CHAPTER THREE
GREEN MARSHES AND TROUBLED WATERS
Jamaica Bay
Window-seat passengers who look down just before landing at Kennedy Airport see a stretch of water interspersed with a patchwork of marshy islands through which creeks form looping ribbons that meander through thick mats of cordgrass. This is Jamaica Bay, bounded by the Rockaway Peninsula—the last of the barrier beaches stretching from here to Montauk Point—and the southern edges of Brooklyn and Queens.
Runways, sewage-treatment plants, highways, and garbage landfills have reduced and straightened the bay’s natural perimeter, thereby destroying its once extensive wetland fringe. Yet even in their diminished state, the waters and marshes of Jamaica Bay collectively constitute one of the richest, if most imperiled, ecosystems along the Atlantic coast. For this reason, advocates for the bay’s protection were instrumental in getting Congress to create the 26,600-acre Gateway National Recreation Area in 1972, the country’s first urban national park, of which Jamaica Bay constitutes one unit.*1 The establishment of the park inaugurated a new but by no means final chapter in the history of this piece of New York City’s coastal landscape, one that continues to be rewritten by many forces, including, most recently, Hurricane Sandy.
Early Days
The first known inhabitants of the area around Jamaica were the Canarsie people, members of the Lenape branch of the Algonquian Indian nation that once occupied much of northeastern America. As so often elsewhere, the place names conferred by these Native Americans are still in use today, with Canarsie meaning “fenced land” and Rockaways being a derivation of the tribal name Rechquaakie, translated as “people of the sandy places.” The abundant marine life of the bay constituted the primary diet of these natives, and large middens of their discarded oyster shells dotted the shores before landfills covered them over. Grain must have nourished them also, for they are reputed to have cultivated a great cornfield in what is now the southeast corner of Brooklyn.
Beginning in 1636, Dutch settlers occupied the edge of the bay in southern Brooklyn, or, as they called it, Breuckelen, “broken land.” Their community of Flatlands, with its sea-level landscape like that of Holland, is the first known settlement on Long Island. Nearby Flatbush, known also by its Indian name of Midwout, was settled in 1651.
In 1656 a patent was issued granting the Canarsie meadows, lying east of the Indian planting ground, to Midwout’s “indwellers and inhabitants.” These meadows, part of a system of salt marshes surrounding Jamaica Bay, were valuable for the salt hay they produced. Dutch traveler Jasper Danckaerts (1639–c. 1703) described their appearance:
There is towards the sea a large piece of low flat land which is overflowed at every tide, like the schorr with us, miry and muddy at the bottom, and which produces a species of hard salt grass or reed grass. Such a place they call valy and mow it for hay, which cattle would rather eat than fresh hay or grass.…All the land from the bay to the Vlacke Bos [Flatbush] is low and level, and without the least elevation.…This marsh, like all the others, is well provided with good creeks which are navigable and very serviceable for fisheries. There is here a gristmill driven by the water which they dam up in the creek; and it is hereabouts they go mostly to shoot snipe and wild geese.
When New York was a British colony, Jamaica Bay was considered the property of the freeholders of Jamaica, Long Island. The patent confirmation granted by Governor Richard Nicolls in 1665 was for lands “to extend southeast to the Rockaway Swampe” from the early boundaries of the town. In 1670, in an effort to attract more colonists, Daniel Denton (c. 1626–1703) published a promotional pamphlet titled A Brief Description of New-York: Formerly Called New-Netherlands, in which he wrote: “Upon the South-side of Long-Island in the Winter, lie store of Whales and Crampasses, which the inhabitants begin with small boats to make a trade Catching to their no small benefit. Also an innumerable multitude of Seals, which make an excellent oyle; they lie all the Winter upon some broken Marshes and Beaches, or bars of sand.”
The little Dutch towns and the English settlement at Gravesend in the south-central section of Brooklyn eventually became part of the bay’s perimeter landmass. The mills that once stood beside the streams entering the bay have long since been replaced by the pollution-control plants of the Department of Sanitation. Dikes and floodwalls constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Shore Parkway built by Robert Moses have sealed off the tides that inundated the marshes, transforming areas where the cordgrasses were mowed for hay into waving expanses of phragmites. The eroding marsh islands, their future imperiled by further pollution and climate change, and hummocks in the bay are for the most part all that is left of the vast salt meadows that once extended for thousands of acres around its perimeter. The rich oyster beds have succumbed to pollution, and the wintering seals that once lolled on the Rockaway beaches have been supplanted by surfers and sunbathers.
