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1 Introduction New Yorkers have a dark fascination with their surrounding waters. Where else is it expected that sometime during mid-April, as the depths warm, bacterial activity will bloat the previous winter’s bounty of murders and suicides and cause them to rise to the harbor’s surface—a synchronized resurrection of the damned that captains call “Floaters’ Week.” New York Harbor is a place so mysterious that things go bump in the night in the daytime, too.The public’s cognizance of its ecological health leans more toward this black view—a harbor of utter lifelessness or a chemical stew featuring gasping flounder—than the present reality of a simultaneously stressed but thriving ecosystem. No one has rendered this bleak perspective better than Saul Steinberg in his frontispiece to Joseph Mitchell’s classic Bottom of the Harbor. In his simple sketch Manhattan appears above the waterline as a bundle of gloriously towering spires, the image’s visual weight balanced offshore by Lady Liberty. Commerce is represented by a tugboat towing a cruise ship. Below the surface the composition is spare, with natural life embodied by only two passing fish. But the scene is made memorable by a critical addition—the mystique and dark romance of the harbor are symbolized by a human skeleton tumbling out of a fifty-five-gallon drum. Growing up in New York City in the 1960s and traveling to cleaner shores to fish and swim, I shared the general naïve disdain of the harbor environment and could scarcely believe rumors of fine angling beneath raw sewage. Riding highways along the East River or Upper NewYork Bay, I wondered what creatures, if any, lurked under the floating garbage F5943.indb 1 F5943.indb 1 8/23/12 12:39:00 PM 8/23/12 12:39:00 PM 2 Introduction and oil slicks and among the rotting pilings. But even in its most ravaged state, those few brave enough to buck preconceptions or sufficiently intimate with it by virtue of their station in life or some accident of geography could see, and at times enjoy, the swirling milieu of nature still served up by the choking harbor. Also in that decade the nation’s environmental movement began, to a large extent, not far north of NewYork Harbor—in the Highlands of the Hudson River.It was there that author Carl Carmer and other concerned citizens organized to fight the building of new,and the operating practices of old, electric-generating plants, in the process spawning influential environmental advocacy groups such as Clearwater,Scenic Hudson,and the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association.These organizations, along with their national counterparts, played pivotal roles in the passage of laws that were novel for their time and in the enforcement of long-forgotten but environmentally astute statutes, which together started to stem NewYork Harbor’s decline. And a landmark agreement among environmentalists, regulators, and the electric utilities over the complex suite of Hudson River power-plant issues resulted in the creation of a unique entity entirely focused on the Hudson River and NewYork Harbor—the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research. Later,while a graduate student at the City University of NewYork and the American Museum of Natural History in the 1980s, I worked for one winter as a field biologist on the most contentious environmental issue ever to crash the shores of Manhattan—the ecological consequences of the proposed West Side Highway Project, called Westway.The Westway issue arrived at a time when knowledge of the condition of the harbor’s life lagged behind the actual gains that were being made through the cleansing of its waters.Although the scientific outcome of the finalWestway study was inconclusive, the study did reveal a dynamic and flourishing fish life that helped sway perceptions of Manhattan’s coastline from the home of a few curious and unusually hardy invertebrate and piscine relicts to an important element of the regional ecosystem. Fortunately for me, on the day after my employment on the Westway study ended and I sat at my kitchen table reviewing the want ads,my telephone rang; I was invited to interview for a scientific position with the Hudson River Foundation.I got the job and for more than a decade have been immersed in the never-ending environmental conundrums, wildly diverse personae, ever-mutating governmental programs, and enormous potential of NewYork Harbor. F5943.indb 2 F5943.indb 2 8/23/12 12:39:01 PM 8...

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