Brooklynites reclaim the waterfront for City of Water Day

Last Saturday was the 16th annual City of Water Day, a day of activism, appreciation and  remediation organized by the Waterfront Alliance and the New York-New Jersey Harbor and  Estuary Program. Events spanned all 520 miles of New York City’s waterfront and aimed to educate the public on the waterways through park cleanups, free paddling, interactive science experiments, and more. 

The RETI Center off Columbia Street hosted an event surrounding the construction and launch of floating gardens, complete with music, drinks and enchiladas. Volunteers worked together to assemble hexagonal gardens made of recycled wood, fishnets and thousands of donated corks, which they then placed in the water, where they will remain for anywhere up to two years.

Tim Gelman-Sevcik, the executive director of the RETI Center, said in an interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that this is their way of proactively fighting climate change. “What we’re doing with our floating gardens is putting the marsh grasses back in place … As opposed to trying to pull out the existing infrastructure that’s there, we’re trying to add on to it in the easiest, quickest, way possible — on a small scale, but with the idea that it can be replicated by others or by us.” 

The garden design is already on its sixth iteration, with plans for more. “We have a Silicon Valley mindset of ‘fail fast and often,’ because we’re doing something we’ve never seen other people do, which is putting floating gardens into brackish water,” he said. 

The center has plans of turning these gardens into kits that people can assemble across the city, with the long-term goal of creating a “Blue City,” or a growing, living environment assembled out of many…