In the past, Jamaica Bay and the Rockaways served as one of the finest sources of finfish and shellfish on the East Coast, with oysters ferried daily in huge quantities to oyster bars and restaurants in Manhattan. Railroad construction in the 1880s linked Brooklyn with the Rockaway Peninsula as well as with the community of Broad Channel in the middle of the bay, ushering in the area’s heyday as New York City’s prime summer playground. Great wooden resort hotels facing the ocean sprang up in the Rockaways, and in the interior of the bay, three were sited on the marsh island known as the Raunt. As sport fishing, boating, and swimming became popular, rows of look-alike wooden bungalows sprang up in Arverne and other Rockaway communities, bringing recreation and relief to city residents during the dog days of summer. Subway-served amusement parks opened at Broad Channel, Bergen Beach, and Canarsie, attracting a host of day-trippers.
In the twentieth century, the economy of bay and beach tourism was superseded by industrial development, some of it related to the dawn of the age of aviation, more by the ever-pressing need to dispose of the increasingly populous city’s sewage and garbage. Not surprisingly, several outfalls for sewer lines were sited around the bay, and much of its marshlands were obliterated as garbage scows and sanitations trucks smothered them with waste and debris.
In 1914 an ambitious scheme was advanced to dredge the bay and transform its eighteen thousand acres of water and marshlands into a huge industrial port and ship terminal. Proponents of the plan boasted that Jamaica Bay would then be greater than the combined ports of Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Hamburg. As a start, Canarsie Pier in Brooklyn was built as a berth for oceangoing vessels, but after the costly port project was abandoned, this intended ship dock became a wharf for fishermen.
The flatlands on the margin of the bay were the obvious place to accommodate runways for airplanes when the need arose. In 1930 Barren Island, adjacent to Brooklyn’s southeastern shore, was chosen as the site of Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s first municipal airport. Most of its 387 acres, which comprised thirty-three small hummocks of cordgrass, were covered with six million cubic yards of dredged sand, thereby cohering the marsh fragments, raising the surface sixteen feet, and joining this new-made land to the adjacent shore. Later, another wetland on the north shore of Long Island, Flushing Meadows, was filled in to create LaGuardia Airport, making Floyd Bennett Field obsolete. In 1952 it was sold to the U.S. Navy. But because commercial air transportation at LaGuardia had exceeded capacity, in 1947 Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport, eight times the size of LaGuardia, was created on a 4,527-acre tract of marshland on the eastern perimeter of Jamaica Bay. With 53 million cubic yards of dredged sand from the bay, the new airport’s runways were raised twelve feet above high tide.
The city’s appetite for converting marshes to terra firma did not abate. In several cases, marsh surfaces were raised above tide level by dumping “clean” landfill—nonorganic materials such as beach sand, excavated dirt and rocks from the construction of new buildings, and the rubble yielded by the demolition of old ones. Household garbage gobbled up more marshland. Around the bay’s perimeter, massive mounds of refuse continued to rise. Department of Sanitation trucks plied their slopes like busy ants, continually expanding the size of each landfill site with empty glass and plastic bottles, worn-out mattresses and treadless rubber tires, crushed tin cans and broken appliances, and a jumble of discarded newspapers, magazines, old shoes, meat bones, pickle jars, and orange rinds. Once a given site was full, it was decommissioned, stabilized, and capped with soil before being turned into a park or building lots.
In Jamaica Bay, urban visionary Robert Moses, dubbed “the power broker” by his biographer Robert Caro, demonstrated the canny political tenacity that made him New York’s indomitable master builder for thirty years. In 1938, municipal warfare broke out between Moses and the commissioner of sanitation, who saw the watery “wasteland” of the Jamaica Bay with its scattering of low marshy lands as a convenient supplement to the overflowing landfills elsewhere. Seizing the initiative, Moses countered this proposal with a plan of his own. In one of the many brochures advertising planned or completed public works under his administration as parks commissioner, the bay was depicted in before-and-after fashion. An artist’s sketch labeled “Civic Nightmare” displayed in lurid detail a mountain of smoking garbage, its malodorous fumes wafting across Brooklyn and Queens; a companion rendering showed a blue expanse of water flecked with sailboats and fishing craft, its periphery of landfill sites, which he proposed to decommission, rimmed with six sparkling white beaches and green-shaded waterfront parks.
Moses’s campaign was successful: state legislation was passed transferring Jamaica Bay to the jurisdiction of the New York City Parks Department in 1938. The newspapers gave prominent coverage to his plan for turning the bay into a huge marine playground. However, the proposed beaches never materialized because pollution from nearby sewage outfalls made the water unsafe for bathing, a problem that has continued to mar every subsequent proposal for water recreation around the bay’s perimeter. Several parks did get built, most on soil-capped garbage landfills, between the Belt Parkway and the shoreline of the bay.
