At first Tanya Fields thought it was just a regular cold.
For three days in November of 2004, her 5-month-old daughter, Trist-Ann, had been wheezing and coughing. It seemed like she was choking. Eventually the coughing fits became so bad that the little girl was vomiting; she couldn’t hold anything down. When her doctor failed to get Trist-Ann to breathe more easily, he told the young mother to take her to the emergency room. By the time they reached St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, Trist-Ann had fluid in her lungs. The diagnosis: pneumonia.
The doctors told Fields that her daughter could have drowned from the inside. The next four days and five nights, she did not leave her Trist-Ann’s side at the hospital, while her other daughter Taylor, who was two years old at the time, stayed with her parents in Harlem. It was the first of many trips to the emergency room for Fields, a 27-year-old office worker.
A few months later, Trist-Ann was back in the hospital, again with pneumonia.
At the age of 1, she was diagnosed with asthma.
In other parts of New York City, such a diagnosis might have been a surprise, but not where Tanya Fields and her two children live. In their neighborhood of Hunts Point, a small peninsula on the southeastern tip of the Bronx, one in four elementary-school children suffers from asthma.
Three decades after President Jimmy Carter’s famous walk past the abandoned buildings on Charlotte Street, a new epidemic has taken hold of the South Bronx. Public schools have their own asthma clinics, nebulizers ready to help students breathe when they start gasping for air in class. And while urban planners and public health specialists are still struggling to find the cause for the community’s disturbingly high asthma rates, for parents like Tanya Fields there is no question that it’s the air they breathe that makes their children wheeze.
Every week, according to citizens’ groups that monitor the site, up to 60,000 trucks take a turn off Bruckner Expressway and cut through the neighborhood’s small residential section (its current population is 47,000) to reach Hunts Point’s industrial sector, an area that plays a crucial role in New York City’s metabolism. On the peninsula’s 690 acres sit the world’s biggest food market, at least four private waste-transfer stations, a wastewater treatment plant and the New York Organic Fertilizer Company: a plant that turns half of New York City’s sludge (the solid material that is extracted from wastewater before it flows back into the city’s waterways) into fertilizer pellets.
Sometimes, residents say, they can smell the odors emerging from the plant at a distance of almost two miles.
Hunts Point represents an often-ignored dilemma of urban life: Where large numbers of people live together, they produce waste—waste that needs to be collected, transported, reused, recycled or disposed of. All too often that happens in poor communities of color—that is, communities like Hunts Point, where, in 1999, 97 percent of residents were Hispanic or African American and the median household income was $17,612 (less than half that of New York City as a whole). In September 2005, the Associated Press, in an analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, found that African-Americans were 79 percent more likely to live in a neighborhood where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health risk. In many places, Hispanic and Asian minorities also suffered disproportionate impacts.
For activists around the country, this unequal distribution of waste-processing facilities has a name: environmental racism.
It was to achieve a measure of environmental justice that the New York City Planning Commission passed the so-called Fair Share Criteria in 1991, which stipulated that the benefits and burdens of municipal facilities should be allocated equally across neighborhoods. Three years later, in February 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order demanding that all federal agencies make environmental justice part of their mission.
And yet, 13 years later, at a time celebrities drive hybrid cars and talk of global warming and sustainability has won Oscars and Nobel Prizes, the struggle for environmental justice is far from over. Instead it continues, largely unnoticed, in places like Hunts Point, where the stage is much less glamorous. Here, the scene is set by a city that wastes, a neighborhood where people tend to mind their own business and a system of asymmetric political powers, where the theory of laws and regulations sometimes remains at a great remove from everyday practice.
It was in the summer of 2003, a few months after she had moved into her small, one-bedroom apartment on Fox Street, that Tanya Fields first noticed the smell. Heavy and inescapable, like a mix of chicken manure and rotting meat, it hung in the air, seeping through the cracks between window and air conditioner, forcing her and her little daughter to sit inside on hot summer days.
Her neighbors knew nothing about the odor’s origins. “The community had internalized the smell,” Fields recalled. “When it happened they covered their noses and their mouths and waited for it to pass.” What they did know was that the pungent smells gave them headaches and made them feel nauseous. On particularly bad days, the odor could even trigger asthma attacks.
