creativity

Old Ship, New Reef: What the Sinking of the SS United States Teaches Us About Marine Restoration

Christa Avampato
The SS United States waiting to be taken out of the Philadelphia harbor by tug boats. WSRower, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For nearly three decades, she sat moored along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia—a rusting, 990-foot ghost of mid-century maritime ambition. Built in 1952, the SS United States lived a remarkable double life. Publicly, she reigned as America’s premier flagship ocean liner, carrying over one million passengers across the Atlantic in peak mid-century style—including royalty, Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, and four U.S. presidents. On her 1952 maiden voyage, she shattered the transatlantic speed record, crossing in just three days, ten hours, and forty minutes—a passenger record that stands to this day.

Behind that veneer of luxury, however, she was financed under a top-secret Cold War agreement with the U.S. Navy. Engineered to outrun submarines and capable of being requisitioned within 48 hours to transport 14,000 troops 10,000 miles without refueling, her split engine rooms, lightweight aluminum superstructure, and staggering propulsion were designed to dominate the surface of the sea.

This week, roughly 22 nautical miles off the coast of Destin-Fort Walton Beach in the Gulf of Mexico, her mission reverses completely. Scuttled in deep water, the historic ocean liner will become the world’s largest artificial reef.

For a culture conditioned to view sinking ships as disasters and marine conservation as wilderness preservation, sending 45,000 tons of steel to the seafloor can feel contradictory. But the transformation of the SS United States is not industrial dumping; it is a live experiment in circular infrastructure, rigorous remediation, and engineered ecology.

1. From Superliner to Seabed: The Adaptive Reuse Dilemma

The story of the SS United States has always been defined by scale. When naval architect William Francis Gibbs designed her, she was a technological marvel: light, fast, and built without combustible wood to meet strict military defense specs.

Yet when commercial transatlantic aviation rendered ocean liners obsolete, that massive physical footprint became a liability. Redeveloping a 12-deck, thousand-foot vessel into a stationary hotel or waterfront museum attraction proved financially impossible for potential buyers.

Scuttling the vessel offers a different form of preservation. Rather than being broken down for scrap, the ship enters a living second act. By sinking her intentionally, her naval architecture remains intact—repurposed as underwater infrastructure.

2. The Remediation Journey: Habitat vs. Toxic Residue

You cannot drop a mid-century vessel into marine waters without risking severe environmental harm.

Mid-20th-century shipbuilding relied heavily on hazardous compounds: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in wiring and gasket adhesives, asbestos insulation throughout the hull, petroleum sludges in fuel bunkers, and lead-based hull coatings. Letting those substances sink into the ocean and ocean floor would turn an intended sanctuary into an offshore toxic site.

Before the ship could be cleared for sinking, it underwent intensive decontamination:

  • Hazard Stripping: Crews cleared interior debris, plastics, hazardous insulation, and wiring down to bare steel.
  • Hydro-Blasting: Fuel tanks were repeatedly scoured and certified contaminant-free under EPA and Coast Guard standards.
  • Hydrodynamic Venting: Workers cut large vent corridors through decks and bulkheads—not only ensuring the hull sinks upright and settles evenly on the seafloor, but creating open pathways for deep currents to circulate oxygen through the interior chambers.

3. Engineering a Living Reef

Much of the northern Gulf of Mexico’s seabed is a flat expanse of sand and silt. While vital for burrowing species, these open plains lack the hard surfaces required for marine life to anchor.

When the SS United States settles on the bottom, it introduces an immediate solution:

  • The Foundation: Within days, microscopic algae and hydroids form a biofilm across the bare metal. Within months, bryozoans, barnacles, and sponges cement themselves to the steel, building the reef’s foundation.
  • A Flourishing Reef: Structural cavities shelter baitfish and juvenile nurseries. These, in turn, draw pelagic predators—amberjack, cobia, groupers, and red snapper—turning the ship into an active marine community.

4. Diverting Pressure from Fragile Natural Systems

The ecological argument for an artificial reef is as much about protecting existing habitat as creating a new one.

Recreational diving, spearfishing, and charter boats are major economic drivers along the Florida Panhandle. Without designated destinations, heavy human traffic degrades natural reefs.

An artificial reef of this scale acts as a relief for the natural areas around it. By creating an iconic site for divers and fishing, the local management plan concentrates recreational traffic, giving sensitive natural ecosystems a vital buffer from tourism wear and tear.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

True ecological resilience is not about keeping human activity completely separate from nature. It is about identifying pragmatic, circular intersections where our built history, industrial materials, and natural regeneration work together to support one another in a truly collaborative ways.

