S3 E2: “What if the rebuilding of the city in the face of a climate crisis is a moment to build a more just and a more environmentally flexible city?” Before we can understand what the future of New York City could look like as our climate changes, we need to go back... way back. With the help of local historian and professor, Kara Schlichting, Christina learns about what the area was like before European colonization, how settlers changed New York’s waterfronts, and how the development of industrial port infrastructure set the city up for economic dominance -- and put New Yorkers on a collision course with environmental issues we’re contending with to this day. How can our past help us determine what an equitable future might look like?
S3 E2: “What if the rebuilding of the city in the face of a climate crisis is a moment to build a more just and a more environmentally flexible city?”
Before we can understand what the future of New York City could look like as our climate changes, we need to go back... way back. With the help of local historian and professor, Kara Schlichting, Christina learns about what the area was like before European colonization, how settlers changed New York’s waterfronts, and how the development of industrial port infrastructure set the city up for economic dominance -- and put New Yorkers on a collision course with environmental issues we’re contending with to this day. How can our past help us determine what an equitable future might look like?
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[00:00:41] Christina Thompson: Hi, welcome back to A Little Green Podcast. I'm Christina Thompson. A few years ago, I picked up a book called Island at the Center of the World. It's a really great novel by Russell Shorto that details the history of the founding of New Netherland, a little place that would also later be called New York City. The book is awesome. Such a great read if you need a new reco and love to nerd out on a little bit of history like I do it sheds a ton of light onto the colonization days of this place that I call home and does an amazing job at showing the lasting influence of those early Dutch settlers on modern New York City as we know it. And that got me thinking. This season of A Little Green is all about learning how New York City is fortifying itself for the future in the face of climate change. But, of course, I'd really like to know the history that got us here. I think we should look back and I mean way back into New York's past before we can understand its present and future. [Waves crashing] To get started on this history lesson, we decided to reach out to an expert, who also happens to be my neighbor.
[00:02:02] Kara Schlichting: My name is Kara Schlichting, and I am an associate professor in the history department at Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York, and I live in Brooklyn.
[00:02:13] Christina Thompson: Where in Brooklyn are you?
[00:02:14] Kara Schlichting: Cobble Hill.
[00:02:15] Christina Thompson: Get outta here!
[00:02:16] Kara Schlichting: Yeah!
[00:02:16] Christina Thompson: I'm in Carroll Gardens.
[00:02:18] Kara Schlichting: We're literally neighbors.
[00:02:20] Christina Thompson: Kara wrote a book about the history of how New York became, well, New York. It's called New York Recentered. And according to Kara, there's one big feature that made New York what it is today.
[00:02:31] Kara Schlichting: Waterfronts have multiple layers of interest to me as a historian. First, they're finite. People fight about control of finite resources, so, looking for an archival record, I had a suspicion that there were going to be lots of different interest groups, users, who want to control waterfront.
[00:02:48] Christina Thompson: The first people to enjoy this waterfront were the Lenape. They're indigenous to what was then called Lenapehoking. And it was this waterfront that made Lenapehoking such a desirable place to live.
[00:03:07] Kara Schlichting: Tidal ecosystems are some of the richest in terms of biotics and plants, and so there's lots to eat that's really delicious in a tidal ecosystem.
[00:03:17] Christina Thompson: The Lenape had lived with the land for centuries, and they relied on the rich ecosystem of the ocean to sustain them. Let's pause for a moment and take a trip back in time to Lenapehoking and the area that's known as Manhattan today. And you know what? Because I'm sure you're all sick of hearing my voice already, let's turn the mic over to our music director, Aaron, to give us the lowdown. [Forest sounds and footsteps]
[00:03:39] Aaron Levison: The flat land of Mannahatta is dense with hickory and oak Streams wind through the forests and valleys. [Water sounds] They connect salt marshes, ponds, and the ocean. You might encounter a bear or a gray wolf. [Wolf howls] There are whales, otters, and porpoises. People hunt, fish and gather. They move as the seasons change. The Lenape depend on shellfish like oysters and clams that are abundant in the water around them.
[00:04:32] Christina Thompson: The Lenape weren't the only people to recognize what a special place this was.
[00:04:36] Kara Schlichting: The Dutch arrive in the early 1600s. Henry Hudson sails up the Hudson River. This will eventually become a British colony from New Amsterdam to New York. They're all here for the same reason, and it is in fact the ecosystem, and it's the geography of New York's Bay and Greater Estuary.
[00:04:57] Christina Thompson: The colonists saw this abundance as an economic opportunity, and Lenapehoking was about to change dramatically. Part of it would become New Amsterdam until the British took control in the 1660s. Let's hear from Aaron again. He's really good at this.
[00:05:13] Aaron Levison: The Dutch supposedly purchased Manhattan from the Lenape in the late spring of 1626. Scholars agree that the Lenape likely viewed the transaction on different terms.