In recent years, urban planners and public health specialists have tried to discover why, according to figures from the Department of Health, a child under 14 from Hunts Point and the neighboring district Mott Haven was more than three times as likely to be hospitalized for asthma than a child from the Upper East Side. For adults, who generally have lower asthma rates than children, the discrepancies in hospitalization rates between the two neighborhoods had a ratio of more than 10 to one.
In October 2006, a team of researchers from New York University reported that asthma symptoms spiked for South Bronx schoolchildren—including those from Hunts Point—whenever there was an increase in the number of diesel trucks spewing soot particles into the air. The study also found that a child from the South Bronx was twice as likely to attend a school near a highway than other children in New York City.
Public School 48, right on the border between Hunts Point’s residential and industrial sections, is one of these schools. One morning last fall, a slightly chubby boy with a blue polo shirt and glasses was sitting in a small room next to the gym, pressing a transparent plastic mask over his nose and mouth. He was 8 years old and should have been in a classroom with the other third-graders. Instead, he was in the school’s clinic, inhaling medicine from a nebulizer to open up his airways while listening to the muffled screams and laughter of playing children.
“They do miss out on a lot because of asthma,” said Christina Pizarro, the school’s parent coordinator. “Our chronic asthma children miss two, possibly three days of school per week.” Of the ones that make it to school, she added, two to three end up in the school’s clinic at some point during the school day.
Yet in spite of such indicators, to date there’s no conclusive scientific proof that air pollution does indeed produce asthma.
“There is no smoking gun, showing this is what’s causing all this,” said Juliana Maantay, an associate professor of Urban Environmental Geography at Lehman College. Maantay has spent years researching the spatial relationship between air pollution, race and asthma in the Bronx, using data from the New York City Department of Health, the census and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). What she found reaffirmed her suspicions: Bronx residents who live within walking distance of a pollution source are not only 30 percent more likely to be hospitalized for asthma, they are also poorer and more likely to be minorities.
“Today is not a good day,” said the receptionist in the lobby of the New York Organic Fertilizer Company (NYOFCo), as she lit two scented candles on top of her heavy wooden desk. Outside on the streets of Hunts Point, the smell had already been difficult to ignore; but as soon as the first of two sets of heavy glass doors fell shut, the odor hit like a warm and heavy wall. Inside the plant, a complex system of machines with names like triple-pass rotary dryers and venturi scrubbers turn the moist remnants of human feces into mothball-sized organic fertilizer pellets. The candles did not stand a chance of bringing even temporary reprieve.
“You never really get used to it,” the receptionist said.
Synagro, NYOFCo’s parent company, bills itself the largest recycler of organic residual in the United States, and its Hunts Point plant processes half of New York City’s sludge—enough to cover an entire football field with a three-inch-thick layer every day.
Since its opening on May 18, 1993, NYOFCo has processed over three million tons of sanitary sewage sludge—a service for which the DEP says it pays $30 million per year. Last April, The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, bought Synagro for $772 million.
When John Kopec, plant manager of NYOFCo, took a recent group of visitors through his workplace, they could choose between a short and a long tour. Those who chose the short tour observed the drying process through a large window in the facility’s conference room. The ones who chose the long tour were in for a more memorable experience. Within minutes of passing through the door that separates the plant’s offices from its large, dusty factory floor, where dark, almost black sewage sludge runs on conveyer belts and emerges as fertilizer, the odor soaks itself into hair, skin and clothes. Six weeks after the tour, a reporter’s notebook would still carry a faint, but distinctive smell.
At the tipping area at the other side of the factory floor, a truck dumped its load of black sludge, while a worker hosed down the vehicle with water. Every day, 20 to 30 of these trucks arrive at the plant from all over the city. Because the number of trucks varies from day to day, Kopec explained, the sludge sometimes sits and waits for several hours until it can be processed. This waiting period, he said, was responsible for much of the smell that emerged into the neighborhood.
From the tipping area, Kopec led the way outside. Near the entrance of the building, eight white storage silos house the finished fertilizer pellets until they are loaded on train carts and taken to Florida and Ohio—where they end up on citrus groves and in fields growing soybeans and corn.