The SS United States was constructed for transatlantic luxury and Cold War defense. As she settles onto the Gulf floor, she takes on a far more enduring role: proving that with rigorous decontamination, the physical relics of our industrial past can be reimagined to support living marine systems.

creativity

Beyond the Candidates: Climate Wins on the 2026 U.S. Election Ballot

Christa Avampato
Image from Grist. https://grist.org/elections/tax-the-rich-for-climate-action-protect-towns-from-floods-its-on-state-ballots-this-november/

As many of us watched the election results roll in on Tuesday night, a quiet revolution for climate policy played out at the bottom of the ballot.

When environmental policy is filtered through candidate campaigns, it routinely gets buried by other issues that are viewed as more tangible and immediate such as the price of groceries and gas, cost of living, job creation, and foreign relations. But when clean water, local open space, and energy sovereignty are put directly to voters as standalone questions, a different political reality emerges: the public is far more protective of the environment than conventional politics and politicians would have us believe.

Across the country, 2026’s direct ballot initiatives revealed a decisive grassroots mandate centered on three clear climate issues:

1. Water Unifies All of Us

From coastal Texas to the suburban counties of North Carolina and Florida, voters treated water infrastructure for what it is – vital to survival.

  • In Corpus Christi, Texas, a community recently on the brink of a water supply crisis, voters overwhelmingly passed a citizen-led initiative imposing mandatory drought surcharges on heavy industrial water users.
  • Across county ballots nationwide, voters authorized nearly $1 billion in dedicated funding for river restoration, lead service line removal, and coastal lagoon defense—consistently choosing to tax themselves pennies on the dollar to ensure their water supply remains clean and safe.

When it’s on the ballot, water wins.

2. Pushing Back on AI Data Centers

In more than 40 municipal and county ballot initiatives across 10 states—including Ohio, Kansas, Illinois, Maine, and Wisconsin—voters were asked whether to approve zoning changes, tax incentives, or permits for massive AI data centers.

The result was a resounding no. In over 30 municipalities, electorates voted to ban, pause, or strictly regulate data center construction.

  • In Kansas, voters banned high-impact data centers (defined as consuming over 100,000 gallons of water a day for a decade), requiring any future reversal to go back to a public vote.
  • In Ohio, communities pushed back against utility-scale facilities that threaten to strain the regional grid and shift the costs of fossil-fuel plants onto residential bills.

Measures like these are about defending resources. Communities saw tech firms siphoning local water tables and stressing electrical capacity, and they used direct democracy to protect their communities.

3. Defeating Fossil Fuels

Direct democracy also proved to be a critical shield against corporate rollbacks:

  • In Colorado, voters defeated Amendment 82, an industry-backed effort to enshrine a constitutional “right to natural gas” that would have preempted local building electrification and municipal heat-pump adoption.
  • In California, voters resisted Proposition 45, rejecting attempts to gut environmental review standards for major development projects.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Electing progressive legislators is essential, but candidate victories can be tenuous. Will they keep the promises they made on the campaign trail? Will adversaries prevent them from enacting the policies they campaigned on? Will donors, special interests, and the next election cycle cause distractions? The answers to these questions are at the root of modern politics and political policy.

While electing candidates with strong climate platforms is essential to protecting the planet, ballot measures are an additional lever for voters and communities to exercise:

  1. Initiate Local Water Bonds: Look into whether your municipality or county has the statutory power to run a dedicated infrastructure bond for stormwater mitigation or lead pipe replacement.
  2. Watch Local Zoning on Data Centers: Pay close attention to local planning boards considering data centers or industrial energy expansions; the 2026 midterms proved that citizen-led ballot referendums can stop unsustainable projects that threaten energy grid capacity.
  3. Put Policy Directly to the People: If state legislatures stall on clean energy or conservation, grassroots coalitions can bypass the statehouse and take the question directly to the voters via the ballot. This takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, but in states where this is allowed and considering what’s at stake, it’s worth it!

An Actionable Playbook for Organizers

To get environmental measures on the ballot, here are three strategic takeaways for community organizers:

  1. Audit Your Local Ballot Options: Look up your city or county charter to see how many signatures are required to trigger a ballot proposition.
  2. Track the Anti-Initiative Backlash: As more environmental propositions show up on ballots, special interests such as fossil fuel companies may attempt to sponsor measures to raise signature thresholds or require supermajorities (like 60% requirements rather than a simple majority, as happened in Florida). In addition to getting climate policy on the ballot, we also have to defend the ballot proposition process as a whole.
  3. Start with Single-Issue Local Efforts: You don’t have to start with a massive statewide effort. As seen with this year’s data center referendums and local water protections, single-town zoning and utility initiatives can stop major resource exploitation and set precedents that can be used to ladder up to state and national efforts.

