New York

The end of the Greenpoint frontier--the upper lobe of Brooklyn nesting beneath Long Island City--is unforgiving territory. The strong winds that blow through this oil-sluiced industrial wasteland often carry the stench of diesel, fish, and sewage courtesy of the area's largest landholder, the sewage treatment plant. But new life breathes in the edge of this desolation within the confines of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. The improbability of the park is mirrored in its design: young trees and shrubbery that--perhaps once--were germane to the area take tenuous root next to Brutalist concrete walls undulating along the perimeter of the sewage plant. Slab-stairs engraved with geologic epochs descend to the primordial ooze of the Creek, reflecting the simultaneous life and death of our urban climes: the Citi building, the stalled and stunted condominiums, the crane shovels dispersing trash into river barges across from a plant processing our human waste. And still, flowers bloom even in the twilight of autumn as Manhattan etches a twinkling horizon. Such is the new face of New York's environmental efforts: self-aware, yet hopeful.

Photo:  Molly Riordan