On September 4, 2003, fertilizer dust in one of these silos ignited, causing a blast that catapulted the silo’s roof into the air and set the silo on fire. Although no one was hurt, the explosion frightened residents and sparked worries about similar incidents. In the past 15 years, there have been at least seven fires and explosions in the plant, according to a facility report prepared by NYOFCo.
“Anything with this kind of material is going to be dangerous,” Kopec said at the end of his tour. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 as well as the Oklahoma City bombing two years later used fertilizer as an explosive.
On a late Saturday morning in November, the Hunts Point offices of Mothers on the Move were deserted, as was the dry patch of green on the other side of Intervale Avenue. From time to time, a car drove by, seemingly taking little notice of the bright graffiti decorating the ground-floor office. The only thing interrupting the silence were the roaring jets of passenger planes taking off from nearby LaGuardia airport every few minutes.
Tanya Fields was late. The night before, her parents had picked up Trist-Ann and Taylor for the weekend, and she had taken the opportunity for a night out with her girlfriends, she said as she arrived. Her black dreadlocks pulled back from her face, Fields had donned a big pair of sunglasses to keep out the bright sunshine, while a black down jacket protected her from the chilly November wind and hid the growing bump on her stomach. Sometime in May, Trist-Ann and Taylor will have a little brother. Rather than relishing the remaining hours of a free weekend, Fields was eager to show off her neighborhood. However, the 35-minute walk to the lawns and basketball hoops of Barretto Point Park at the tip of the peninsula was hardly a scenic weekend stroll. Instead, it went past a plethora of auto-body shops, several waste-transfer stations, a cruise-ship-sized prison barge that sits in the East River, the Hunts Point wastewater treatment plant and the New York Organic Fertilizer Company.
Tanya Fields arrived in Hunts Point in 2003. Taylor was 4 months old, and the young mother was desperate to move out of her parents’ crowded home in Harlem. Stuck in a complicated relationship with her daughter’s father and in the middle of her studies at Baruch College, she knew that the South Bronx was one of the few places she could afford. As Fields passed rows of warehouses and auto-body shops, where piles of rusty carcasses peeked over walls and water puddles sparkled with the rainbows of spilled motor oil, street names like Leggette, Tiffany and Casanova evoked Hunts Point’s prosperous past, when wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs lived and did business in the neighborhood.
In the 19th century, large estates dominated the western part of the peninsula, while the east was left to sand and shrubbery. Then, in 1904, the extension of the subway line from Manhattan opened the area to industrial development. It was the first of many instances when the fortunes of the South Bronx changed in reaction to developments beyond the borough’s borders. Before long, factories and other manufacturing businesses being crowded out of an increasingly residential Manhattan started to appear in Hunts Point. In the 1920s, Con Edison built large storage tanks for manufactured gas, used for heating and cooking, on the eastern side of the peninsula that now hosts the Fulton Fish Market. With the new industries came the people that worked there, mainly Jews from Eastern Europe, who built their homes and synagogues in the neighborhood.
The next big transformation came during the two decades after Word War II. White working-class residents became more affluent and moved to the city’s northern suburbs, the Hunts Point wastewater treatment plant went into operation and the neighborhood gained its current demographic composition. In a dynamic that was not so different from Tanya Fields’ move five decades later, African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, forced out of overcrowded tenements in Harlem, moved into apartment buildings vacated by the white exodus to the suburbs.
In the 1960s, when the congestion caused by delivery trucks had become too much of a strain on traffic in downtown Manhattan, the city relocated its produce market to Hunts Point, and the city’s other big food markets soon followed. However, at the same time a larger trend was unfolding: The new residents were not only poorer but also arrived at a time when the economic base of their predecessors was slowly but steadily fading. New York’s manufacturing industry was leaving the city, taking with it the jobs that for decades had provided a living for its working classes.