The voting ballot isn’t just for picking candidates—it is also a direct tool we have to protect our planet and all beings who share it so let’s use it the fullest extent possible. We have no time to waste!

creativity

From Scenic Retreat to Stormwater Sponge: Inside Central Park’s $35 Million Flood Overhaul in NYC

Christa Avampato
Harlem Meer. Photo from Central Park Conservancy. https://www.centralparknyc.org/locations/harlem-meer

Standing near the edge of the Harlem Meer this week, NYC’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani framed an ambitious underground civil engineering project in an unexpected way. Evoking the animated lore of Avatar: The Last Airbender, he introduced the city’s newest infrastructure overhaul as an act of civic waterbending: steering the flow of water across urban landscapes to serve and protect neighborhoods rather than swamp them with flood waters during storms.

For over 160 years, New Yorkers have seen Central Park as a scenic sanctuary—a place to wander wooded trails, watch seasonal and resident birds drift across calm ponds and soar from tree to tree, and take refuge from the city’s busyness.

Yet behind that tranquil landscape lies an ongoing operational dilemma:

  1. To keep the north end water bodies full during dry spells, the city continually pumps in roughly 175 million gallons of municipal drinking water every year.
  2. When severe storms hit, heavy runoff cascades off park terrain and adjacent streets, overwhelming local storm sewers and forcing floodwaters into basements, subway entrances, and avenues across Central and East Harlem.

The newly launched $35.7 million North End Recirculation Project transforms this 19th-century scenic retreat into an active, protective stormwater sponge.

The Unseen Problem: Drinking Water In, Storm Sewage Out

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux shaped the northern park waterways between 1862 and 1865, creating three interconnected bodies of water: The Pool, The Loch, and The Harlem Meer.

While these ponds look natural, their levels are maintained by the city. Every year, Central Park draws an estimated 175 million gallons of clean municipal drinking water simply to keep those ponds replenished.

Meanwhile, extreme rainfall events are increasing across New York City. The surrounding combined sewers can’t manage that sudden deluge. Runoff rapidly fills the Meer to capacity, backing up local drainage lines and forcing sewage-laden water into street intersections and ground-floor homes along the park’s boundaries.

Treating park water bodies purely as decorative scenery wastes clean drinking water during heatwaves and floods neighbors during storms.

How Central Park Acts as a Living Sponge Works

Rather than excavating massive subterranean concrete holds, the project uses the natural slope of Olmsted’s original layout across a 204-acre watershed.

  • Closed-Loop Recirculation: During dry periods, water from the Harlem Meer is continuously pumped back up to the top of The Pool, flowing downhill by gravity through The Loch and back into the Meer. Natural filtration keeps the water clean and circulating, eliminating the need to top off the ponds with city tap water.
  • Protective Catchment: When meteorologists forecast a heavy storm, park managers will lower the water level of the Harlem Meer in advance so it can take on the extra water and keep it in the park rather than flood the surrounding streets.
  • The Neighborhood Benefit: By temporarily draining part of the Meer, the city creates a vast empty space right before the storm. Rainwater from park hills and surrounding streets surges naturally into the Meer instead of rushing into neighborhood storm drains.

Once the storm passes, the captured water is filtered and recirculated, keeping 132 million gallons of stormwater out of neighborhood sewers every year—a massive 90% drop in sewer runoff from this watershed.

Environmental Justice at the Park Boundaries

Resilience infrastructure must protect the communities that face the greatest risk.

For years, East Harlem residents and advocates from organizations like WE ACT for Environmental Justice have highlighted how low-lying northern Manhattan streets bear the brunt of storm waters. Basement apartments flood, street corners become like impassable lakes, and sewer overflows dump untreated waste into open waterways and onto the streets.

By reimagining Central Park not just as a respite (which it certainly is!), but also as protective green infrastructure for Central and East Harlem, this project proves that green spaces can do the heavy lifting to help people as climate change intensifies.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Every public green space can play an active defensive role against extreme weather.

  • Rethink Decorative Water: Examine ponds and decorative fountains in your neighborhood. Advocate for retrofits that replace tap-water top-offs with recirculating, naturally filtered systems.
  • Demand Dynamic Infrastructure: Storage basins should not sit full during storms. Urge city managers to install smart valves and retention ponds that empty ahead of storms to catch neighborhood runoff.
  • Connect Park Boundaries to Community Needs: Beautiful parks should never be disconnected from the streets around them. Ensure public investments protect adjacent neighborhoods from runoff and sewer back-ups.

