tested spaces, fought for by conservation-
ists, historians, activists, and developers.
Buchanan, my Arthur Kill guide, is what
I would call a water activist, somebody
who believes the harbor should not be
fenced off or privatized but recognized for
what it is—the largest public space in the
city, a living, breathing thing. By his think-
ing, our survival in a rising-sea-level future
depends on watery, sandy-beach edges, on
marshes and creeks, as opposed to con-
crete walls and gates. Now, as we stand on
the sandy beach at Pralls, surveying the
ecologically devastated heron-less heron
sanctuary, imagining its coast repopulated
with millions of oysters, and catching the
tips of lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers
glinting in the sunlight, I begin to consider
what else the islands might have to tell us
about what is native and foreign, man-
made and natural, past and future. Islands
direct us to examine what divides us or
disconnects us, what makes one place a
sanctuary, the other an asylum.30 new york | august 19–september 1, 2019airport. Just past the citgo refinery, we
come to a crook in the Arthur Kill, in which
sits a parenthesis-shaped roughly 100-
acre spit of land. “Pralls Island up ahead!”
says Buchanan.
This is our destination, a green patch that
looks like a primeval forest broken down on
the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. We row
toward Pralls’s northern shore. In 1990,
Exxon’s Bayway refinery spilled 567,000 gal-
lons of oil into Arthur Kill. Now if you walk
across the island, you see a landscape repeat-
edly redevastated by the efforts to save it:
Not long after the oil-spill recovery began,
when an Asian-long-horned-beetle infesta-
tion risked killing maple trees throughout
the Northeast, the trees on Pralls were cut
down to eliminate a potential breeding
ground. Only the stumps remain. From
there, the degradation cascaded. Invasive
buckthorn shrubs drowned out the native
species. When young shoots did grow, the
deer ate them. The herons stopped landing
there (for myriad reasons, not all of them
clear), and stormwaters frequently washed
over the island, blanketing it in plastic. Next
came mile-a-minute, a vine that emigrated
from Asia in the 1930s via contaminated
holly seed. It grows up to six inches a day,
smothering everything around it. The Parks
Department has tried to control the vines by
releasing another beetle, the mile-a-minute
weevil, which also comes from Asia and is
enlisted by ecologists in what is referred to
as biological control.
In this minuscule island, roughly 20 city
blocks big, you can read the entire recent
history of the urban-ecology movement—its
ambitions and struggles, its hopefulness and
hopelessness—and there are similar stories
being told across the archipelago of New
York Harbor, if you stop to listen.
Islands are our planet’s poems: Tight,
circumscribed, they are other, defined
against the landmass from which they
broke or the sea from which they emerged.
In their isolation and their boundaries, they
seem to make living more intense. It takes
work to reach them, which can make them
storehouses for all we hope to ignore; or, if
we choose to embrace them, their precious-
ness forces human ambition skyward
rather than outward.
We know this about our largest islands—
the skyscraper came of age in Manhattan
because of geological restrictions. But we
can easily forget that the city is, in fact, a
vast collection of islands. Every borough
but the Bronx floats off from the Atlantic
seaboard. No one can agree on the precise
number of islands in New York waters—
30-odd, depending on how you count—but
they are part of what makes the city so
extraordinary, located at the mouth of one
of the world’s largest natural harbors. The
islands are our silent neighbors. It is easy to
live here and never notice them. Until one
day, driving down the FDR, you might look
out at the pile of rocks off the southern
coast of Roosevelt Island and wonder,
What is that place?
Even the smallest of these islands holds
in its tiny footprint morality tales, histories
that can help us see ourselves more clearly:
the planned community of Roosevelt, the
tourist trap of Liberty, the slow-burning
human-rights violation of Rikers. As with
Pralls, we have more than once considered
the islands repositories for waste or trash.
More recently, that story has begun to
change, and not just because we’ve become
more attuned to our harbor ecology. As the
last large industrial sites of the greater
islands of New York are built over with
condos and shops, and public housing is
slowly sold away to private developers,
these almost-water dots that are the city’s
lesser islands have become newly con-he harbor is huge—four times the size of
the city—and it’s easiest to think about in
regions. Jamaica Bay, the southeasterly
section of the harbor, is a marshy interior
sea, a cross between the Jersey shore and
the Hamptons, filled with reed-covered
little islands—Big Egg, Little Egg, Ru e
Bar, Yellow Bar, and Silver Hole—and one
big island, Broad Channel, the inhabited
island, with fishing boats everywhere. If
you pass out of Jamaica Bay through the Rockaway Inlet
and look starboard, you’ll see the top of White Island
floating just beyond the Belt Parkway.White Island doesn’t look like Pralls. It’s classically beautiful in the sense of
seeming “natural.” Yet it wasn’t formed by a glacier, like Staten Island, or by any
other geologic forces. It was made from trash deposited in a salt marsh less than
a century ago. It was also made by the golf course next door pouring asphalt on
top to prevent sand from blowing on its greens. In 1995, the Parks Department
added Rockaway sand to the awkward hump, then surrounded it with acres of
spartina grass and, on the top, high coastal grasses specifically attractive to grass-
land-loving birds. Two decades after that, the former trash heap is now a popular
rest station on the highly bird-trafficked East Coast flyway: a habitat for savanna
sparrows, field sparrows, and grasshopper sparrows.
White Island is not perfect. Phragmites, the common, side-of-the-highway( I.)
LOWER BAY ISLANDS