Eat the City(65)
John is in the small-time business of peddling East River fish, with a cell phone call to people who’ve wandered by the pier and expressed interest in his salty, oily wares. “A lot of time they walk down and they witness me fighting the fish,” John says. “I always blurt out, soon as I see it, I give it an amount number: twenty dollars, thirty dollars, fifty dollars, you know? And the guy says, ‘Oh, you sell them?’ I go, ‘Yes, sir!’ ”
John won the 2009 Brooklyn Fishing Derby, a monthlong, borough-wide competition to capture the largest fish, with a 40-inch striped bass. Sometimes he gets up at six in the morning to come to the pier and doesn’t leave until eleven p.m. One night he fished till three a.m. in a rainstorm, while his friend crawled under the fish-cleaning table.
He caught a bird once and had to unbraid the line out of its wing; he has caught a log, a boot, a shoe, various pieces of tire, a rusted can, a pair of old-fashioned bloomers, a sunken board, a shirt, half a fender. He caught a hacklehead, a fish that looks like a toad. He often catches plastic bags and used condoms—“Coney Island whitefish,” the anglers call them. He looks up at one of the few places in the city where you can see an expanse of sky, as big as a Wyoming or Montana sky, sweeping above the East River. Then he looks down. “This whole river is covered in a carpet that looks like the most dirtiest cotton,” he says, gazing out at the fuzzy white surface of the water, from whose depths he extracts food. For the first time, he goes quiet.
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HE doesn’t talk about Newtown Creek, a partial border between Brooklyn and Queens, whose waters empty into the East River just around the corner from John’s fishing spot. But the history of this creek, as well as its fetid, chemical water, embodies all the reasons not to eat the fish he catches. The creek is a four-mile Superfund site, one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the country. It contains raw sewage from twenty direct sewage portals and oil and toxic chemicals from a century of industrial waste.
On one of his regular patrols, John Lipscomb, a boat captain for the Riverkeeper environmental organization, takes me upcreek on his Chesapeake Bay deadrise workboat. We enter a netherzone of floating pieces of cars, collapsing bulkheads, and rusting pipes that can emit sewage from the city sewers during a rainstorm. Along the creek banks are crumbling redbrick, smokestacked buildings, like a watery museum of nineteenth-century industry, alongside hulking twentieth-century plants. About a mile in, I see viscous black oil pooling onto the Queens side of the creek and spilling out of the booms, floating plastic barriers designed to contain it. The beast from below is burbling up.
It’s the site of the Pratt oil refinery, one of the oldest on the creek, which once took up eighteen acres making kerosene for lamps. Later, on the phone, a Riverkeeper investigator conjectures that the recent installation of metal bulkheads could have punctured the soil, creating a path for oil to seep from the groundwater to the surface water—perhaps a very large plume.
A vast underground lake of contamination more than fifty-five acres wide has already been identified alongside the creek, containing spills, leaks, and waste oil companies dumped long ago. “Like the Blob,” wrote Daphne Eviatar in New York Magazine, “it keeps changing shape and moving—bulging south beyond the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, slithering north toward Greenpoint Avenue, ballooning west to at least Monitor Street.” The oil in the groundwater along the creek banks adds up to the largest urban oil spill in North American history—estimates range from seventeen million to thirty million gallons, or three times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.
It wasn’t always so contaminated. “Exceedingly refreshing,” wrote Edward Neufville Tailer of a quick swim in its waters, where he also caught weakfish, in 1848. But in following decades, the Industrial Revolution exploded on its banks, and the water served as a transitway and waste disposal. The American oil industry invented itself on this little waterway, where kerosene was first produced, and where John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil eventually consolidated control over more than a hundred creek-side stills. By the early twentieth century, the creek carried more freight than the thousand-mile Mississippi River. Storage tanks leaked, solvents spilled, and the waste products of distilling oil to produce paraffin wax, kerosene, naphtha, gasoline, and fuel oil seeped into the ground and water. It was a slow-motion spill of disastrous proportions.
More recently, a survey of industry along the creek noted cement factories, food and waste processors, gasoline storage centers, thirty facilities for storing extremely hazardous wastes and one more for storing radioactive waste; seventeen petroleum and natural gas storage facilities; and ninety-six aboveground oil storage tanks. The city’s sewer overflows still dump millions of gallons a year of raw, untreated sewage directly into the creek.
Of course, the thing is that water moves. You can go out on Newtown Creek one day and see oil slicks and gassy swirls colored violet and blue and brown, like an iridescent bruise, while you sniff out uriney ammonia, the stink of feces, and the chemical smells of asphalt and petroleum and rubber cement thinner. The next day the tide will come in and a certain wind will blow through and the creek suddenly looks just like any natural passage, flowing clean and supple as water.
Obviously, then, Newtown Creek also flows freely into the East River. Its myriad toxins and carcinogens carry through the water to Gantry Pier. Its fish swim out to John Ruffino’s line.