[00:05:26] Christina Thompson: And the New York we know today was poised to take shape.
[00:05:36] Kara Schlichting: Urbanization on Manhattan Island starts in earnest in the very early 1800s, and it's going to transform Manhattan's waterfront, and then it's going to have a ripple effect across the waterfronts along the Hudson River, up around Long Island.
[00:05:49] Christina Thompson: This transformation went beyond the waterfront, literally. The settlers actually made more land.
[00:05:56] Kara Schlichting: Why? Why build all this land? And it's about developing port infrastructure.
[00:06:03] Christina Thompson: So New York's port was key to its growth, and industrialization made it the hub for shipping, manufacturing, and more. It became "the island at the center of the world."
[00:06:15] Kara Schlichting: The Erie Canal is finished in 1825. It brings an incredible amount of commerce moving through the city. Immigration is starting to boom.
[00:06:22] Christina Thompson: More than 60,000 people were living in New York City by 1800. The population had nearly doubled since the previous decade.
[00:06:30] Kara Schlichting: The city is growing rapidly at Manhattan Island, and the environment is changing as that happens.
[00:06:36] Christina Thompson: And this rapid growth presented a problem.
[00:06:40] Kara Schlichting: Poop is the question of all cities. How are we going to deal with getting rid of an enormous amount of waste that is starting to collect in a way that they haven't seen in New York?
[00:06:51] Christina Thompson: The issue of waste is as old as, well, humankind. Surely they knew how to deal with it by the 1800s...
[00:06:58] Kara Schlichting: They're just going to dump it in the harbor. They assume the harbor is a sink for waste, that the tidal system will flush it out to sea. Industrial waste is also being dumped into the harbor without any type of regulation.
[00:07:11] Christina Thompson: The city basically poisoned and polluted its own water, both the drinking water and the ocean. And people were noticing...
[00:07:20] Kara Schlichting: People talk about swimming at the beach in the newspapers and being hit in the face with a dead cat, or wiping human, human poop off their shoulders as they get out of the water.
[00:07:29] Christina Thompson: Oh god.
[00:07:30] Kara Schlichting: Oysters are starting to come back from the New York Harbor green and oily and smelling of petroleum. People are getting conjunctivitis from touching oyster shells. They eventually realized that, uh, typhoid is being spread through eating raw oysters because typhoid is something that spreads through raw sewage. They realized Atlantic Ave here is the most polluted corner of the harbor. It has zero oxygen level. It can't sustain life.
[00:08:00] Christina Thompson: These once thriving ecosystems were what made New York and Lenapehoking so livable in the first place.
[00:08:06] Kara Schlichting: The oysters in New York Harbor were unmatched. The shells that we have from the middens of the Lenape, people who were here before European settlement have oyster shells that are 10 inches wide that could have up to a pound of flesh of oyster meat--
[00:08:22] Christina Thompson: Oh my God.
[00:08:22] Kara Schlichting: --inside them. That's a steak, it's not a shooter.
[00:08:25] Christina Thompson: No. New Yorkers realized they needed to try something different.
[00:08:35] Kara Schlichting: We need to treat the sewage. The tides cannot wash this away. It's bad for the economy of the city. It's ruining the oyster fleets. It's unhealthy for people's, like, public health concerns. They're telling people, "Don't touch the driftwood that's coming out of the harbor."
[00:08:49] Christina Thompson: Wow.
[00:08:50] Kara Schlichting: So, that's kind of one of the pushes for cleanliness to clean up the harbor, and water pollution is a real concrete bit of evidence that the environment is degrading.
[00:09:02] Christina Thompson: Around the 1900s, the city finally began treating its waste. More on that in a minute. [Boat bell rings] But it's worth noting that at this time, the urban waterfront wasn't a place for recreation. [Horse hooves and waterfront sounds]
[00:09:12] Kara Schlichting: These are places of industry with sailors, longshoremen, housing, catering behind it, but we would not have been able to walk down there and peer into the harbor. It would've been closed off. [Boat horn]
[00:09:26] Christina Thompson: As we start making our way into the 1900s part of this little history lesson, there's one man that we really can't ignore.
[00:09:41] Kara Schlichting: Should we, should we talk about Moses? Has to happen...
[00:09:44] Christina Thompson: Should we talk about him? Boogeyman?
[00:09:49] Aaron Levison: Quote, "No mayor shaped New York. No mayor, not even LaGuardia, left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting imprints. But Robert Moses shaped New York." End quote.
[00:10:06] Christina Thompson: That's from The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro. When I talked to Kara, I had just picked up the definitive Robert Moses biography and it's really, really long.
[00:10:16] Kara Schlichting: So, my hot take as a historian of New York City is that you don't need to read the full Power Broker.
[00:10:21] Christina Thompson: Okay.