When we turn greenspaces into allies and collaborators, we save our drinking water, protect homes and businesses, and maintain the health of all beings who live in our communities.

creativity

A Healing Touch: How Healthy Corals Reached Out to Save Bleached Corals

Christa Avampato
Coral Reef. Photo by Shaun Low on Unsplash

We know how good it feels to get a hug from our loved ones. Science has shown that physical touch is vital for human health. For infants, a lack of regular physical contact, cuddling, and responsive care disrupts core physiological, hormonal, and neurological development. It turns out that on coral reefs, a healing touch can restore health, too.

When ocean temperatures spike, coral reefs across the globe experience sudden trauma and expel the microscopic, colorful algae living inside their tissues that supply up to 90% of the coral’s daily food through photosynthesis. Without them, the coral bleaches, starves, and often dies within weeks.

We’ve long believed bleached corals are a lost cause. A recent accidental laboratory discovery shattered that assumption. It turns out that healthy corals can resuscitate their bleached family members.

An Accidental Tumble in a Stanford Lab

The breakthrough began not with complex computer models, but with a physical accident in a laboratory at Stanford University.

Marine ecologist Steve Palumbi noticed that two small finger-coral fragments in an aquarium tank in his Stanford University lab had toppled over and landed against each other. One fragment was healthy; the family member of that coral was bleached.

Where they pressed together, Palumbi spotted something startling: a thin band of vibrant color was creeping across the bleached coral’s pale tissue. The healthy coral was quite literally giving their coral relative life.

Researcher Daniel Collins set up a simple experiment to test what happened:

  • He took pairs of genetically identical coral clones—one bleached, one healthy.
  • In five tanks, he placed the pairs directly in physical contact.
  • In five matching control tanks, he set the pairs apart without touching.

The results arrived with stunning clarity.

Every coral pair placed in physical contact thrived within days. The healthy partner acted as a living bridge, funneling microscopic algae directly into their starving relative. Within seven weeks, all five touching corals regained full color, rebuilt their algal populations, and made a complete recovery.

In the control tanks, every isolated coral died. Proximity alone did nothing. Physical contact between relatives made all the difference.

Nature’s Living Pipeline

Corals might look like colorful ocean rocks, but they are colonies of tiny soft animals building shared homes. When two fragments share the same DNA, their immune systems recognize family rather than an invading enemy. The healthy coral pumps life-giving tenants to their relative, giving emergency care.

This simple mechanism challenges how we think about ecological recovery. We often picture resilience as an individual trait—a single tough organism weathering a storm alone. Here, survival depends entirely on direct, physical connection. Communing is a matter of life and death.

Practical Hope for Global Reef Restoration

Ocean warming caused by climate change remains the single greatest threat to marine ecosystems. This discovery of coral touch gives restoration teams a powerful, low-cost tool.

  • Reimagining Coral Nurseries: Reef restoration groups often grow coral fragments on underwater ropes or metal frames with wide gaps between them to prevent competition. Grouping genetic twins together so they can touch could create built-in mutual support systems when temperatures rise.
  • Rapid Response Triage: Rather than waiting months for bleached wild reefs to slowly absorb free algae from murky waters, divers could actively graft healthy nursery clones onto bleached colonies immediately after heatwaves pass, jumpstarting recovery by months.
  • Accessible Conservation: This technique requires no expensive machinery, chemical injections, or proprietary technology. It relies solely on understanding natural behavior and arranging related living organisms with intention.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Nature repeatedly solves existential crises through cooperation rather than isolation.

  • Look for Simple Physical Bridges: The most durable resilience solutions often look less like high-tech interventions and more like thoughtful, natural arrangements.
  • Prioritize Direct Connection: Whether designing community shade canopies, restoring salt marsh shorelines, or nurturing neighborhood ecosystems, survival increases when individual pieces link into a shared network to help one another.
  • Stay Open to Accidental Clues: Breakthroughs often hide in plain sight when experiments do not go according to plan. Keen observation of living systems reveals pathways that theory sometimes overlooks or simply never considered.

When healthy living beings reach out and link arms with those in need, recovery begins and restoration can happen at speeds once thought impossible. It’s true for related corals, and it’s true for us, too.

creativity

From Runway to Resilience: Turning a Brooklyn Airfield into an Outdoor Public School Campus

Christa Avampato
Runway Green

At the southern edge of Brooklyn, where Flatbush Avenue dead-ends into Jamaica Bay, lies Floyd Bennett Field.

