MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant Nature Walk

The day before Thanksgiving, I decided to whet my appetite by going on the “nature walk” at the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant. Newtown Creek separates Brooklyn from Queens, and is one of the most polluted industrial sites in America, containing raw sewage, toxins, and oil that has seeped into the waterway from a massive oil spill beneath Greenpoint.

This fact apparently inspired artist George Trakas, who designed the trail, but navigating the quarter-mile of cement and steel made me sad more than anything else. Trakas put so much tenderness into his design: handicapped accessibility, plaques beneath each plant detailing its historical uses, plenty of spots for silent contemplation, graceful and sturdy construction echoing the themes of boats and water, even a fragrance garden and an etched path for raindrops to simulate the creek’s flow. But these details were so overwhelmed by the stench, the sludge, and the inescapable sound track of industrial churnings that I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Trakas’s elegant vision wasn’t really a giant wink at the prospect of such a polluted waterway ever becoming a nature sanctuary.

The trail begins at the corner of Paige Avenue and Provost Street in Greenpoint, otherwise an industrial no-man’s-land. Two boulders mark the entrance, and painted fish on the sidewalk lead you past a Time Warner Cable facility to a steel gate, which “has a wave shape to mimic the movement of water.” (A wink here, surely, as Newtown Creek is notoriously stagnant.) Once through the gate, there’s a choice: to a “fragrance garden,” or to the trail. It being November, there were no fragrant plants to mask the sewage reek. On the bridge, made to mimic a ship’s hull, portholes offered views of pipes and helmeted workers, and a distant church steeple. A loudspeaker bleated, “Time out! Time out!”

A walkway with jaillike cement and steel-bar walls abutted an asphalt factory, where I detected my first glimpse of nature in some scruff grass. It ended in the so-called “blooming lily,” a rotunda with a tree, benches, and steps leading right into “the placid waters of Newtown Creek.” The bottom few steps were rimmed with slime. I sat on a bench and watched a crane lift automobile carcasses and drop them onto a barge. Nearby I noticed an emergency call box, a “trash barrel” (representing Greenpoint’s cooper heritage), and a water fountain (what would spurt out if you pressed the button?). A brisk breeze ruffled the water. Seagulls swarmed in the scrap-metal dust.

The most impressive part of the walk is the gated “Whale Creek Path,” at the end, which features weeping willow trees, kayak landings, and a picnic bench affording a view of the gleaming onion domes of the plant itself. Next to a warning sign about a raw-sewage discharge point, a bayberry bush was planted (“Aromatic wax on berries rendered into sweet-smelling candles,” read the plaque). In the distance, the Pulaski Bridge hummed and arced against the Manhattan skyline, and a billboard for the Shriners Hospital asked, If you could improve a life, would you? If you could change a creek, would you? Yes, and yes! the native plans answer, but there’s no one but me around to hear them.

TASTE: A slice, New York City–style

The most important rule of eating pizza in New York City is not to plan to do it. You’re feeling a little peckish, so you pop into the nearest pizza shop, grab a slice and maybe a soda, and about eight minutes later you continue on with your day. A slice of pizza in New York is not an event.

My real pizza-eating story takes place on a recent chilly evening, around 9 pm. I was on my way to a cocktail party in Manhattan. I’d eaten dinner hours before but felt I needed some sustenance for a night on the town. So I ducked into Not Ray’s Pizza in Fort Greene (the parodic name is purely coincidental). Fluorescent lights. An intimidating, high counter of thick plastic sheltering stagnant pizzas on beat-up tin trays, and calzones and a bowl of garlic knots as afterthoughts. Glass shakers of faded red-pepper flakes, oregano, and Parmesan. Tippy stools, Formica-topped tables. I approach the counter and say, “Just a slice” (not “Can I please have one slice of plain pizza to go? Thanks!”). The counter guy jabs the pizza wheel across the pie, flips the cutter onto its side, and uses the blade to heft my slice onto a crenellated paper plate with a wax-paper sheet, then into the oven--all in a single fluid motion. Four minutes later he flops the plate onto the countertop. I pay, wordlessly, and sit by the window. The crust is so hot I can’t touch it, so I use the plate to fold the slice in half, taco-style. (N.b.: Another common New York pizza-eating style is to take the slice outside at this point, the plate protecting your hands from the heat, and nudge the slice forward, tip first, eating it one-handed as you walk.)

The spine cracks, and lurid orange grease oozes into the crease. I shake on cheese and flakes. I dab at the grease with a wad of napkins. I tip the slice into my mouth and the cheese slides toward me, leaving a naked, damp, bumpy crust in its wake. The taste: a crisp crack of folded crust, an easing of salty, stretchy cheese into the mouth mingling with the bland crunch of the crust, followed by a swig of effervescent, tangy Diet Coke, swallowed in one searing hot, icy cold gulp. I leave with a scalded tongue: the true aftertaste of a slice of New York City pizza.