Although Moses’s chief aim was to build parks whose purpose was active recreation rather than protection of the natural environment, he can nonetheless be credited with providing New York City, in 1951, with one of its prime ecological jewels—Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. The curious history of its creation is the outgrowth of a characteristic Moses ploy. Where the subway now runs, a branch of the Long Island Rail Road, spanning the bay on a wooden trestle, carried passengers to the Atlantic beaches and the once-elegant seaside resorts in the Rockaways. The trestle, built in 1877, would periodically catch fire, and in 1950 it was severely damaged by flames. The railroad decided to withdraw its service to the Rockaways, and the New York City Transit Authority agreed to purchase the old spur for its Rockaway line. Instead of rebuilding the trestle, the Transit Authority wanted to dredge sand from the bay to create a new embankment on which to build the elevated subway tracks that now carry the A train to the Rockaways. Since the bay was by this time a jealously guarded piece of Moses’s now-considerable park empire, he refused to permit dredging to take place unless the Parks Department received something in return. It was therefore agreed that, in conjunction with its dredging operations, the Transit Authority would construct a series of dikes to impound fresh water. Two ponds, one on the east side of Cross Bay Boulevard, the other on the west, were created, and Moses appointed a veteran Parks Department gardener, Herbert Johnson, as superintendent of the newly designated Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.
In addition to the ponds, a nesting area was created on one of the larger islands in the bay, thanks to another act of interdepartmental gamesmanship on Moses’s part. This time he maneuvered the Sanitation Department to pipe organically rich sludge from the 26th Ward Sewage Treatment plant located on the bay’s perimeter to Canarsie Pol, a barren island in the middle of the bay. After the sludge had been worked into the sandy surface to form rich topsoil, Johnson began setting out tufts of beach grass to serve as habitat for waterfowl.
Broad Channel, the largest of the marsh islands in the center of the bay and the only one that remains inhabited today, was also part of the refuge-in-the-making. With the demise of regular rail service, the popularity of the adjacent Raunt as a middle-class summer resort had declined. Its remaining population was made up mostly of old-timers living year-round in the weather-beaten former summer bungalows perched over the water on wooden stilts next to a rickety wooden boardwalk running the length of the settlement. Potable water was collected in rain barrels and plumbing was nonexistent. Its three summer hotels had become decrepit. Because the little marine colony in the middle of Jamaica Bay did not fit Moses’s grand vision for New York City’s growing parks empire, he had no qualms about planning its demolition in 1939 during construction of the Cross Bay Parkway Bridge (now the Cross Bay Veterans Memorial Bridge) connecting Cross Bay Boulevard with the Rockaways.
With imperial authority, Moses decreed that all the remaining structures on the Raunt be demolished, along with the cabins that dotted the marshes around contiguous Ruffle Bar.*2 The dispossessed residents had only scorn for the new refuge and swore that the birds would ignore the two ponds. However, as the ponds collected rainwater and became almost like freshwater lakes, aquatic plants took hold: widgeon grass, muskgrass, and sago pondweed. Once the refuge was in operation, Johnson was left largely unsupervised to do as he pleased. From cuttings he gathered at other marine locations, he propagated such berry-producing plants as autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata), Rosa rugosa, Rosa multiflora, bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica), and chokeberry (Aronia). With seeds from pinecones, which he collected in Jacob Riis Park, he started a nursery of Japanese black pines (Pinus thunbergiana), later transplanting the seedlings to form groves throughout the refuge. Since grain was another means of attracting birds, he sowed wheat, oats, and rye.
West Pond, Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
By 1953 the outlines of the refuge were in place, and soon the birds did come, by the thousands. Migrant ducks that normally breed on the freshwater lakes and ponds of the prairie states—Baldpates, Pintails, Gadwalls, Ruddy Ducks, Green-winged Teals—began to nest at Jamaica Bay along with the more common Mallards, Black Ducks, and Greater and Lesser Scaup. Brants came to graze on the sea lettuce that covered the bay bottom, and soon Black Skimmers, terns, and egrets started to lay their eggs on the sand in the beach grass. The wealth of grain, seeds, and berries resulting from Johnson’s horticultural labors attracted land birds, which supplemented the flourishing shorebird and waterfowl populations. In 1958, five years after the refuge was started, 208 species had been sighted at Jamaica Bay; the following year the count had climbed to 238; in 1960 it reached 242; and by 1962 the tally was 283. Today’s list stands at 332 (nearly half the bird species so far recorded in the Northeast).
Snowy Egrets on marsh edge, Jamaica Bay
COURTESY OF DON RIEPE
In addition to Johnson’s habitat creation, an important reason for the success of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge as a major bird-watching destination is its position on the Atlantic Flyway at the point of intersection of two separate streams of migratory waterfowl, one following the eastern coastline to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and the other taking a flight path that veers to the Midwest and pushes northward into Ontario. The refuge therefore has a unique geographical significance as a place of confluence for both land birds and shorebirds during the fall and spring migrations. There are, in addition, many birds that stay and build their nests and raise their young in the protected reeds and grasses. Osprey, formerly decimated by DDT and nonexistent in Jamaica Bay, now nest on the elevated platforms that have been erected for this purpose in the refuge as well as elsewhere near the perimeter of the bay.