For decades, this massive stretch of historic aviation runways and decommissioned hangars has felt suspended in time. It was New York City’s first municipal airport, the takeoff point for historic transatlantic flights, and an active naval air station during World War II. Before that, it was Barren Island, absorbing the discarded waste of a rapidly developing city.

Today, this federal land is getting a new lease on life—an outdoor educational campus dedicated entirely to New York City public school students.

Runway Green, an ambitious nonprofit initiative founded by Brooklyn educator Geoff Roehm, recently secured a 60-year lease on seven acres of this airfield. Six decades of guaranteed land access for public education is an extraordinary civic commitment that builds the city’s resilience to climate change.

Breaking ground in 2027, the site will begin its first phase: turning three acres into a productive urban farm and ecological training ground in partnership with The Campaign Against Hunger.

More Than a Field Trip

Traditional environmental education in New York often looks like a four-hour school bus excursion outside the city. Runway Green is creating an interconnected, multi-organization ecosystem where students move from curious visitors to credentialed practitioners within the five boroughs.

  • Hands-on Exposure: A student might start with a single-day visit, getting their hands dirty in a maritime garden or exploring living shorelines with partners like Billion Oyster Project and New York Sun Works.
  • Immersive Fieldwork: Through partnerships with New York City Outward Bound Schools, teenagers can participate in multi-day leadership intensives and overnight camping on the bay.
  • Dual College Credit: Through a new collaboration with CUNY Kingsborough Community College, students will earn both high school and college credits through hands-on courses based directly on the field’s unique ecosystems.
  • Career Pathways: Instead of abstract career days, high schoolers will spend dedicated days each week working alongside environmental scientists, urban farmers, and green infrastructure builders, graduating with concrete credentials for clean-economy careers.
A rendering of the future charter school campus at Floyd Bennett Field. Photo courtesy of Launch at Floyd Bennett Field.

The Power of Place-Based Problem Solving

Climate resilience is best taught and learned when immersed in nature. Coastal ecology, food security, and storm surge management require tactile, multi-sensory engagement with the natural world.

By placing this campus directly inside Jamaica Bay’s dynamic coastal zone, the landscape becomes the teacher. Students will study the layered history of Barren Island and historic municipal flight while simultaneously restoring salt marshes, monitoring soil health, tracking wildlife, and learning how nature-based solutions protect southern Brooklyn neighborhoods from storm surges and flooding.

As emerging technologies and automated systems reshape our workforce (particularly entry-level white-collar desk jobs), the demand for grounded, physical problem-solving is increasing. Practical knowledge—how to restore a shoreline, construct a community solar project, manage a sustainable farm, and repair community infrastructure—will become ever-more important.

‘An unprecedented opportunity’ Brooklyn charter school plans new campus on Floyd Bennett Field.Courtesy of Launch Floyd Bennett Field.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Community collaboration and visionary long-term capital can generate solutions that benefit people and the planet.

  • Reimagine Public Lands: Look at underused federal, state, and city plots in your own borough. Advocate for long-term leases that protect parkland and dedicate space to civic, educational, and ecological renewal that benefits the entire community.
  • Support Hands-On Career Pipelines: Follow and champion organizations like Runway Green and The Campaign Against Hunger as they build pathways for city students to enter green trades, coastal restoration, and local food production.
  • Bridge Classrooms with Living Systems: Encourage your local school districts and community boards to invest in experiential, place-based learning partnerships where students earn college credits by solving neighborhood environmental challenges.

This transformation of Floyd Bennett Field does more than teach students about the environment. It empowers them to imagine and physically craft their future, and gives them a direct stake in protecting and running the city they call home.

creativity

When music moves you – a story from Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night

Christa Avampato
Opening Night at Carnegie Hall – 2026

It’s always such a special experience to feel music as well as hear it. That’s what happened at Carnegie Hall‘s opening night this week when I sat in the front row with my fabulous friend, Tara. The Berlin Philharmonic was conducted by Kirill Petrenko with Jonas Kaufmann as the soloist. Because we were sitting so close, we could see every expression and feel the emotion from Petrenko and every performer on the stage. We were immersed in the physicality of their performance, feeling their joy, pain, regret, and inspiration.

While I loved every piece, the one that still has me smiling is Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome) by Ottorino Respighi. I had never heard of the piece or the composer. It premiered in the U.S. 100 years ago at Carnegie Hall, performed by the New York Philharmonic. Its 4 sections are alternately playful, solemn, wonder-filled, frightening, and triumphant. To close out the piece and the performance, horn players were staged in the balcony of the Hall, announcing the hope and victory of better days. My eyes were misty and so were Tara’s. The audience jumped up for a standing ovation. Petrenko was thrilling to watch. Smiling and cheering for the orchestra members, and having them acknowledge the praise, elevated the whole evening for us.

