Lila Gould and I left from Greenpoint and traveled south with the tide to the new Bushwick Inlet Park.

We were in the middle of a heat wave, but it was nice and cool on the water.

The tide was moving fast, and we steered through remnants of the old piers,

past the new towers along the Greenpoint waterfront,

and pulled the boat into the Bushwick Inlet.

The park exists now because in 2005, the city promised North Brooklyn 28 acres of waterfront to sweeten the rezoning that let all those luxury towers go up.

It delivered only a fraction, and even that took years of inventive activism: paddle-ins, fence banners, a whole film festival for the park. (Rendering by landscape architect Abel Bainnson Butz.)

The real thing looks even better, with people hanging out on the bank, sitting and chatting.

The most amazing thing was a family building sandcastles at the water’s edge.

Someone airdropped us a photo of ourselves. It seemed rare and special, and also like the most natural thing in the world. “The whole East River should be like this!” we thought.

Lila is the daughter of two artists and grew up in Red Hook, a neighborhood shaped by its waterfront.

It makes sense that her recent graduate thesis exhibition at CCS Bard was with the artist Anne Healy, a show called Logic of Intuition.

 It is the first solo exhibition of Healy’s work in decades, focused on her sculptures from the 1970s, when she was hanging enormous sculptures made of sailcloth, and connecting them to bridges and along the shore.

We talked about the amazing artwork that was being made in the 1960s in NYC by women like Anne, ephemeral and monumental at the same time. (Anne Healy’s piece Hot Lips, 1970)

We landed the boat around the other side of an iron fence, disconnected from the park,

and had lunch.

Hopefully, this part will be part of the park someday

but that day it was just for us.

Nancy and I met at the end of Manhattan Avenue and paddled out through the forest of new high-rise condominiums in Greenpoint.

We let the tide carry us around the LIC peninsula and situated ourselves at Gantry Plaza State Park.

This spot wasn’t as comfortable as planned. Ferry wakes reflected off the sea walls around us, making even bigger waves inside the cove.

“Don’t worry,” I told Nancy, “we can always just jump over this gate and walk home.”

But Nancy wasn’t worried. Our job that day was to record and interview for Urban Omnibus about the 20-year arc of the Tide and Current Taxi.

Nancy knows a lot about he city’s waterways and the politics of who gets to use them, she has spent part her career on it, from The Bridge, her a proposal for a floating pedestrian crossing of the East River, which led to co-founding Works on Water in 2016, a collective of artists committed to the intersection of waterways, increasing urban density, and the changing climate.

Nancy pointed out something that I never thought of before: that the Tide and Current Taxi started the exact year that the NYC City Council approved the rezoning of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfronts, 2005.

It was no coincidence that the time marked so many changes: that decision was one of the most significant land-use actions in the modern history of NYC.

With both Nancy’s and my artworks on the water, we had been there for the whole thing.

For this interview and for this post, I looked for pictures to make a side-by-side comparison of the Greenpoint waterfront then and now, but it’s complicated.

It is not just the buildings that changed, it is everything: the vantage point, places we could actually get the boat, even the things that happened were different. We were different.

But Urban Omnibus found perfect ones, and their story weaves a perfect tale of images through the decades.

Thank you, Nancy Nowacek, Ingrid Burrington, Sasha Portis, and the crew at Urban Omnibus for putting the Tide and Current Taxi in such a great context, and with such thought and attention.

Here is the article with Nancy!

Tide and Current