The result is well-documented history. In the 1970s and 1980s, violence, arson and abandonment made living conditions so difficult that some 60,000 residents, almost two-thirds of the population of Hunts Point, left the neighborhood. Today, although crime rates are dropping and apartments are quickly filling up, Hunts Point still grapples with the legacy of the last century. The past shows itself in a few rows of pretty brownstones in the residential section of the district and in the high brick chimneys of an old money-printing factory, but nowhere is it more evident than in local zoning regulations that make it easy for polluting facilities to move to or remain in the area.
Every day, New York City’s eight million residents and businesses produce 1.4 billion gallons of wastewater—the equivalent of about 28 million full bathtubs—and 50,000 tons of garbage. Municipal agencies like the DEP and the Department of Sanitation work together with private businesses to collect, treat, recycle and ultimately dispose of the city’s waste. Few people know more about the role of Hunts Point in this system than Ruben Diaz Jr., who represents the residential section of the neighborhood in the New York State Assembly in Albany.
Sitting in his office in Soundview, the neighborhood just north of Hunts Point, Diaz was angry.
“We got screwed,” said Diaz, his feet propped up on his desk. “We really got screwed.”
Ever since he was first elected in 1997, at the age of 23, environmental issues have been high on his list of priorities. Yet all too often his efforts have run into dead ends. Because there are no waste transfer stations in Manhattan, said Diaz, every year, 1.1 million trucks drive an extra 6.1 million miles to take garbage from Manhattan to the South Bronx, where it is processed and stored before trains, trucks and barges take it to landfills out of state.
In 2006, the City Council passed the Department of Sanitation’s solid waste management plan, under which every borough is meant to collect and process its own waste locally. But parts of the plan are currently stuck in the committee stage in the State Assembly. The new garbage strategy envisioned the revival of a marine waste transfer station on the Gansevoort Pier in Manhattan’s fashionable Meatpacking District. Because the pier is part of the Hudson River Park, which falls under the responsibility of Albany, three local assembly members, with the help of the speaker of the house, Sheldon Silver, are keeping the bill from moving to the floor to get a vote. They maintain that the city has not properly considered their alternative proposal: putting the marine transfer station at another pier about 20 blocks to the north.
“They’re saying ‘not in my backyard,’ when in the meantime the garbage is coming into our backyard,” said Diaz. “We’re guilty of that, too. But the problem is, we never win.”
Tanya Fields pulled out her cell phone and keys from the pockets of her jacket and placed them into a small plastic tray before walking through the metal detector. On this Tuesday morning in mid-March, she was on her way to meet Joanne Goubourn, the principal of HYDE Leadership Charter School in Hunts Point. Much had changed since Fields’ walking tour through Hunts Point last November. Her gray coat could no longer hide the fact that she was seven months’ pregnant. Taylor and Trist-Ann were already counting down the days until her delivery date in eight weeks. In December, Fields had quit her job at American Express and in February she started a new, full-time position as community-outreach coordinator for Sustainable South Bronx, one of the other environmental-justice groups in Hunts Point.
Today, Fields had come to ask Goubourn to let Sustainable South Bronx start an afternoon program at her school, which would give students what Fields called “a hands-on approach on what it means to build a green community.” As she was rattling off the names of facilities and her organization’s programs, Goubourn, who had moved from Washington D.C. to the South Bronx a little over a year ago, was nodding her head.
“The thing that is so sad for me is that there is no awareness,” said Goubourn, recalling her experiences with her students’ parents. “They don’t even know how to be angry.”
The window of her small, cramped office was open only a few inches, but the sharp whiff of exhaust fumes was hard to ignore. Edgewater Road, the main truck route leading to the Hunts Point Terminal Market, was a mere three blocks away.
“This is turning into a civil rights issue,” Fields said before she left. “They start to internalize a certain kind of oppression.”
For Tanya Fields, the struggle to break this circle began three-and-a-half years ago, when she watched her daughter desperately gasping for air at a Manhattan hospital. Before she found her way into the offices of Mothers on the Move to join a small but growing group of community activists, she had to make a decision. Hunts Point had to become her home—a place where she would stay even if her own fortunes changed. Now, as her third child was about to be born, she was trying to find a bigger apartment in the neighborhood, hoping that by the time her son was grown, he would be able to look out over his surroundings with pride—a child of Hunts Point, the Bronx.