In addition to its 332 bird species, more than seventy species of butterflies and many small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles inhabit the refuge. Diamondback terrapins lay their eggs in the sand. A mating ground for horseshoe crabs, the bay boasts one of the largest populations of these curious crustaceans in the Northeast.
But there is no guaranteed happy ending to this success story. A wetland can be compromised in many ways, and sustaining not only the refuge but also the rest of Jamaica Bay as a viable ecosystem has proved challenging. Fortunately, there is someone who makes the health of the bay waters, marshes, and wildlife his ongoing mission.
Guardian of the Bay
Don Riepe is a former National Park Service ranger who was the resource manager at the refuge soon after it had become part of the federally operated Gateway National Recreation Area in 1972 until his retirement in 2005. Riepe is a resident of Broad Channel, his house perched over the water where he docks his boat. It is appropriately named Guardian of the Bay.
To get to Broad Channel on the subway, I took the A line, bound for Far Rockaway. Just before the train reached the Aqueduct Racetrack stop, it emerged from the ground and continued along a trestle. At the next station, riders with suitcases got off to take the shuttle bus to JFK. As the doors closed and the train started up again, I gazed out at the watery expanse of the bay and then at the green of the refuge’s forested upland on either side of the tracks. Descending the stairs at the Broad Channel stop, I took a close-up look at the community that had been built improbably on the southern end of the long, narrow marsh that lies within the center of the bay.
Don Riepe
Broad Channel waterfront with Riepe house and dock in foreground
Today there is scant evidence of Broad Channel’s old, ramshackle character. Instead, as I walked from the subway to Cross Bay Boulevard, I saw images of the Virgin Mary along with a wealth of other garden statuary in yards with freshly painted picket fences. There were motorboats in many driveways, and American flags in people’s yards up and down the street. I passed Saint Virgilius Roman Catholic Church and its neighbor, Christ Presbyterian Church, both built of wood, with gable roofs adorned with steeples. Because it was March, there were large shamrock posters decorating windows and doors. Except for its unusual location, Broad Channel is by all appearances a typical New York City Irish neighborhood.
Turning south on Cross Bay Boulevard, I walked a couple blocks to 9th Road, turned right, and at the end of the block found Riepe’s waterside address. A sign outside announced that this was the headquarters of the American Littoral Society, Northeast Chapter. It is also the office of the Friends of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, as I learned when I sat down with Riepe in the half of his kitchen that is not given over to newsletters-in-the-making and all the other paraphernalia of a busy life as nature’s advocate. In addition to heading these two organizations, Riepe is affiliated with several others seeking to protect the bay’s water quality, fragile ecology, and periphery from infringement by continued urban development. These groups include New York City Audubon, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, and Natural Resources Defense Council. Riepe is their watchdog, since he spends approximately two days a week patrolling Jamaica Bay’s marshes and shoreline in his boat, looking for such violations as illegal crabbing, dumping, and commercial rather than recreational fishing. He helps these groups plan conferences to develop concerted policies for dealing with environmental issues, coordinates volunteer beach cleanups, and participates in raptor-banding operations as a way of monitoring the bay’s population of ospreys, hawks, eagles, and owls. Closely allied with him in these efforts are his two neighbors Dan Mundy Sr. and Dan Mundy Jr., founders of Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers. The Mundys, zealous activists who have worked closely with wetland scientists to measure the high levels of nitrogen in the bay waters—the primary agent in the current, rapid erosion of marshes—have been tireless in their efforts to force government officials and politicians to pay attention to the issue of pollution in the bay.
Riepe, who grew up adjacent to Jamaica Bay, has spent almost his entire life within its confines, fishing and observing birds and other wildlife. He counts himself lucky to have found the perfect career niche in 1976 when he became a National Park Service ranger assigned to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area. After serving as refuge manager, he decided to bypass the climb up the government agency’s career ladder in order not to transfer elsewhere, where he would have had a higher position in the National Park Service.
After we had coffee in Riepe’s kitchen-cum-office, he offered to take me on a walk in the refuge, which is a short drive from his house. As we started down the trail that encircles West Pond, I noticed a Tree Swallow poking its head through the entry hole in one of the several nesting boxes that Riepe had previously installed. “Look,” he exclaimed, pointing out a nest of sticks on a tall, plank-topped pole. “See, there’s an osprey on the nest. You remember back in the sixties when they were practically extinct because of DDT spraying? The first osprey nest to be built in this region was on a platform that Herb Johnson erected here in the refuge. Now we have ospreys nesting on all fifteen of the platforms we have put up around the bay.”
