What Would Happen if You Walked All of New York’s Shoreline? |
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The art and architecture of New York’s shoreline.
What Would Happen if You Walked All of New York’s Shoreline?
The art and architecture of New York’s vast and sweeping waterfront.
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge spanning New York Harbor.
Last fall, I spent a glorious October Saturday walking the coast of Queens. It was one eight-mile segment of a monumental undertaking: a trek along the coastline of New York City. Cooked up by a group of artists called Works on Water and by New York’s Department of City Planning, the project was meant to help New Yorkers understand that we inhabit an island city, an urban archipelago with roughly 520 miles of shoreline. I was a latecomer to the walk but also right on time: I managed to show up for the final leg.
Like a lot of stories, this one began with a chance encounter. A little over a decade ago, I bumped into Nancy Nowacek on a street in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. She’d been an art director at a magazine where I’d long written a regular column. But both of us had moved on, and she told me that she was working on a conceptual art piece, a footbridge across the Buttermilk Channel from Red Hook to Governors Island. She called it “Citizen Bridge” and was raising money by selling T-shirts that said Citizen in bold white type. (After Donald Trump started, in Nowacek’s words, “weaponizing the idea of citizenship,” she referred to the project simply as “The Bridge.”)
What I didn’t entirely comprehend at that moment was that Nowacek intended to actually build the bridge. Indeed, she spent several years working on the project full-time, writing grant proposals and giving lectures and putting up a Kickstarter page to support it. Along the way, she ran into other artists interested in working in and around the water and formed the group Works on Water. The experimental organization began hosting a triennial “dedicated to artworks, performances, conversations, workshops and site-specific experiences that explore diverse artistic investigation of water in the urban environment.”
Bringing artists together has its challenges, but getting the bridge approved and built turned out to be impossible. By 2016, Nowacek and her interdisciplinary team had developed several prototypes for a floating structure, yet she was hamstrung by the myriad regulations imposed on the 1,400-foot-wide waterway. But this impasse spawned something else: a partnership with the city and its planning department. “In doing the diligence, the seven or eight different permits that the bridge needed to get approved,” Nowacek explained, “I found myself in a meeting with Michael Marrella at City Planning. And I was spooling out the flow chart of how I understood this particular permit we were talking about, and the kind of contingencies and how to get to other permits. And he was like, ‘You know this better than some of my employees.’”
Marrella, for his part, was not especially encouraging about the prospects for Nowacek’s bridge. “One of the things I was trying to emphasize in that initial conversation,” he observed recently, “is that in New York City, every square inch of real estate is contentious and there are multiple objectives for any piece of land, but when it comes to the water’s edge and the water itself, that interest is magnified.” But Nowacek persevered, inserting herself into the world of waterfront planning and advocacy, attending endless meetings of organizations like the Waterfront Alliance, and soon she and the other water artists were solidifying their bond with the city planners and organizing a new project—what became the walk along New York’s 520-mile waterfront. “We had a first meeting with them in........