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.
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