Young ospreys on nest, Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DON RIEPE
Circuit path around West Pond, Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
I looked up in the sky above the osprey nest and saw a huge jet from JFK taking off above the bay. “That’s a Delta,” Riepe said. “After I got to know all the birds, I learned to identify airplanes. Sometimes on a slow day in the refuge or out on the bay in my boat, I like to see what kinds of planes are in the air.” Speaking with regret about one extinct species, the Concorde, he said, “I know I’m an environmentalist and am supposed to have minded and that some of the people nearby complained about the noise, but those planes were really elegant. Beautiful lines. I miss them.” The airport’s plan for continued expansion into the bay remains a hot issue, particularly among naturalists and bird-watchers. Runway patrols sometimes shoot birds that come within the flight path, much to bird lovers’ dismay.
Gateway’s current National Park Service staff at the refuge has shifted its focus from resource management to visitor services. Riepe believes that while they do more programs in the visitor center, they give less attention to nourishing and maintaining the refuge’s natural-seeming but horticulturally needy landscape. He finds this change of administrative direction discouraging: it is difficult for him to watch Herbert Johnson’s carefully created lifework being neglected, along with his own achievements, after the decades he has spent protecting Johnson’s legacy. He complains that some areas are mowed as lawn but none are pruned to maintain shoreline views and open habitats. However, he tries to compensate for this by directing landscape-care projects performed by volunteers under the aegis of Friends of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. In addition, Riepe is a talented photographer whose work has been featured in several nature magazines, and as we concluded our walk at the visitor center, I noticed that many of the blown-up nature photographs on exhibit had been shot by him—either in the refuge or on American Littoral Society field trips.
Since Riepe was obviously the right person with whom to tour the entire bay, I called him up again a couple of months later when the weather was warmer and his boat had been put in the water. “Come around eleven o’clock,” he said. “That is when it will be high tide. It’s a good day to go out and see the horseshoe crabs.” When I arrived at his house, Elizabeth Manclark, his part-time assistant, helped me into a pair of waders, and the three of us climbed into Riepe’s boat. Heading south through Broad Channel, we stopped a short distance away at Little Egg Marsh. Manclark assisted Riepe in anchoring the boat, and then I clambered over the edge and into the water. There in the shallows along the edge of the marsh were hundreds and hundreds of horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus). These strange-looking arthropods are, according to the fossil record, a species that is at least 450 million years old. Normally they live on muddy bottoms and the sandy ocean floor, but during the high tides of new and full moons in the breeding season, they come ashore to mate.
Horseshoe crabs mating, Little Egg Marsh, Jamaica Bay
Luckily for us, this was the breeding season, and we were in the right moon phase to observe horseshoe-crab mating in full swing. I learned that the larger ones scrabbling in the sand making little depressions were females. The males, two-thirds their size, were positioned behind them, their front claws, which look a little like miniature boxing gloves, holding on to the back of their partners’ domed shells as they were dragged along toward the high-tide line. “She’s laying her eggs, and he is covering them with sperm as she pulls him over the nest. Look,” he explained, picking up a male and turning it over, “do you want to see something X-rated? He has two penises.” Sure enough, beneath a protective plate on the underbelly of the horseshoe crab, which Riepe held open for inspection, was a double set of tiny genitals.
The horseshoe crabs were not the only attraction. Skittering along the shoreline of the marsh was a flock of Semipalmated Sandpipers (Calidris pusilla), along with some Dunlins. There were a pair of striking black-and-white American Oystercatchers, their long red bills poking about the tidal flats, feasting like the other shorebirds on the millions of newly deposited horseshoe-crab eggs. There were numerous Laughing Gulls, which often breed on marsh islands such as those in Jamaica Bay. “Look over there.” Riepe pointed to a large, dark wading bird with a long downturned bill. “There’s a Glossy Ibis.”
I felt the shore-bound horseshoe crabs brushing against my waders as I walked back to the boat through the water. Manclark pulled up the anchor while Riepe started the motor and then steered the boat back through one of the little creeks that wend their way through Big Egg Marsh. We came out into Beach Channel, which runs along the northern edge of the Rockaway Peninsula, its shoreline indented here and there with boat basins. Passing under the Cross Bay Bridge, Riepe pointed to a Peregrine Falcon perched high up on a ledge between two girders.
Continuing beneath the trestle carrying the subway tracks across the channel to the Rockaways, Riepe turned the boat into Vernam Basin in order to show me a recently designated city park. The spit separating Vernam from Barbadoes Basin was where, encouraged by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, a developer had planned to build a truck-body customizing operation, an enterprise staunchly opposed by local citizens. Through their efforts, coordinated under the auspices of New York Audubon’s Buffer the Bay program, the land was instead transferred to the Department of Parks & Recreation. Riepe pointed out that this might be the first bit of green that migratory birds on the Atlantic Flyway see as they approach Jamaica Bay.