I feel lucky to work for an organization that gives people this kind of experience—one that stays with them long after the final note, an organization that connects people through music, an organization that is an instrument of peace, awe, curiosity, and sheer happiness.

(And of course we had to round out the evening with delicious charbroiled oysters and NA prosecco at Tanner Smith’s, one of my favorite places in the neighborhood!)

creativity

6 Years Ago Today

Christa Avampato
Photo of me the day I found out I had breast cancer

October has always held a special place in my heart. Fall is my favorite season and I relish all the abundance that comes with it. October was also the month I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had my bilateral mastectomy. This month is filled with milestone anniversaries, and today, October 5th, is a big one.

Today, 6 years ago, I sat in the NYU Langone office of my breast surgeon, Dr. Freya Schnabel, and she definitively told me I had breast cancer. My friend, Meg, was next to me. Dr. Schnabel walked me through everything she knew from my biopsies: the stage, the aggressiveness, the location, and my options. She asked if I knew what I wanted to do. I did not cry. My voice did not shake. I told her I wanted a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction as soon as possible. She told me it was the right decision. And so it began.

The pre-surgical MRI revealed much more, showing my case was worse than we originally thought. Then surgery revealed I needed a second surgery days later because the pathology showed an even tougher road ahead. There would be chemo, radiation, more surgeries, and waves of intense medications that would persist for years with horrendous side effects that impacted my physical and mental health.

Today I look back at that stoic version of me who sat in that chair 6 years ago, knowing nothing about what was ahead, and I smile. She was so brave. So focused. So damn determined to live and heal and rise up stronger and healthier than ever. She decided right then and there, in that chair, that she was going to kick the ever-loving shit out of cancer.

And she did. We did.

So many people helped make that possible and I will never stop saying THANK YOU to all of you for all of it. Every single kind word and act that so many of you gave to me is permanently etched in my memory forever. I’m beyond grateful to you. 

I’m grateful for every day, the bad days included, because living and living well is a privilege denied to so many. I never take any of this beautiful, messy, imperfect, joyful life for granted. I’m doing my best to make the most of it.

creativity

Sunken Suppers: Walking Lower Manhattan’s Shifting Shorelines and Coastal Secrets for Climate Week NYC

Christa Avampato
Me leading our tour group. Photo by Shannon Carroll.

This is me in my happy place: sharing stories about New York City’s secret past, weaving together narratives about food, nature, and people. My second official Climate Week NYC event was a huge success!

On Tuesday evening, we gathered at South Street Seaport for the NYC’s Secrets & Lies walking tour, Sunken Suppers & Coastal Secrets, as part of Climate Week NYC. Together, we walked through centuries of changing coastlines—from ancient oyster reefs that once buffered this harbor against storm surges to colonial wharves, historic street markets, and the nature-based solutions along the water that are reimagining and rebuilding coastal resilience today.

A huge thank you to the 44 people who bought tickets. You are all stars with insightful questions, boundless curiosity, and great energy for the entire evening.

Tremendous gratitude to photographer Shannon Carroll for capturing the spirit of our group so brilliantly throughout the evening, and to Climate Group for sending Shannon to photograph our event, all the support you gave to us, and an incredible week. 🙏

Where should we take our secret history stories next? 🌊🦪

All photos by Shannon Carroll for Climate Week NYC

creativity

The Dignity of Relief: What Finland Can Teach NYC About Public Restrooms

Christa Avampato
The public restroom I used in a park in Helsinki, Finland. Photo by Christa Avampato.

I was winding my way through Helsinki, and I really needed to pee.

I had just taken a long run along the waterfront. I was so taken with how beautiful and peaceful everything looked that I just kept going, suddenly finding myself well over 30 minutes from my hotel. I pulled out my phone and searched for a public restroom nearby on Google Maps. One popped up close by… inside a public park.

A park bathroom? Did I dare?

As a New Yorker, every instinct screamed caution. Every New Yorker knows the quiet panic of being stranded outdoors with nowhere to go. Back home, we calculate emergency walking routes to department stores, buy unsolicited coffees to unlock bathroom door codes, or peer through subway station gates hoping for an open door. For decades, finding a clean, safe public restroom in New York City has felt like an impossible obstacle course. Denying people access to basic sanitation does not erase bodily needs. It degrades our streets, punishes working-class commuters and delivery workers, isolates families with young children, and strips basic dignity from public life.

