Bioswales & Bee Havens
Each day, New Yorkers use a billion gallons of water. That’s how much water the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park holds - 40 feet deep and a mile and a half around. This water disappears, magically, through the sewers. Or so we think.
Addendum - 09.30.2021
Shortly after submitting this story, tropical storm Ida barreled into NYC and dropped seven inches of rain on Central Park in mere hours. Only days before Ida, Tropical Storm Henri broke rainfall records in the area. The ground was saturated and this much water had nowhere to go. My studio space flooded and had four inches of water in it. Twenty-three people died in New York.
The infrastructure in New York City – and most of the world – is not capable of dealing with the ever-increasing effects of climate change. A recent study finds that if climate change trajectories stay the same, children born in 2020 may see seven times more extreme climate events than their grandparents 1. The bioswales installed in New York City are a great step, but we need more action and we need it now. The picture isn’t rosy but it doesn’t mean we should give up or ignore it. Learn more. Get involved. Make small meaningful changes in your life. Let’s all keep the bees buzzing.
Nature
New York City has an interesting relationship with nature.
So many of us here seek it out by leaving– a trip to the beach, the park, a cemetery, if we’re lucky a trip up the Hudson Valley. Sure, those fancy brownstoners have tree-lined streets and private backyards, but for most New Yorkers nature is abstract, a near monoculture of grass and a few trees.
NYC bioswale 78D along with a sketch of what is going on underground.
New York City wears its vast complexity well. So well that it’s easy to take for granted the power we use, the gas we cook with and the toilets we flush. This last one is especially true. Water from our sinks, showers and toilets just spiral down the drain, becoming a stream of things we no longer want to think about.
New York’s first underground sewer was installed in the 1660’s, a wood-covered trough down the middle of Broad Street, in what was to become the Financial District in southern Manhattan. Sewer-building began in earnest in 1850 in reaction to a series of cholera outbreaks when seventy-five miles of sewers were installed. By 2019, 7,500 miles were in use - longer than a round trip from New York City to Los Angeles.
The sewers here don’t just make our dishwater, bathwater and toilet-flushes disappear, they also deal with draining our streets, roofs and sidewalks. A normal, sunny day sees a billion gallons of household wastewater treated, while a large storm can send four times this amount - a staggering 4 billion gallons. Wastewater is cleaned and generally safe to release into the waterways and back into the water cycle.
When the system reaches twice its daily volume, two billion gallons, it's overloaded. Storms can double this and the system becomes saturated. It starts dumping a slurry of stormwater and raw sewage directly into our streams and rivers. This is not good. Stormwater run-off contains a cocktail of chemicals, and raw sewage, a multitude of pathogens - all harmful to humans and the organisms living around us. This runoff also unloads a massive amount of nutrients, creating deadly algal blooms - sucking oxygen out of the water and suffocating marine life.
The city is dealing with a choice made a hundred years ago– a “combined” sewage system – where rainwater run-off and sewage mix in the same tunnels and end up in our waterways. While this creates a “simpler” system, it means that large volumes of rain can overwhelm a system meant primarily to deal with sewage.
NYC bioswale 93A - take a look at it in AR on your phone or view it on a map
My morning walk to work isn’t far, maybe ten minutes if I dawdle and it was a relief during Covid. An industrial zone in East Williamsburg, it was a ghost-town for the first few months, a stark contrast to its typical flurry of activity. There were no more careening forklift freeways. Walls were now painted over with murals, road signs slapped over with stickers, broken shipping pallets littered the sidewalk. Weeds poked through the cracks of rollup doors, no longer clanking up and down. There was silence.
Nestled neatly away in this paved expanse, I started to notice small refuges of green. Each one had a partially-enclosed shin-high metal fence which suggested protection, and a small sign: “Rain Garden.” Each was planted with an assorted mix of native roses, irises, chokecherries, grass and echinacea. Remarkably, bees buzzed away - ignoring the warehouses full of plastic bags, the welding shop and religious statue importer - and busily clambered over flowers.
I started to notice that each small metal fence had a handwritten number on it. 78D was brimming with roses. 82C, clumps of orange daylilies. 92D, half-covered in shipping pallets and New Jersey tea shrubs. A semi-lived-in Winnebago camper van was parked next to 83A, its contents spilled out onto the street but the bees buzzed away, this time ignoring the pile of junk bike frames, warped record albums, used clothing, shopping carts and scrap wood.
Each rain garden had its own little microcosm of life. This is nature in New York City.
NYC bioswale 90C - take a look at it in AR on your phone or view it on a map
As part of a city-wide project to mitigate these dangerous overflow events in our sewage system, the city began installing rain gardens or bioswales. They delay the entry of stormwater by as much as forty-eight hours, known as a “rainwater pause”, it reduces the volume of overflow and allows plants to absorb excess nutrients.
On the surface, these gardens are not big, just twenty’ by five’ or roughly the size of two parking spots, but they extend deep below the sidewalk. Filled with layers of coarse stones they catch stormwater and street runoff, each catching nearly 2,500 gallons of water for the native plants, shrubs and trees planted in them.
Last year, the system of roughly 3,000 bioswales prevented an estimated 38 million gallons of untreated waste water from entering the sewers. The City plans on building 9,000 total.
Today, as I walk to work the forklifts are no longer silent, trucks jam the streets, the sparks from the welding shop spill out onto the sidewalk. But in each little rain garden, the bees keep buzzing away.
See a map of all NYC Bioswales
Sign up to be a NYC DEP Harbor Protector
Dig deeper into NYC Bioswales, how they work and how to care for them
1 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi7339
Augmented Reality Files
Each of the three images below is an augmented reality file. To use, click, wait and then move your phone around when you see the AR viewer.
This was written as a submission for Hold on Whale!, a fantastic zine produced by the very talented Sophie Butcher.