For three days in November of 2004, her 5-month-old daughter, Trist-Ann, had been wheezing and coughing. It seemed like she was choking. Eventually the coughing fits became so bad that the little girl was vomiting; she couldn’t hold anything down. When her doctor failed to get Trist-Ann to breathe more easily, he told the young mother to take her to the emergency room. By the time they reached St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, Trist-Ann had fluid in her lungs. The diagnosis: pneumonia.
The doctors told Fields that her daughter could have drowned from the inside. The next four days and five nights, she did not leave her Trist-Ann’s side at the hospital, while her other daughter Taylor, who was two years old at the time, stayed with her parents in Harlem. It was the first of many trips to the emergency room for Fields, a 27-year-old office worker.
A few months later, Trist-Ann was back in the hospital, again with pneumonia.
At the age of 1, she was diagnosed with asthma.
In other parts of New York City, such a diagnosis might have been a surprise, but not where Tanya Fields and her two children live. In their neighborhood of Hunts Point, a small peninsula on the southeastern tip of the Bronx, one in four elementary-school children suffers from asthma.
Three decades after President Jimmy Carter’s famous walk past the abandoned buildings on Charlotte Street, a new epidemic has taken hold of the South Bronx. Public schools have their own asthma clinics, nebulizers ready to help students breathe when they start gasping for air in class. And while urban planners and public health specialists are still struggling to find the cause for the community’s disturbingly high asthma rates, for parents like Tanya Fields there is no question that it’s the air they breathe that makes their children wheeze.
Every week, according to citizens’ groups that monitor the site, up to 60,000 trucks take a turn off Bruckner Expressway and cut through the neighborhood’s small residential section (its current population is 47,000) to reach Hunts Point’s industrial sector, an area that plays a crucial role in New York City’s metabolism. On the peninsula’s 690 acres sit the world’s biggest food market, at least four private waste-transfer stations, a wastewater treatment plant and the New York Organic Fertilizer Company: a plant that turns half of New York City’s sludge (the solid material that is extracted from wastewater before it flows back into the city’s waterways) into fertilizer pellets.
Sometimes, residents say, they can smell the odors emerging from the plant at a distance of almost two miles.
Hunts Point represents an often-ignored dilemma of urban life: Where large numbers of people live together, they produce waste—waste that needs to be collected, transported, reused, recycled or disposed of. All too often that happens in poor communities of color—that is, communities like Hunts Point, where, in 1999, 97 percent of residents were Hispanic or African American and the median household income was $17,612 (less than half that of New York City as a whole). In September 2005, the Associated Press, in an analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, found that African-Americans were 79 percent more likely to live in a neighborhood where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health risk. In many places, Hispanic and Asian minorities also suffered disproportionate impacts.
For activists around the country, this unequal distribution of waste-processing facilities has a name: environmental racism.
It was to achieve a measure of environmental justice that the New York City Planning Commission passed the so-called Fair Share Criteria in 1991, which stipulated that the benefits and burdens of municipal facilities should be allocated equally across neighborhoods. Three years later, in February 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order demanding that all federal agencies make environmental justice part of their mission.
And yet, 13 years later, at a time celebrities drive hybrid cars and talk of global warming and sustainability has won Oscars and Nobel Prizes, the struggle for environmental justice is far from over. Instead it continues, largely unnoticed, in places like Hunts Point, where the stage is much less glamorous. Here, the scene is set by a city that wastes, a neighborhood where people tend to mind their own business and a system of asymmetric political powers, where the theory of laws and regulations sometimes remains at a great remove from everyday practice.
It was in the summer of 2003, a few months after she had moved into her small, one-bedroom apartment on Fox Street, that Tanya Fields first noticed the smell. Heavy and inescapable, like a mix of chicken manure and rotting meat, it hung in the air, seeping through the cracks between window and air conditioner, forcing her and her little daughter to sit inside on hot summer days.
Her neighbors knew nothing about the odor’s origins. “The community had internalized the smell,” Fields recalled. “When it happened they covered their noses and their mouths and waited for it to pass.” What they did know was that the pungent smells gave them headaches and made them feel nauseous. On particularly bad days, the odor could even trigger asthma attacks.