Returning to the main part of the channel, we passed Brant Point, so named because numerous members of this geese species winter in the bay until it is time for them to migrate to their breeding grounds on Baffin Island and in the High Arctic. Next we came to Dubos Point, a larger spit embraced by Conchs Hole Point and Motts Point. This forty-five-acre peninsular appendage was a marsh before it was filled with dredged material in 1912 to create solid land for real-estate development. Its current state as scrub forest is due to nature’s reclamation of the site after development did not occur. Another Buffer the Bay success story, it was transferred by the Office of General Services to the Department of Parks & Recreation and designated a nature sanctuary in 1988. Its naming honors René Dubos, the microbiologist instrumental in developing modern antibiotics. Dubos was also a much-esteemed author of several books on the relationship between humankind and the environment, and the originator of the injunction “Think globally, act locally.” His wife, Jean, was a driving force behind the creation of the sanctuary; its name commemorates them both.
We were now in Grass Hassock Channel alongside Jo Co, the largest marsh in the bay. According to Riepe, it is the best marsh in the bay for nesting. I could see the long necks of numerous Snowy Egrets sticking up above the mats of cordgrass. Here Laughing Gulls, American Oystercatchers, Common Terns, Forster’s Terns, Seaside Sparrows, Willets, Glossy Ibises, and Clapper Rails also make their nests. Protecting the integrity of this and the other Jamaica Bay marshes is the focus of the New York City Audubon Society’s Jamaica Bay Research and Management Information Network, which over the past twenty years has sponsored the Harbor Herons Nesting Survey, an annual data-collection project. A companion Audubon effort, the Harbor Herons Shore Monitoring Program, is a citizen-science initiative funded by the New York City Environmental Fund. Its mission is to observe the colony of herons, egrets, and ibises on Canarsie Pol and the marshes surrounding it in order to determine their flight lines and foraging patterns. Riepe participates in both these projects, making day-to-day observations as he patrols the bay in his boat. At the same time, he is able to check on the ospreys nesting atop the fifteen platforms scattered across the bay.
Now JFK Airport was directly ahead of us, its longest runway already penetrating the eastern edge of Jo Co Marsh. Riepe and other Buffer the Bay advocates are engaged in an ongoing dialogue with airport officials over proposals to build more runways out into the bay. As a member of the Bird Hazard Task Force, he tries to counter their fears that gulls, geese, and ducks in flight pose a serious danger to low-flying planes. As Riepe brought the boat as close to one of the runways as possible, through my binoculars I happened to spot simultaneously a Great Blue Heron gliding over Jo Co Marsh and a Delta airplane. I then understood why he liked to watch both soaring birds and jumbo jets rising into the sky in a straight line and landing with such precise purposefulness.
Having reached the airport’s no-trespassing zone at the eastern edge of the bay, we turned around and headed back along Grass Hassock Channel beside Jo Co Marsh. Across the water at Elders Point Marsh we spotted a rookery in a big tree: cormorants occupied at least two dozen large stick nests in its branches. Riepe next steered the boat into Mucke Creek, which separates Jo Co Marsh from Silver Hole Marsh. Because of the rising tide, we were able to thread a passage through the dense mass of marsh grasses. On either side of the boat we saw a large number of nesting egrets and other shorebirds. Passing out into Broad Channel, Riepe went north toward the open water of Grassy Bay. The edge along the airport side has been extended with dredge spoil in a perfectly straight line, a project carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps’ relationship to the bay is a complex one; it is charged with constructing and managing the nation’s military and civil infrastructure, but its purview includes water resources as well. It is therefore the governmental agency responsible for working with the Environmental Protection Agency, which has as its stated goal “the protection and maintenance of the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.” Although these words do not include the phrase “restoration of marine ecologies,” the Corps is involved in projects directed toward environmental regeneration, which in the case of Jamaica Bay means using its dredging equipment to rebuild marshland. Unfortunately, the existing marshland is continually shrinking. According to studies made by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, since 1974 the rate of loss of intertidal marsh islands has been accelerating. Between 1974 and 1994, 526 acres of marsh islands were lost—an average rate of 26 acres per year. Between 1994 and 1999, 220 acres were lost—an average rate of 44 acres per year. Thus, unfortunately, the Corps’ work is far from being a zero-sum operation.
Riepe blames the accelerating marsh erosion less on climate change than on the city’s combined storm-water and sewage system: when it rains heavily, untreated water from the four large sewage-treatment plants on its perimeter gets discharged into the bay. Even without such events, though, the treated wastewater does not meet clean-water standards. Although it is detoxified and the sludge separated out, Riepe feels that the effluent still has too much nitrogen content. “The bay gets overnutrified, and this causes the bloom of algae,” he explained. “Then you get bacteria and nematodes working together, and this starts to eat away the root systems of spartina grass and other vegetation that holds each of the marsh islands intact. As this process destroys them from the inside as well as the outside, they start to fragment, and that increases the amount of edge that can erode.” Using irrefutable data showing the level of marsh-eroding nitrates leaching out of the residual sludge and contaminating the bay, Riepe and the Mundys, father and son, were instrumental in enlisting a consortium of environmental organizations to join the American Littoral Society and the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers in making the case for a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Fund in 2010 against the City of New York. It was successfully settled out of court, with the result that efforts are under way to reduce the 57,000 pounds of nitrogen per day being discharged in the bay—double the amount of twenty years ago—to a limit of 22,000 pounds per day.