[00:10:21] Kara Schlichting: I liberate you from that.
[00:10:23] Christina Thompson: Well, it, it is like a billion pages long.
[00:10:26] Kara Schlichting: I like Chapter 19.
[00:10:28] Christina Thompson: Okay.
[00:10:28] Kara Schlichting: That's what I would recommend.
[00:10:29] Christina Thompson: I'll, I'll skip ahead. I'm on-- I'm still only on, uh, Chapter One in, in his Yale days, so...
[00:10:33] Kara Schlichting: Oh, yeah. You've got Some time....
[00:10:36] Christina Thompson: We cannot talk about New York's development without talking about Robert Moses. He looms large in our history.
[00:10:42] Kara Schlichting: Sometimes Moses will say he's working in conservation. Sometimes he says he's working in preservation. What he means by that is he's thinking about the environment and making it look more useful to him. And the way he thinks an environment is useful is particularly for recreation. Very utilitarian. Beaches need to be clean because people need to swim there. People need to recreate.
[00:11:09] Christina Thompson: Robert Moses was a man with a plan. Or rather, a man with his own plan. Many of the decisions in regards to city planning and building that he ultimately saw through were based on his own personal opinions and beliefs: what he deemed beautiful and what he thought was necessary or right.
[00:11:26] Kara Schlichting: He isn't interested in rocky mudflat, marsh flat, marshland type of environment. He's interested in remaking-- rebuilding the environment to suit a particular type of use and, and particular look. Passive, sit in the sun, play appropriately, no drinking, no gambling games, no kind of honky tonk games are the types of beaches he builds.
[00:11:49] Christina Thompson: Robert Moses held many influential, albeit unelected, positions in New York, including Parks Commissioner.
[00:11:56] Kara Schlichting: So he has a lot of power to create a large-scale network, and he's very concerned about the waterfront in particular. He-- it's been mostly privatized or industrialized, and the waterfront that is accessible, places like Coney Island, with its amusement park, he thinks of in a disparaging light. He doesn't like what he calls the honky tonk.
[00:12:15] Christina Thompson: His vision was pretty narrow and exclusive, to say the least. New York's waterfront had been heavily privatized and commercialized, and he wanted to change that.
[00:12:25] Kara Schlichting: Which I would say is a public good to get more people access to more public space, and he's interested in cleaning up the waterfront. Some of it is ulterior motives, but the first three modern sewage treatment plants on the Upper East River are put in because of Moses, because of the World's Fair at Flushing Meadows Park in 1939 and 1940,
[00:12:47] Christina Thompson: Moses saw the opportunity to turn an ash dump into a park to host the fair. And here, we finally get a more robust solution to New York's poo problem.
[00:12:56] Kara Schlichting: He wants to make sure that the waterfront approaches and the waterfront of the fairgrounds are not laden with human waste.
[00:13:02] Christina Thompson: But these ambitious projects that created the New York we know today were not cheap.
[00:13:08] Kara Schlichting: Moses is a master at funneling resources into his projects, and, in the 1920s, he gets some resources from the state of New York, but he comes into his own when New Deal funds become available. New York City gets so much New Deal funding. He's like, "I've got plans. Let's go."
[00:13:29] Christina Thompson: The New Deal funded parks like Flushing Meadows and Central Park's Great Lawn. Hundreds of playgrounds, pools and more. But the cash flow was only temporary.
[00:13:40] Kara Schlichting: Moses and LaGuardia take the funding during the New Deal, build all these parks, and they just push down the line, how will we pay to maintain these places? And that becomes a problem post-war, where the city parks really do suffer when the city's budget collapses in the sixties, but particularly the seventies and the eighties.
[00:13:58] Christina Thompson: Enter a new era for New York's green spaces.
[00:14:02] Kara Schlichting: There are not funds. So the rise of what we see today in these public-private partnerships that help private funding into parks, like the Central Park Conservancy, brings in private funds as well as public funds. And so that public and private partnership can make some parks beautiful.
[00:14:19] Christina Thompson: Flash forward to the seventies and eighties. New York is suffering from economic stagnation and decline, its port no longer dominates US shipping, and the waterfront has deteriorated.
[00:14:31] VOX POP: ...Yeah, I wish the streets were just a little cleaner, but...
[00:14:33] VOX POP: ...Very filthy...
[00:14:34] VOX POP: ...It's disgusting...
[00:14:35] VOX POP: ...It's a mess...
[00:14:36] VOX POP: ...I don't like it...
[00:14:40] Christina Thompson: In 1986, the New York Times wrote:
[00:14:43] Aaron Levison: Crumbling piers, obsolete terminals, and idle industrial equipment litter the waterfront areas, and experts say they will never be salvaged by cargo shippers or passenger shipping lines. End quote.
