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!
↑ Return to Top of Page ↑