Side note: A few weeks later, for thoroughness, I made a planned trip to “the One and Only Famous Ray’s of Greenwich Village,” purported to be the definitive New York City Ray’s. (The business pages list at least fifty-four Ray’s Pizzas in the city.) It was authentic to the core, and improved on Not Ray’s only by having fountain sodas, high, round tables at the front with no chairs (there was a seating area in the back that seemed only for tourists), and local customers who didn’t speak their orders but held up one or two fingers to indicate the number of slices.

TOUCH: The floors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

When I heard that one could navigate one’s way around the Metropolitan Museum of Art blindfolded, using only the texture of the floor beneath one’s feet as a map, I was intrigued. How many times had I visited the Met and fixed only one sense—my vision—on only one thing—the walls? What would it be like to ignore the artwork and focus solely on the feeling of my footsteps as I made my way through this vast institution?

So I set out to do this one recent weekday morning, when the museum was not too crowded and I could absorb the full sensory experience of walking through the galleries: the different colors of the floors, the sound my feet made passing from room to room, the textures of the surfaces. I should note that I was wearing a pair of especially thin-soled sneakers that always make me feel rapid and stealthy. I therefore didn’t mind when the security guards eyed me as I photographed their floors.

Hellenistic floor

I began in Hellenistic Art, where the roughness of the black and white mosaic tiles offered a pleasant friction. The second floor of art from Cyprus was wood parquet, and my feet encountered more stickiness as I moved across it, perhaps as a result of floor polish. In African Art, a supple, almost creamy rose-colored marble greeted me. The photography wing—an exhibit of beatnik photos at the time of my visit—was squishy, almost bouncy dark gray carpet, soothing and noise-dampening, and so plush that visitors left a faint trail of footsteps in its nap. In the Twentieth-Century Art Wing, however, the carpet turned more utilitarian, almost itchy in its synthetic nubbiness. I exited quickly down a rare internal staircase. My sneakers made a satisfying “pat-pat” sound on the marble. The risers were the shallow type that give you the illusion of floating up and down them.

Cyprus floor

In French Art Deco, the floors were buffed concrete with stylish cracks. My sneakers made an unavoidable and conspicuous “slap-slap.” It was a relief to enter the Modern Design Collection, where slick black marble and bricked tiles with waves in them allowed me to ice-skate through the wing. The parquet in French Rococo Furniture was a dark, stately basketweave, offsetting the faux candlelight, fireplaces, and the stately beds. The Medieval galleries presented the most unforgiving floor: matte stone with brittle grouting, offering not even the faintest reflection of light.

African floor

After my journey, my senses were heightened enough to appreciate the genius of the Main Hall, the atrium one enters upon arriving at the museum. Its gold-flecked floors were either granite or an intricate mosaic of red and orange stones, and they absorbed the sound of footsteps so thoroughly that all one could hear was the grand, echoing murmur of voices and a faint underlying shuffle of anticipation.

SOUND: The Hua Mei Bird Garden

Every morning, rain or shine, and before the alternate-side parking regulations kick in, the Hua Mei birds and their owners converge in a pine grove just south of Delancey Street. The Hua Mei Bird Garden is at the northern tip of one of the segments of Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, between Forsythe and Chrystie streets, and surrounded by a chain-link fence and marked with a sign in Chinese and English: “Respect the Birds. Respect the Plants.” Approaching from the north, it’s easy to miss the garden: the blaring truck horns, idling buses, and lurching taxis all but drown out the trilling of these exotic, diminutive birds. But if you step off the sidewalk into the cobblestone shadows, you’ll see ornate bamboo cages swinging from poles and tree branches and strung along a nylon clothesline. Behind the bars, bright-eyed birds chirp and preen and fly about, their wings fluttering against the spindly bars of their cages. Each has a unique song. Their owners—almost exclusively Chinese men—perch on nearby benches, cradling paper coffee cups and comparing notes on their birds. Every so often, a few men enter the garden to turn back the cotton cover on a cage, or chuckle at their birds the way one might at a baby.

On a recent Sunday morning, a yellow bird with an orange head and three porcelain water bowls let out a rich warble. A gray bird with a pink beak nibbled on a piece of bok choy and offered a tentative tweet in return. A bird with ringed eyes flitted around its cage. A yellow bird with gray wings called out, “Cheer, twittle tweet!” And a gray and brown bird with a russet head and tangerine breast murmured, “Chick a chick chick chick.” A man in a green Izod shirt wiggled his finger between the bars of its cage. The nearby birds erupted into song, and he moved the cage deeper into the trees. A Hua Mei with gray feathers as fluffy as a newborn chick’s tucked its head beneath its wings. A regal beige bird in an enormous cage with a cover held aside with binder clips uttered a shrill, full-throated call and did a series of back-flips, landing each time on an infinitesimal bamboo swing. The yellow bird whistled in response, its chest rippling, its beak fluttering and quivering “Putta pee, putta pee!” Then it dipped toward its water dish. Up above, huge, silent pigeons soared.

A community group was erecting tents and a plywood stage for a street fair in the adjacent square. A man climbed onto the stage and barked into the microphone, “Testing! Testing!” The microphone squawked. A father passing by with a toddler in a stroller pointed up. “See the birdies?” And a teenage kid crossing the park stopped at the sight of the birdcages, and, without removing his headphones, sat on a bench to listen.