Newtown Creek Narratives Make Pollution Personal

The Toll of Contamination
By Athena Ponushis, Photo by Maria Howell

Laura Hofmann grew tomatoes in her backyard. She made sauce. She fed her six children. But every morning, when the stay-at-home mom would walk out to her Greenpoint garden, she would see her tomatoes were grey—yes, grey—as if someone had dumped an ashtray on her red fruit. This was the mid-‘80s. Laura simply picked up her hose and washed the ash off her food.

As her five boys and baby girl grew, the Hofmanns moved further down Dupont Street, trading their backyard garden for a rooftop view. From her new perch, the once unsuspecting mother saw smoke stacks. Images started streaming together in Laura’s mind—the smoke stacks of the former Greenpoint Incinerator drifted to the ash on her tomatoes, the foul smell at the softball field led to the sewage sludge tank, the oil spill she grew up hearing about still rippled along Newtown Creek with a sheen of “black mayonnaise.”

“When I put two-and-two together, I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s the ash I’ve been washing off my vegetables all these years,’” remembered now 51-year-old Laura, a white Kleenex in her hand. “My kids had basically been eating from contaminated soil, soil laden with cancer-causing toxins.”

Laura has recently recorded stories similar to her tomato eye-opener for a developing health study, the Newtown Creek Community Health & Harm Narratives Project (CHHNP). Through neighbors interviewing neighbors, the study aims to document the public health concerns of residents living along Newtown Creek.

After her revelation on the roof, Laura’s childhood memories of sipping from her grandmother’s old water well no longer felt safe and her mother’s brain cancer felt like more than bad luck. Her father’s degenerative brain disorder seemed more than coincidence, notably adding the loss of the family Chihuahua “Poco” to yet another rare brain disease.

“My mother and father may have been married, but they weren’t related. And they certainly were not related to their dog,” Laura said frankly, sitting across a glass table from me in her fifth-floor living room. Paintings of sailboats and light houses hang on her seafoam-green-colored walls, walls she has been decorating with maritime knick knacks and coastal flea-market finds for 24 years, before words like “environmental offender” were part of her vocabulary. Now she can spell her family’s afflictions—progressive supranuclear palsy, central nervous system lymphoma, even Poco’s diagnosed encephalopathy—for me to write down in my notebook. A lifelong Greenpoint resident, Laura blames these medical ailments on the stagnant pollution and stagnant politics surrounding her home.

“You have to take control of your health, be your own doctor. Okay, I do that. I go online and research the symptoms, see what these diseases are about,” said Laura, who has been diagnosed with lupus and fibromyalgia. “If I went to school, I’d be on my way to a medical degree. I’ve accumulated too much medical knowledge just via my family. This isn’t stuff you want to know.”

The first time I interviewed Laura, I sat at her table for three hours. She was not anxious to tell me her story. She was not hesitant, but she was a little armored. What would I do, scribble down a pretty quote with dirty words?  Was I just another reporter sensationalizing her neighborhood’s neglect? It is a sexy story—industry drowns decades of troubles down Newtown Creek, millions of gallons of spilled oil continue to swell underground, locals say do not dip your middle finger in the water, you might end up with two.

Was I worthy of the details of her oldest son’s seizures, her younger son’s asthma, her daughter’s migraines? Affirmatively, the Newtown Creek contamination has created a community of victims. The Newtown Creek contamination has created a community of disappointment. But this did not stop Laura. Despite the researchers who have disappeared, despite the unreturned emails to the Department of Environmental Conservation, Laura again shared her story.

Twenty-nine-year-old Rachael Weiss spearheaded the CHHNP health study after listening to vocal residents like Laura stand up at public meetings. Wanting to give them more than a town-hall audience, Weiss secured roughly $46,000 from the state to fund the narratives project. Now local voices can be taped by an audio recording, composing a touchable, playable oral history of what their neighborhoods have been and what they have become.

“This area has been neglected for so long, I really want to empower the residents,” said Weiss, the project’s principal investigator. “Residents can relate their experience and document it. Then they see it matters, so they see they matter. They see they deserve better. Maybe they will fight harder for recognition. Maybe it will give them a voice to demand changes.”

With a master’s degree in public health, Weiss has pored over many reports where people seem to get lost in the numbers. The Newtown narratives project was designed to be less statistical, less sterile, more human. Investigators intend to collect around 50 interviews, then edit the narratives into sound bites accessible through HabitatMap.org, an environmental justice social networking site. Additionally, a formal analysis identifying common themes throughout the narratives will be prepared, complete with a recommendations page.

“We’re sending it out to everyone,” said Weiss, anticipating the report to be finished early next year. “To elected officials all over the city, agencies all over the state, it’s going everywhere.” Equal to the many places Weiss plans to send the study are the many perspectives she hopes to include. Not just Greenpoint, not just oil, not just people who associate illness with the neighborhood, but all views along the creek.

To learn more about CHHNP, contact newtowncreekstudy@gmail.com or
(718) 577-1359