River to Creek Walk: oyster shells, corn planting and your own personal marsh

The walk through Greenpoint from the East River to Newtown Creek attracted a crowd of about 20 curious and intrepid citizen researchers.  We took people on a historical and tactile tour of the area, overlaying present, past and future with imaginative, factual and sensory data.

We were accompanied on the walk by Steve Glenn, of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, who gave us a history of the flora that thrived in the area prior to settlement, and a sense of what had landed there now (everything from re-introduced scrub oaks to the ubiquitous Tree of Heaven, a non-native tree seen everywhere in New York City).

There’s a whole slew of photos of the walk (below are some highlights), and coming soon are some selected questions and observations garnered from our researchers during the walk.