting into the five boroughs, so too has the movement played a leadership role in a city where many residents already grasp the common-sense value of rainwater recycling but don’t see how to make it work in a heavily urbanized environment.
“In a way we’re reinventing the wheel,” Simmen says. “Many of the immigrant cultures in our city come from places where rainwater harvesting is a way of life. People who come from the Caribbean -- there’s no groundwater supply there, every drop of water you use for irrigation comes from the sky, and people know to catch and store the water when it rains.”
To further that education, numerous websites offer set up and safe storage tips to the aspiring rainfall harvester. For example, the site for Tree People, a Los Angeles tree-planting group, offers an interactive application to help calculate proper cistern size depending on the size of the collecting rooftop and the expected rate of rainfall. A University of Florida Extension site, meanwhile, provides a how-to guide for anyone looking to hook up a simple, self-containing 55-gallon rain barrel system to an existing gutter or downspout.
Designing a self-contained system is important. Not only does rainwater evaporate when left uncovered, it also can be a magnet for mosquitoes, rodents and other disease-bearing pests. Finally, there are the issues of drowning risk and potability. Like a backyard pool, a good rainwater collection source should we well marked and well-guarded, and it should be abundantly clear to passersby that the water that just flowed in off somebody’s rooftop is for plant use only.
“Rainwater is generally free of harmful materials and in most cases chemicals, but can be adversely affected by air pollutants and/or contaminated by animals in the catchment area,” warns the rainwater harvesting website Harvest H20.
There are various methods to prevent contamination. Jonah Braverman, an urban agricultural coordinator with East New York Farms, says his group uses a “first flush” system. This involves a plugged, 10-gallon PVC downspout directly adjacent to the collection source - the gutters of a nearby house. Once the downspout fills completely, remaining water is automatically diverted to the main downspout, which flows directly to a 500-gallon tank. After the rainstorm, garden volunteers, remove the plug and dispose of the first few gallons of water, and with it, whatever early sediment came washing in off the rooftop. Most research has found that filtering the first 10 gallons – as the first flush system does – is enough “to protect yourself from bird excrement and other pollutants,” Braverman says.
The collection system also includes a direct line to the city sewer, so that volunteers can shut off and drain the system during the winter when freezing might shatter the permanently filled water lines. So far, the only lingering concern with the three year-old irrigation system is water pressure. To address that, the group is planning to purchase a solar-powered pump. “We will also be hooking the system up to a second roof,” he says.
Looking down the road, rainwater collection enthusiasts sees opportunities to expand the Water Resources Group’s efforts to private lots and facilities other than community gardens. In early June members of the Water Resources Group along with members of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection will visit Philadelphia where Philadelphia Green, a project funded by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, has been working on pilot projects involving permeable paving materials, including asphalt. Such projects, if successful, could dramatically increase the percentage of rainwater captured and minimize storm runoff from parking lots and streets. The newly permeable surfaces can then be planted with trees and other plants, making them cooler and more attractive – without consuming additional drinking water.
In a sense such projects hark back to an earlier era. Simmen notes that that the lots of many Brooklyn brownstones still contain the buried backyard cisterns local residents once used to store rainwater during the dry months. “Since the early 20th century, New York has one of the few cities that doesn’t exist next to or on top of its water supply,“ Simmen says. As a result, many of us haven’t learned the importance of protecting the local waterways from pollution, something we might have learned growing up in another city. It’s something that we had here and it’s something that we’ve lost.”
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With gasoline prices in the city well above $3 and heading ever upward, New York motorists gnash their teeth and grumble whenever they refill their tanks.
But government feels the effects of rising gas prices as well. "Our expenses are going up when the cost of heating oil, the cost of diesel fuel, when the cost of gasoline goes up," Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said. "There's not a lot that this city or this state can do about it."
Many aspects of the energy situation certainly remain outside the mayor's control, but there are some steps he and the City Council could take that would not only lower costs but also address New York's serious air pollution problem.
With gasoline prices on the rise, drivers are looking for ways to save. Sales of hybrid cars -- powered by electricity, as well as gasoline -- have risen sharply in recent months, with Ford Motor Company telling the Washington Post that sales of its two hybrids had doubled in the past month and Toyota reporting that it cannot produce enough of its Prius hybrid to meet the demand. Sales of Honda's natural gas powered car, the Civic GX, have reportedly increased as well.
While consumers may be choosing these vehicles to save money, they are also helping the environment. Automobile exhaust is a key component of smog and soot, and a contributor to the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The hybrids and cars powered by natural gas cause less of this pollution than conventional gasoline-burning cars.
Anyone who lives in New York breathes auto exhaust. But most New Yorkers -- living in a densely developed city with a good mass transit system -- do not suffer from rising gasoline prices as much as residents of rural areas who may have to drive 30 miles for a gallon of milk. As taxpayers, though, we all pay at least indirectly for the costs of another fuel -- diesel.
Diesel powers most trucks and buses, including city-owned garbage trucks and city-funded school buses. Like gasoline, it is a petroleum product, subject to the vagaries of the oil market -- but even more expensive than gasoline. The city could save money and improve public health by cutting down its use of diesel -- and a good place to start would be with its garbage trucks.
Even if diesel cost only pennies a gallon, it would still extract a high cost. Thanks largely to diesel exhaust, Manhattan air is the most dangerous in the nation.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment, residents of the borough bear the greatest risk in the U.S. of getting cancer simply from breathing. The soot contained in diesel emissions is also a
significant reason why children in New York City are hospitalized for asthma at twice the national average.