[00:14:57] Kara Schlichting: So starting in the 1990s is when New York starts to think about its waterfront. It's been kind of the post-industrial decline when the city loses its port industry has been happening for three, four decades at that point. This is a, a national story. Even an international story as, as post-industrial ports reconsider what their waterfronts look like and open up what had been places of industry and shipping to the public again.
[00:15:26] Mayor Bloomberg: We have utterly transformed the waterfront no matter which direction you look. You can see the fruits of that labor and the new waterfront parks and esplanades that provide public access all along the harbor.
[00:15:38] Christina Thompson: In 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced VISION 2020, a hundred and thirty waterfront projects, including acres of parkland, esplanade, and a new commuter ferry service. It was presented as a novel approach to our waterfront, but it sounds familiar, doesn't it?
[00:15:56] Kara Schlichting: What I think is fascinating about this is it hearkens back to the coastal ecosystem of the early 1600s, 1700s, when the city was seen as this archipelago of islands in marshland that needed to be crisscrossed, that the waterfront was the connecting unit of this place. It was where commerce happened. It was how transportation happened.
[00:16:18] Christina Thompson: But Mayor Bloomberg's plan did mark a turning point.
[00:16:21] Kara Schlichting: Bloomberg says, "Yes, the waterfront is a single unit. It must be treated and planned as such, but it isn't about commerce and transportation. It's about leisure and a place to be outside." It vowed to restore working waterfronts, improve water quality, increase public access, and increase climate resilience with greener shorelines. And so, before, if we cut off climate, those are all the things -- waterfront access, cleaner waterfront -- those are questions that Moses is asking in the '30s too, right? Like, this is a very evergreen question of having access as an urbanite to clean environment for recreation.
[00:16:58] Christina Thompson: The vision may have moved away from using the waterfront for commerce, but it was still economically driven.
[00:17:04] Kara Schlichting: It's not just for the folks who get to sit along shore, but that such redevelopment will attract developers. And I would say this is like a really increasing hallmark of 21st century New York City redevelopment. This is a real spur to environmental gentrification and this idea that a post-industrial, degraded waterfront can be rebuilt through naturalistic, planned green spaces and that this will be good for the city's economy as well.
[00:17:37] Christina Thompson: Okay, so now it's 2011, and something big is about to change the way New Yorkers think about the waterfront forever: Superstorm Sandy,
[00:17:46] Kara Schlichting: Sandy reminded us that this is a city built on an estuary, that all of this filled land that we have dug basements into, dug subways into, built our sewage treatment infrastructure on, our bridges, is all reclaimed land. If you look at the maps of what, where used to be waterfront that are now land today, and then you look at what soft flooding in Sandy, those are places where water traditionally flowed.
[00:18:12] Christina Thompson: Sandy brought us into our current era of waterfront development: one that has to contend with intensifying weather and climate change.
[00:18:20] Kara Schlichting: Superstorm Sandy
[00:18:23] Kara Schlichting: is the first foray into what is a conversation that really brings in questions of eco grief, and the fear of climate uncertainties, and asks for monumental rethinking of how our waterfronts look and how we invest in the city. That is hard for individuals, government, investors, to really grapple with.
[00:18:47] Christina Thompson: So how do we move forward? What will the next 10, 20, 50 years of New York's waterfront look like?
[00:18:54] Kara Schlichting: I know it will take political will from all levels of government and funding a la the New Deal. Print the money and think about it later.
[00:19:04] Christina Thompson: But also, like, a level of imagination that I don't think a lot of people have been asked of in terms of what living looks like and what--
[00:19:12] Kara Schlichting: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:12] Christina Thompson: --your neighborhood looks like. How do we not only fortify our city in the face of climate change, but also avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?
[00:19:21] Kara Schlichting: What if the rebuilding of the city in the face of a climate crisis is a moment to build a more just and a more environmentally flexible city? Do we want to, as citizens demand something that might be slightly more equitable?
[00:19:36] Christina Thompson: We'll be asking that very question over the next six episodes. Next time on A Little Green, we'll hear about what this current era of development looks like.
[00:19:46] Damaris Reyes: And I said, "Listen guys, we've go to get it together because people are going to come into our hood. They're not going to know what it is that we need."
[00:19:55] Christina Thompson: To learn more about all of the organizations and topics we chatted about on today's episode, check out alittlegreenpodcast.com or head to avocadomattress.com to read more on our online magazine. A Little Green is an Avocado Green Brands podcast. This podcast was written and produced by Anna McClain and myself, Christina Thompson. The music and wondrous vocal stylings you heard are from Aaron Levison. And special thanks to Megan Hattie Stahl for additional production support.
[00:20:27] Kara Schlichting: Christina, we should just have her beer and shout about history.
[00:20:29] Christina Thompson: I know. I was like, "I'll see you at, uh, Henry Public at five." Yeah.