Standing on that Finnish path, nature called and I had zero choice. I pushed open the door, braced myself, and had my eyes blown wide open.

Finnish public park bathrooms feel like a serene retreat. They are gorgeous, immaculate, crafted with metal that’s so clean it sparkles, and even carry a lovely, fresh scent.

Now, New York City is testing a new approach to our own street-level crisis. The Mamdani administration has begun installing 17 free, modular, ADA-accessible public restrooms across all five boroughs. Awarded through a 4 million dollar pilot contract with Throne Labs, these standalone units operate off-grid without requiring direct hookups to municipal water, power, or sewer mains. They feature running water, flushing toilets, touchless access, and solar-supported climate control.

At roughly 235,000 dollars per unit to build, install, and service, City Hall views this pilot as an enormous bargain. Building a single traditional plumbed restroom in a New York City park routinely costs between 1 million and 3 million dollars due to complex utility trenching, multi-agency permitting, and construction red tape.

Yet while New York leans into venture-backed modular technology to bypass utility headaches, my run through Helsinki showed me a very different truth: cities can provide clean, universal public sanitation at a fraction of that cost by reimagining civic design from the ground up.

Lessons from Helsinki: Two Paths to Affordable Public Access

Finland has treated public sanitation as vital civic infrastructure for centuries, tracing back to the first wooden public facilities built at the Suomenlinna fortress in 1748. Today, Helsinki provides reliable public relief through two complementary models:

1. The Zero-Dollar Street Furniture Model

Downtown sidewalks and busy transit squares feature sleek, automated green restrooms designed and operated by street furniture innovators like JCDecaux and Nordic manufacturer Danfo.

  • The Economics: These units cost municipal taxpayers virtually zero dollars. Helsinki exchanges commercial display rights on city bus shelters and information kiosks for the contractor manufacturing, installing, powering, and maintaining self-cleaning restrooms around the clock.
  • The Result: The public receives dependable, automated, clean street facilities funded entirely through private ad revenue rather than tax dollars.

2. The Ecological Dry Toilet (The Helsinki Huussi)

In public parks, island reserves, and along the very waterfront trails where I went running, Helsinki embraces the huussi—a beloved traditional Finnish composting outhouse modernized for urban life. Led by Chief Design Officer Hanna Harris, the city worked with architectural teams like The Dry Collective and ecological manufacturers like Pikkuvihreä to build stylish, prefabricated timber dry restrooms.

  • The Economics: Each prefabricated timber unit costs between 15,000 and 45,000 euros to build and install. Annual maintenance runs roughly 3,000 to 5,000 euros per unit to swap collection drums, restock natural wood shavings, and service the cabin.
  • The Ecological Loop: The system uses zero water. Instead of flushing gallons of treated drinking water down the drain, it diverts organic matter into batch-composting drums, safely curing waste into nutrient-rich soil and biogas for regional green spaces.

Helsinki installs and maintains an ecological dry restroom for about 10 to 20 percent of what New York pays for a single modular pilot unit.

High-Tech Workarounds vs. Resilient Public Systems

Comparing these programs exposes two contrasting philosophies of urban problem-solving:

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Comparison of NYC pilot project and Helsinki public restrooms

New York opted for a high-tech stopgap: proprietary software, remote cellular access, and heavy tanker truck service routes to skirt the city’s broken capital construction bureaucracy.

Finland opted for systemic design: either using advertising revenue to fund public goods, or deploying low-tech, biomimetic solutions that eliminate water use and mechanical failure points altogether.

Sanitation is climate resilience. When cities lack public bathrooms, human waste washes into storm drains during heavy downpours, polluting local estuaries and overloading combined sewer systems. Clean, accessible restrooms protect our waterways, safeguard street health, and give residents the freedom to walk, bike, and use public transit without anxiety.

New York’s 17 new restrooms mark a welcome first step. As our city works toward doubling its public bathroom network by 2035, embracing the financial creativity and ecological simplicity of models like Finland will help us build public spaces that truly welcome everyone.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Transforming civic infrastructure requires us to look beyond expensive stopgaps and demand smarter, circular design.