Cities around the country recognize that diesel exhaust poses a threat to public health and are doing something about it. They are switching their truck and bus fleets from diesel to cleaner fuels and technologies. New York has already taken some steps as well. Last spring, the City Council passed, and the mayor signed, bills that would require the city to purchase cleaner vehicles, mandate that city diesel-powered vehicles use low-sulfur diesel, and control emissions on trucks, transit buses and sight-seeing buses. But the city could do more -- one important step would be switching its garbage trucks from diesel to a cleaner fuel.
There are a number of commercially viable alternatives to diesel.
Biodiesel is a domestic, renewable fuel made from vegetable oils. Despite news stories about cars that fill their tanks on leftover restaurant vegetable oil, vegetable oil must go through a chemical process to remove certain components before it be used as a fuel.
The use of biodiesel to replace diesel in trucks and buses does not significantly reduce fuel costs or pollution because it is typically blended with 80 percent regular diesel to form B20. B20 can power diesel vehicles without modifying their engines.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, running an engine on B20 results in a 12 percent reduction in soot and carbon monoxide and a 20 percent reduction in hydrocarbons, which are associated with increased cancer rates as well as global warming. However, emissions from an engine running on B20 contain a slightly higher number of pollutants thatlead to smog.
Biodiesel can be used in its pure form, B100, which does not contain a drop of regular diesel. According to the EPA, burning pure biodiesel in an engine reduces hydrocarbon emissions, soot and carbon monoxide by far greater amounts than B20 does. But manufacturers' warranties do not cover engines that run on B100, and the fuel can damage some rubber hoses and gaskets in older truck engines. In addition, biodiesel would do nothing to ease the burden of high diesel fuel prices on the city budget, since it costs more than conventional diesel.
Hybrid-electric vehicles run on a fossil fuel, such as diesel or gasoline, and electric energy generated during braking. When drivers of a conventional car or truck hit their brakes, that energy is lost. However, in a hybrid-electric vehicle, that energy is captured and stored in a battery, which can then power the vehicle under certain driving conditions. When a hybrid vehicle runs on the stored electric power, it does not spew harmful pollutants into the air or burn fossil fuel. And because they do not use gasoline or diesel oil when running on the battery, hybrids save money.
Not all hybrids are created equal. Some have a better fuel economy than others. The extent to which hybrids displace diesel, generate pollution and produce cost savings also depends on whether they use diesel, gasoline, or natural gas.
Unlike biodiesel and hybrid-electric vehicles, natural gas vehicles can fully displace diesel powered ones. Natural gas is domestically produced and burns cleaner than any form of diesel. Running an engine on natural gas, compared to conventional diesel, produces 32 to 73 percent fewer pollutants that lead to smog, and 69 to 83 percent fewer hydrocarbons. And while natural gas prices have gone up in recent years, it still costs less than diesel. In September 2005, diesel cost (in pdf format) an average of $2.81 a gallon, while the equivalent amount of natural gas cost $2.12.
Some private companies have already switched their trucks to natural gas. Last year, for example, Manhattan Beer Distributorsopened a natural gas refueling station in Brooklyn and retrofitted an additional 15 of its trucks to run with the cleaner fuel. Because natural gas is a gaseous fuel, regular filling stations cannot handle it, which is why Manhattan Beer Distributors had to build its own station. A lack of such stations represents a major impediment to increased use of natural gas vehicles. But of all of the commercially viable alternatives, natural gas vehicles can do the most to help people breathe easier.
Per mile, refuse trucks consume the most fuel of any vehicle on the road, burning one gallon of diesel fuel every 2.8 miles. Partly because they are among the oldest vehicles on the road (nationally, 41 percent of them have been in use for more than 10 years), garbage trucks are among the most polluting vehicles. As trucks age, their pollution controls deteriorate, allowing higher levels of pollutants to escape into the air. A recent report by INFORM (in pdf format) calculated that the 3,607 diesel-fueled refuse trucks operated by private garbage haulers in the city collectively generate as much as 9,500 tons of soot and pollutants per year. Thousands more tons spew from the Department of Sanitation's 2,500 diesel-powered refuse trucks.
The city's refuse truck fleet -- mostly diesel powered -- travels 6,300 miles each day. So, at $2.81 for a gallon of diesel, the city spends more than $2.3 million a year on diesel fuel for garbage trucks. If the city's fleet ran entirely on natural gas, New York's taxpayers could save more than half a million dollars a year a year in fuel costs.
Natural gas trucks do cost $40,000 to $50,000 more than conventional diesel trucks. However, state and federal government grants are available to help pay for natural gas trucks and refueling equipment.
And the gap in costs is narrowing. The EPA's tighter emissions standards for 2010 could spur the price of a diesel powered truck to increase by as much as $10,000 to $12,000. A study conducted by TIAX, an independent research firm, estimates that the pollution controls needed to meet the new emissions standards will soon erase any cost advantage that diesel refuse trucks have over natural gas trucks.
If every one of the public and private diesel refuse trucks in the city ran on natural gas, it would save 54 million gallons of diesel fuel a year, sharply reducing noxious emissions. (This is based on figures in another INFORM report, Greening GarbageTrucks.)
Of course there are other things the city can do as well. When awarding contracts, it can give preferenceto private companies that use cleaner fueled vehicles. City government can also offer incentives such as tax credits to private companies that switch to alternative vehicles.
Many New Yorkers are not familiar with natural gas, biodiesel and hybrid-electric vehicles. But these technologies, which can save money and help address the public health problems, are not some kind of futuristic fantasy. They are available right here, right now, if we choose to use them.
Stephanie Mandell is with the Sustainable Transportation Program at INFORM, an independent research organization that examines the effects of business practices on the environment and on human health.