New York Harbor: An Urban Wilderness Revives
"I think the average New Yorker's take on the harbor is that it's a pretty grim place," says John Waldman, an ichthyologist who is on the faculty of the Ph.D. Program in Biology. Waldman, who does research on fish biology in the metropolitan area for the Hudson River Foundation, is the author of Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, as well as other books on fishing, ecology, and conservation.
"Part of what compelled me to write this book was that as I was doing research on fish populations, I saw the harbor cleaning up and coming back to life before my eyes," says Waldman. "At the same time, I became aware through the historical literature of just how horrible it was 100 years ago."
Throughout much of the 1900s, the harbor--broadly defined as the system of estuaries surrounding the city, from the Tappan Zee Bridge to the New York Bight--was in a "phenomenally compromised state," after centuries of ecological misuse, says Waldman. The harbor has been a veritable dumping ground for the city: in the 1890s, workers shoveled garbage off of barges near Sandy Hook, and, as late as the 1960s, untreated sewage and chemical waste were dumped directly into its waters. New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell famously wrote of the harbor water, in 1951, that "you could bottle and sell it for poison." The bleak view of the city's surrounding waters is only reinforced by stories of "floaters," bodies from the winter's murders, that bob to the surface at a certain week each April. But since the 1980s, the situation has improved for the non-human creatures that dwell below, and many of them are now flourishing.
"I felt like it was kind of a horror story with a happy ending," he says. "It was a great plot line to follow."
Hearbeats in the Muck tells the story of "a harbor of utter lifelessness or a chemical stew featuring gasping flounder" and how it got that way, and it charts the harbor's turnaround into "a simultaneously stressed but thriving ecosystem." The book received the 2000 New York Society Library Award in natural history, and Publisher's Weekly called it an "exemplary and compact work of popular ecology," Waldman enjoys writing about science for a general audience, and in addition to his books, has contributed articles to the New York Times; however, he is primarily a biologist who has spent his professional life getting to know the harbor's inhabitants.
Since earning his Ph.D. in biology from The Graduate Center, in a program offered jointly with the American Museum of Natural History, Waldman's research has focused on population genetics of migratory fish. (He also received his bachelor's degree from Lehman College.) Waldman has run a striped bass tagging program since 1984, helped to organize international conferences on the state of shad and sturgeon, and published more than 45 scientific papers. Through his research, he has seen the effect of environmental practices begun in the 1960s, such as the treatment of human waste, make a positive impact on the biodiversity of the harbor.
He knows what is down there, and you would be surprised: it is an urban wilderness, teaming with life. "There are more rare species and communities in the metropolitan area than anywhere else in the state," says Waldman. And most of them are under water. A passage from the book describes fishing trips taken by the New York - New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program, for studies that Waldman worked on in the 1990s, and points out the "incongruity of habitat and habituate." On these trips, the catch-of-the-day included a chair seat, a packing box from a refrigerator, a tree trunk, broken bottles, reams of decomposing paper, and a car tire. It also included snapper, bluefish, porgies, striped bass, weakfish, silver perch, croakers, and gizzard shad--to name a just a few species of fish thriving below--as well as well as an abundance of blue crabs.
According to Waldman, there was a lack of data on how the harbor was improving until studies on fish were performed in the 1980s. Environmental officials became concerned about the consumption of fish caught by the harbor's small but tenacious fishing community--some who fish for sport and others who fish for dietary protein--and ordered tests on toxicity levels, which Waldman helped conduct. Although many were toxic and not deemed fit for human consumption, the fish were more plentiful than anybody expected.
"What really moved me was the capacity of the system to respond very quickly to the positive changes," he says. "It will be a long time before you can eat an oyster, but the fact that they're there, playing their original ecological role, is a good thing."
The fish, and other animals that could not have survived here 30 years ago, are back. "Just by cleaning up sewage over the course of several decades, the system responded beautifully," says Waldman. "All of a sudden we have this phenomenal striped bass fishing." He also reports other signs of life. "Sea turtles have been spotted in the Verrazano Narrows and the East River. A pair of bottle-nosed dolphins were seen near the Tappan Zee Bridge, and a 'Florida' manatee swam up the East River." And humans too: since 1992, all of New York City's beaches were open for swimming.
"Somebody just caught a 52-pound striper in Hoboken," says Waldman. Apparently, word travels fast in the harbor fishing world, and there is much to be excited about. Even the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, infamous for being the one of the city's most stagnant and toxic waterways, has yielded weakfish. Its bottom is now visible, and seals were seen there last winter.
As Waldman says in his book's conclusion, "New York Harbor took society's best shot and, without fanfare, bounced back up again." As a scientist, an angler, and a New Yorker, he takes pleasure in knowing that "rivers of fish still flow through its depths, battalions of crabs clamber over its bottoms, and a wondrous assortment of other creatures go bump in the night all day long."