Saving the Bay
It is obvious that if the bay is to retain its character as a fecund wetland where birds breed, fish spawn, and horseshoe crabs mate, the Army Corps’ marsh-rebuilding efforts with federal environmental mitigation funds need to be accelerated. The work is necessarily incremental, expensive, and slow, raising the question of whether reclamation can keep up with reduction. In the race between gain and loss, at this point it would appear unwise to bet on the remaining Jamaica Bay wetlands staying intact, much less accreting.
Nevertheless, Riepe is hopeful. As we turned west into North Channel, he pointed to a marsh with an orange fence surrounding it. “This is Elders Point West, the Army Corps of Engineers’ first major marsh-reclamation project to be completed after Elders Point East. Since the agency works with the Port Authority on keeping shipping channels deep enough for large oceangoing vessels, it is sometimes a case of one hand helping the other. Here the Corps brought the sand dredged out of the shipping channel at the Rockaway Inlet near the mouth of Jamaica Bay into this area and stored it. Then they pumped it onto this piece of marsh, increasing six acres to thirty. After that, they planted spartina grass on top. It took two years to get the whole thing up and going, but I think they did a very good job.”
As he turned the boat around and started back south through Pumpkin Patch Channel, Riepe pointed out Black Wall Marsh and Yellow Bar Marsh, two fragmented marsh hummocks, both encircled with orange mesh fencing. He explained that this was the combined site of the Army Corps’ next marsh-reclamation project, which would be performed in conjunction with volunteers he had helped organize under the aegis of Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers. “In two weeks,” he said, “we have a few hundred volunteers coming for four days to plant 88,000 plugs of spartina grass. We’ve been working with them since the fall, when we harvested 250 pounds of spartina seeds with sickles. The seeds are now germinating at a nursery in Pinelands, New Jersey, where they’ve been kept wet and cold in saltwater tanks over the winter.” Manclark chimed in, “We’re super-excited! It’s the first time a not-for-profit group has been able to get out and do a marsh restoration project.” I asked if I could come and take part in one of the volunteer grass-planting days and was assured that I would be welcome.
On the beautiful April morning that had been scheduled for the event, I arrived at the dock when the bay was at low tide. There I found myself in the company of 160 young volunteers from the Church of God. Group by group, we clambered aboard the motorboat that was to ferry us to thirty-acre Black Wall Island, whose surface had been augmented with 155,000 cubic yards of sand dredged from Ambrose Channel by the Army Corps of Engineers. As we approached and the water became too shallow to go farther, a raft was waiting to take us to the point where we could wade the rest of the way ashore. Sneakers in hand, I enjoyed the sensation of bottom ooze between my toes and seaweed brushing my ankles.
Flats containing plugs of spartina grass had been delivered earlier, and Manclark was instructing the first batch of volunteers on how to plant it. “This is a jig,” she said, holding a waist-high wooden tool with two perpendicularly crossed planks at the bottom, one of which had round, pointy pieces about six inches in diameter fastened to either end. A short footboard fastened above it allowed the hole diggers to use their weight to push the points into the sand. “Okay,” Manclark said. “We use the jig to mark the places where we want to make holes, because the plugs of grass have to be planted two feet apart. You make the first two marks, and then you move the jig so that the back point goes into the second of the two depressions you’ve just made in the sand. You press down on the jig again, and now you have another mark. You keep moving forward, and pretty soon there will be a straight row showing where we are going to plant the plugs of grass.” Holding up another device, which looked like an oversized version of the kind of tool gardeners use to plant bulbs, she said, “This is a dibble. Now the next person in line holds one of these and pushes it into the marks that have just been made. When you pull it up, a cylinder of sand comes out; you lay this to one side and move on to the next mark. We may not have enough dibbles, so there are also spades and trowels over here. Next the planter comes along with a plug of grass and puts it in the hole and uses the loose sand beside it to pack it in.” She then explained why the plugs had to be planted in such a way that the grass just above their roots was securely covered with sand. “Remember, the tide is going to come in and completely submerge the island, so we’re concerned about salinity shock. The shoots may turn a little brown at first, but then they will become green as the roots take hold.”