In recent years, urban planners and public health specialists have tried to discover why, according to figures from the Department of Health, a child under 14 from Hunts Point and the neighboring district Mott Haven was more than three times as likely to be hospitalized for asthma than a child from the Upper East Side. For adults, who generally have lower asthma rates than children, the discrepancies in hospitalization rates between the two neighborhoods had a ratio of more than 10 to one.
In October 2006, a team of researchers from New York University reported that asthma symptoms spiked for South Bronx schoolchildren—including those from Hunts Point—whenever there was an increase in the number of diesel trucks spewing soot particles into the air. The study also found that a child from the South Bronx was twice as likely to attend a school near a highway than other children in New York City.
Public School 48, right on the border between Hunts Point’s residential and industrial sections, is one of these schools. One morning last fall, a slightly chubby boy with a blue polo shirt and glasses was sitting in a small room next to the gym, pressing a transparent plastic mask over his nose and mouth. He was 8 years old and should have been in a classroom with the other third-graders. Instead, he was in the school’s clinic, inhaling medicine from a nebulizer to open up his airways while listening to the muffled screams and laughter of playing children.
“They do miss out on a lot because of asthma,” said Christina Pizarro, the school’s parent coordinator. “Our chronic asthma children miss two, possibly three days of school per week.” Of the ones that make it to school, she added, two to three end up in the school’s clinic at some point during the school day.
Yet in spite of such indicators, to date there’s no conclusive scientific proof that air pollution does indeed produce asthma.
“There is no smoking gun, showing this is what’s causing all this,” said Juliana Maantay, an associate professor of Urban Environmental Geography at Lehman College. Maantay has spent years researching the spatial relationship between air pollution, race and asthma in the Bronx, using data from the New York City Department of Health, the census and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). What she found reaffirmed her suspicions: Bronx residents who live within walking distance of a pollution source are not only 30 percent more likely to be hospitalized for asthma, they are also poorer and more likely to be minorities.
“Today is not a good day,” said the receptionist in the lobby of the New York Organic Fertilizer Company (NYOFCo), as she lit two scented candles on top of her heavy wooden desk. Outside on the streets of Hunts Point, the smell had already been difficult to ignore; but as soon as the first of two sets of heavy glass doors fell shut, the odor hit like a warm and heavy wall. Inside the plant, a complex system of machines with names like triple-pass rotary dryers and venturi scrubbers turn the moist remnants of human feces into mothball-sized organic fertilizer pellets. The candles did not stand a chance of bringing even temporary reprieve.
“You never really get used to it,” the receptionist said.
Synagro, NYOFCo’s parent company, bills itself the largest recycler of organic residual in the United States, and its Hunts Point plant processes half of New York City’s sludge—enough to cover an entire football field with a three-inch-thick layer every day.
Since its opening on May 18, 1993, NYOFCo has processed over three million tons of sanitary sewage sludge—a service for which the DEP says it pays $30 million per year. Last April, The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, bought Synagro for $772 million.
When John Kopec, plant manager of NYOFCo, took a recent group of visitors through his workplace, they could choose between a short and a long tour. Those who chose the short tour observed the drying process through a large window in the facility’s conference room. The ones who chose the long tour were in for a more memorable experience. Within minutes of passing through the door that separates the plant’s offices from its large, dusty factory floor, where dark, almost black sewage sludge runs on conveyer belts and emerges as fertilizer, the odor soaks itself into hair, skin and clothes. Six weeks after the tour, a reporter’s notebook would still carry a faint, but distinctive smell.
At the tipping area at the other side of the factory floor, a truck dumped its load of black sludge, while a worker hosed down the vehicle with water. Every day, 20 to 30 of these trucks arrive at the plant from all over the city. Because the number of trucks varies from day to day, Kopec explained, the sludge sometimes sits and waits for several hours until it can be processed. This waiting period, he said, was responsible for much of the smell that emerged into the neighborhood.
From the tipping area, Kopec led the way outside. Near the entrance of the building, eight white storage silos house the finished fertilizer pellets until they are loaded on train carts and taken to Florida and Ohio—where they end up on citrus groves and in fields growing soybeans and corn.