  • Rethink Public-Private Value: Advocate for municipal policies that channel commercial advertising revenue and developer concessions directly into neighborhood public amenities like restrooms, water fountains, and benches.
  • Pilot Low-Water and Composting Infrastructure: Urge local parks conservancies, community gardens, and urban farms to experiment with modern dry-composting facilities. Sustainable designs can bring clean sanitation to green spaces at a fraction of the cost of plumbed concrete buildings.
  • Use and Share Restroom Locators: Map out local facilities using community platforms like Got2Go and the city’s pilot bathroom tracker. Crowdsourcing data highlights neighborhood transit corridors that still lack basic coverage.
  • Demand Procurement Reform: Speak up at community board meetings and municipal hearings to demand streamlined park construction. Cities should not have to spend millions of dollars or hire private tech vendors just to install a basic, clean public restroom.

True civic care does not require over-engineered gadgets. It requires the collective will to build simple, durable, sustainable, and dignified shared spaces that respect every person who calls the city home.

The inside of the restroom I used in a park in Helsinki, Finland. Photo by Christa Avampato.
creativity

Sunken Suppers & Coastal Secrets: Uncovering NYC’s Maritime Food History for Climate Week NYC

Christa Avampato
Fraunces Tavern in NYC. Photo by Christa Avampato.

When global leaders, researchers, climate advocates, scientists, and business managers gather across New York City for Climate Week NYC 2026 next week, the conversations will often hover at 30,000 feet. We will hear about carbon offsets, macroeconomic shifts, and international energy policy, as well as companies talking (often in broad strokes) about their actions and programs.

Those high-level summits matter. Yet climate resilience does not start in a boardroom—it lives under our feet, in the streets we navigate daily, and along the shorelines that shape our city.

Long before seawalls and modern bulkheads defined Lower Manhattan, this shoreline functioned as a dynamic, edible ecosystem. Oysters the size of dinner plates stabilized storm surges, tidal wetlands cushioned the coast, and maritime markets fed a growing metropolis straight from local waters and busy sidewalks. The street names we walk every day—Water Street, Pearl Street, Front Street—trace the literal history of how New Yorkers continually pushed soil into the harbor, reshaping the edges of New York’s islands while distancing ourselves from the natural systems that sustained us to make us the city we are today.

Next week, I’m hosting Sunken Suppers & Coastal Secrets: NYC’s Maritime Food History Walking Tour. It’s an official Climate Week NYC walking tour centered on food to trace those sunken histories and explore how our maritime past holds the keys to our climate future.

History as a Climate Compass

Looking at climate adaptation through the lens of history changes how we view resilience:

  • Rediscovering Living Infrastructure: Oysters and salt marshes were never just food sources; they were natural breakwaters. Rebuilding living shorelines today is not a new invention—it is a return to an ecological equilibrium that protected these New York islands for centuries.
  • Understanding What Lies Beneath: When we walk Lower Manhattan, we are standing on layers of ballast stones, discarded oyster shells, historic timber, and sunken treasure. Knowing how past generations transformed the coast helps us understand why these same neighborhoods flood today during severe storms.
  • Reconnecting Food to Place: A resilient city requires a resilient food web. Examining how New York historically fed itself from surrounding estuaries reveals the urgent need to protect regional waterways, support local fisheries and food-based businesses, and eliminate pollution in our waters, as well as our air and soil.

Join the Walk

We already have a great crowd who’s bought tickets, but a handful of spots remain for those who want to step out of the conference rooms and experience Climate Week NYC from the street level with me.

We will walk the historic paths of Lower Manhattan around the South Street Seaport, examine how colonial maritime trade shaped our physical geography, and discuss how community-driven ecological repair can protect our coastal neighborhoods like this one from rising tides and storms.

Whether you join in person or follow along from afar, reconnecting with the historical geography of your own neighborhood is one of the most powerful ways to ground climate action in reality.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

You don’t need to attend an international summit to build a climate mindset. You can start by observing how your own neighborhood interacts with the living world.

  • Find What Existed Before Modern Infrastructure: Look up historical topographic maps of your neighborhood (such as the Welikia Project for NYC) or check out exhibits at your local museums. Notice where streams, marshes, and natural shorelines once flowed beneath modern pavement. That historical geography often predicts where water pools during heavy downpours today and opens up our imaginations to what we may be able to restore so that all living beings thrive.
  • Support Nature Restoration: Back grassroots organizations working directly in your neighborhood. In NYC, we have quite a few including the Billion Oyster Project, local riverkeeper groups, and Natural Areas Conservancy. Restoring native habitats builds long-term natural buffers against storm damage and climate resiliency.
  • Walk with Curiosity: Take an hour this week to walk your neighborhood with fresh eyes. Notice where rainwater drains, how trees and vegetation exist alongside human-made infrastructure, and your wildlife neighbors.

Next week, I will be sharing a full recap from my walking tour, along with dispatches, field notes, and ideas gathered from events across Climate Week NYC that I’ve attended.