Soon there were lines of young people, most in their teens and early twenties, who were wearing bright green vests emblazoned with “World Mission Society of the Church of God,” happily moving in assembly-line fashion along straight, evenly spaced planting rows. Others sat in little groups on the sand, pulling apart the plugs of grass whose roots had grown together in the flats. I wondered how so many volunteers had been assembled. Wilmer Rapozo, the event coordinator, was only too happy to tell me about the church’s global reach and ability to enlist volunteers from churches in Manhattan, Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey. He said, “We are the fastest-growing church in the world with fifteen hundred local churches in over one hundred fifty countries. We were originally started in South Korea in 1964 by Second Coming Christ, Ahnsahnghong, who wanted to restore the truth of the Early Church and remind us of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Christ Ahnsahnghong revealed to us the truth of Heavenly Mother. She is the force of love, who is now here in the flesh in these last days to fulfill the prophesies in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.” When I queried, “Really in the flesh?” he beamed beatifically and replied, “Exactly! She is on earth at this time in order to lead us to the Holy City, New Jerusalem. She is directing us. She has told us that it is greater to give love than to receive love, and that is why we are here. We want to love the earth as well as the people of the earth.”
Church of God volunteers planting with dibble, Black Wall Marsh, Jamaica Bay
I turned to talk to Dan Mundy Jr., whose passion for the bay, his lifelong home, equals Riepe’s. An ardent ecologist, he explained how he would go out in a boat on the bay from the time he was six years old. Pointing to the Broad Channel shoreline, he said, “See those two houses over there? I helped my dad build his twenty years ago, and then ten years ago I built mine next door. We started Ecowatchers because we’ve seen the deterioration of the bay over the years and felt it was time to do something to put a stop to it. Now we’re getting these kids here to care about the importance of preserving marshlands. You can see they are having a ball.”
I mentioned the specter of climate change and rising sea level, but this did not trouble Mundy. “When Sandy came, you might have thought that this island would have washed away. But it didn’t. If we can get the nitrate content of the water under control, the reeds in the marshes actually act as a deterrent to storm damage and erosion by dissipating the strong winds. They also take the carbon out of the atmosphere and counter global warming. Besides this, the marshes are the most biologically fertile places on earth. We’ve got all sorts of shorebirds and fish and horseshoe crabs breeding in these marshes, which is why it is so important to save them. There has been an unbelievable loss, and we are now finally getting the National Park Service and the Department of Environmental Protection to pay attention to the scientific data that shows how forty to fifty acres of marsh a year are disappearing.
Dan Mundy Sr., who had joined us, said, “Danny found out that the dissolved oxygen content in the water was below the tipping point of the New York State standard.” He enumerated the causes:
There are three sources of pollution: the nitrates coming from the sewage-treatment plants, the stuff leaching from the thirty-one landfill sites around the bay, and the glycol that the airport uses to de-ice the runways. But now, at last, we’ve been able to reduce some of the contamination by getting legislation passed to prevent the dumping of toxic material in the borrow pits, where sand was previously dredged in order to construct the runways. We’ve even got some oyster beds started. Did you know that oysters can metabolize nitrogen and that they filter-feed thirty-five gallons of water a day?
I wondered at the optimistic tenacity of the Mundys in the face of so many sources of bay degradation, but then I remembered something Don Riepe had said to me.
It’s tough being an environmentalist in a world where there is one disaster after another. We are living in such dire conditions, and if we can’t handle population growth, the result is going to be chaos and revolution. But here at Jamaica Bay, we have an example of nature healing itself, where it’s been given a chance. Look at it this way: despite over a hundred years of deterioration, the Jamaica Bay ecosystem serves as a natural oasis surrounded by a sea of eight million people. An amazing diversity of species still survives in its waters, marshes, and uplands. It is imperative that we preserve and protect the bay and remaining natural areas within the city, as the future of our species may well be dependent on it.
After I got home following my day on Black Wall Marsh with the Church of God volunteers, I called Riepe to thank him for all he had shown and taught me walking through the refuge, sightseeing by boat, observing horseshoe crabs mating, and planting spartina grass. When I asked him to explain his strong attachment to Jamaica Bay, he replied, “I guess I have the nature gene. Nature has been a great healer whenever I have felt discouraged or depressed. I like to lead American Littoral Society birding tours to such places as Nicaragua and Iceland, but I really don’t need to go far away to experience such an abundance of natural phenomena as you find here. Broad Channel is my home, and Jamaica Bay is my backyard. I can’t see living anywhere else.”
*1 The other units of the Gateway National Recreation Area are parts of Staten Island and Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
*2 The remaining residents, many of whom had become year-round occupants, waged a protracted battle to purchase the land under their houses. The city denied their repeated requests to buy the properties they continued to inhabit as squatters until 1982 when they were finally granted the right to take ownership. Broad Channel is now a thriving Queens community of well-kept homes, churches, shops, restaurants, a fire station, a VFW meeting hall, and other neighborhood amenities. The visitor walking down the street sees trim flowerbeds and driveways in which boats as well as cars are parked. Today the dockside houses that received the brunt of Hurricane Sandy have all been repaired.