On September 4, 2003, fertilizer dust in one of these silos ignited, causing a blast that catapulted the silo’s roof into the air and set the silo on fire. Although no one was hurt, the explosion frightened residents and sparked worries about similar incidents. In the past 15 years, there have been at least seven fires and explosions in the plant, according to a facility report prepared by NYOFCo.
“Anything with this kind of material is going to be dangerous,” Kopec said at the end of his tour. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 as well as the Oklahoma City bombing two years later used fertilizer as an explosive.
On a late Saturday morning in November, the Hunts Point offices of Mothers on the Move were deserted, as was the dry patch of green on the other side of Intervale Avenue. From time to time, a car drove by, seemingly taking little notice of the bright graffiti decorating the ground-floor office. The only thing interrupting the silence were the roaring jets of passenger planes taking off from nearby LaGuardia airport every few minutes.
Tanya Fields was late. The night before, her parents had picked up Trist-Ann and Taylor for the weekend, and she had taken the opportunity for a night out with her girlfriends, she said as she arrived. Her black dreadlocks pulled back from her face, Fields had donned a big pair of sunglasses to keep out the bright sunshine, while a black down jacket protected her from the chilly November wind and hid the growing bump on her stomach. Sometime in May, Trist-Ann and Taylor will have a little brother. Rather than relishing the remaining hours of a free weekend, Fields was eager to show off her neighborhood. However, the 35-minute walk to the lawns and basketball hoops of Barretto Point Park at the tip of the peninsula was hardly a scenic weekend stroll. Instead, it went past a plethora of auto-body shops, several waste-transfer stations, a cruise-ship-sized prison barge that sits in the East River, the Hunts Point wastewater treatment plant and the New York Organic Fertilizer Company.
Tanya Fields arrived in Hunts Point in 2003. Taylor was 4 months old, and the young mother was desperate to move out of her parents’ crowded home in Harlem. Stuck in a complicated relationship with her daughter’s father and in the middle of her studies at Baruch College, she knew that the South Bronx was one of the few places she could afford. As Fields passed rows of warehouses and auto-body shops, where piles of rusty carcasses peeked over walls and water puddles sparkled with the rainbows of spilled motor oil, street names like Leggette, Tiffany and Casanova evoked Hunts Point’s prosperous past, when wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs lived and did business in the neighborhood.
In the 19th century, large estates dominated the western part of the peninsula, while the east was left to sand and shrubbery. Then, in 1904, the extension of the subway line from Manhattan opened the area to industrial development. It was the first of many instances when the fortunes of the South Bronx changed in reaction to developments beyond the borough’s borders. Before long, factories and other manufacturing businesses being crowded out of an increasingly residential Manhattan started to appear in Hunts Point. In the 1920s, Con Edison built large storage tanks for manufactured gas, used for heating and cooking, on the eastern side of the peninsula that now hosts the Fulton Fish Market. With the new industries came the people that worked there, mainly Jews from Eastern Europe, who built their homes and synagogues in the neighborhood.
The next big transformation came during the two decades after Word War II. White working-class residents became more affluent and moved to the city’s northern suburbs, the Hunts Point wastewater treatment plant went into operation and the neighborhood gained its current demographic composition. In a dynamic that was not so different from Tanya Fields’ move five decades later, African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, forced out of overcrowded tenements in Harlem, moved into apartment buildings vacated by the white exodus to the suburbs.
In the 1960s, when the congestion caused by delivery trucks had become too much of a strain on traffic in downtown Manhattan, the city relocated its produce market to Hunts Point, and the city’s other big food markets soon followed. However, at the same time a larger trend was unfolding: The new residents were not only poorer but also arrived at a time when the economic base of their predecessors was slowly but steadily fading. New York’s manufacturing industry was leaving the city, taking with it the jobs that for decades had provided a living for its working classes.
The result is well-documented history. In the 1970s and 1980s, violence, arson and abandonment made living conditions so difficult that some 60,000 residents, almost two-thirds of the population of Hunts Point, left the neighborhood. Today, although crime rates are dropping and apartments are quickly filling up, Hunts Point still grapples with the legacy of the last century. The past shows itself in a few rows of pretty brownstones in the residential section of the district and in the high brick chimneys of an old money-printing factory, but nowhere is it more evident than in local zoning regulations that make it easy for polluting facilities to move to or remain in the area.
Every day, New York City’s eight million residents and businesses produce 1.4 billion gallons of wastewater—the equivalent of about 28 million full bathtubs—and 50,000 tons of garbage. Municipal agencies like the DEP and the Department of Sanitation work together with private businesses to collect, treat, recycle and ultimately dispose of the city’s waste. Few people know more about the role of Hunts Point in this system than Ruben Diaz Jr., who represents the residential section of the neighborhood in the New York State Assembly in Albany.
Sitting in his office in Soundview, the neighborhood just north of Hunts Point, Diaz was angry.
“We got screwed,” said Diaz, his feet propped up on his desk. “We really got screwed.”
Ever since he was first elected in 1997, at the age of 23, environmental issues have been high on his list of priorities. Yet all too often his efforts have run into dead ends. Because there are no waste transfer stations in Manhattan, said Diaz, every year, 1.1 million trucks drive an extra 6.1 million miles to take garbage from Manhattan to the South Bronx, where it is processed and stored before trains, trucks and barges take it to landfills out of state.
In 2006, the City Council passed the Department of Sanitation’s solid waste management plan, under which every borough is meant to collect and process its own waste locally. But parts of the plan are currently stuck in the committee stage in the State Assembly. The new garbage strategy envisioned the revival of a marine waste transfer station on the Gansevoort Pier in Manhattan’s fashionable Meatpacking District. Because the pier is part of the Hudson River Park, which falls under the responsibility of Albany, three local assembly members, with the help of the speaker of the house, Sheldon Silver, are keeping the bill from moving to the floor to get a vote. They maintain that the city has not properly considered their alternative proposal: putting the marine transfer station at another pier about 20 blocks to the north.
“They’re saying ‘not in my backyard,’ when in the meantime the garbage is coming into our backyard,” said Diaz. “We’re guilty of that, too. But the problem is, we never win.”
Tanya Fields pulled out her cell phone and keys from the pockets of her jacket and placed them into a small plastic tray before walking through the metal detector. On this Tuesday morning in mid-March, she was on her way to meet Joanne Goubourn, the principal of HYDE Leadership Charter School in Hunts Point. Much had changed since Fields’ walking tour through Hunts Point last November. Her gray coat could no longer hide the fact that she was seven months’ pregnant. Taylor and Trist-Ann were already counting down the days until her delivery date in eight weeks. In December, Fields had quit her job at American Express and in February she started a new, full-time position as community-outreach coordinator for Sustainable South Bronx, one of the other environmental-justice groups in Hunts Point.
Today, Fields had come to ask Goubourn to let Sustainable South Bronx start an afternoon program at her school, which would give students what Fields called “a hands-on approach on what it means to build a green community.” As she was rattling off the names of facilities and her organization’s programs, Goubourn, who had moved from Washington D.C. to the South Bronx a little over a year ago, was nodding her head.
“The thing that is so sad for me is that there is no awareness,” said Goubourn, recalling her experiences with her students’ parents. “They don’t even know how to be angry.”
The window of her small, cramped office was open only a few inches, but the sharp whiff of exhaust fumes was hard to ignore. Edgewater Road, the main truck route leading to the Hunts Point Terminal Market, was a mere three blocks away.
“This is turning into a civil rights issue,” Fields said before she left. “They start to internalize a certain kind of oppression.”
For Tanya Fields, the struggle to break this circle began three-and-a-half years ago, when she watched her daughter desperately gasping for air at a Manhattan hospital. Before she found her way into the offices of Mothers on the Move to join a small but growing group of community activists, she had to make a decision. Hunts Point had to become her home—a place where she would stay even if her own fortunes changed. Now, as her third child was about to be born, she was trying to find a bigger apartment in the neighborhood, hoping that by the time her son was grown, he would be able to look out over his surroundings with pride—a child of Hunts Point, the Bronx.
