A Review of Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City, edited by Carl A. Zimring and Steven H. Corey

Reviewed by Erik Wallenberg

Coastal cities face a dizzying array of environmental problems, from rising seas due to climate change chaos, to polluted waters endangering fish, wildlife, and drinking water. New York City, rocked by Superstorm Sandy and struggling to rebuild a harbor ecosystem that can sustain edible fish and shellfish populations, is ripe for historical examination as environmental crises increase. Throughout its modern lifetime, New York harbor has experienced waste dumping, toxic pollution, a changing coastline, and growth as an international shipping port with attendant dredging issues, all of which we might look to for current context, historical lessons, and to help us better understand our relationship within this ecosystem.

Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City
Edited By Carl A. Zimring, Steven H. Corey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
320 pages

The editors of Coastal Metropolis have assembled a collection by established historians, younger scholars, and authors outside of academia doing related work on the intersection of New York City waste and water. In the Introduction, the editors situate the book to engage “capital accumulation where land and sea come together,” how technology is used to control and transform nature, and “urban metabolic functions.” While the chapters explore these themes to varying degrees, the editors stay tightly focused on water and waste. It is not always clear where capital fits in, or how they are using the notion of the “metabolism of the city.”[1]

In the closing chapter, before the editors’ conclusion, we are treated to a masterful discussion of the economics of this coastal metropolis, a short and clear analysis that would have served as a valuable opening chapter to orient the reader. Ted Steinberg establishes how this port city became a center of capital, from its global connections to the sugar trade to the rise of heavy industry and beyond. The context is essential as Steinberg takes us through the neoliberal phase of capitalism to the near current moment. In looking at polluting industries he also reminds us that, though politicians sometimes obscure this fact, climate chaos and the attendant rising sea is not the only ecological problem that New York City faces.

Instead of focusing on their intended themes, the editors’ have chosen to open this collection with a chapter by Joel Tarr that strays far from them, and has been twice printed in other books, first in 1990.[2] The chapter rambles at twice the length of any other in the book, and while it covers a lot of ground (the entire state of New York) it does not cover much on the promised themes on capitalism, technology, and waste and metabolism. Editing this chapter down to the pertinent elements would have left room to add more than the couple of paragraphs the author added on sewage, toxics, and aquatic life. While it may have been an attempt to set a broader context, the chapter’s lack of focus on water is a confusing place to start a book titled “Coastal Metropolis.”

The book continues on a rocky start with chapter two, “A Hinge in History.” This examination of Jamaica Bay, co-authored by a group of three, feels mashed together. Arguments and history get repeated, sometimes out of order and without a clear understanding of why oyster consumption from Jamaica Bay, a large focus of the chapter, collapsed. Incidentally, we are given a clearer timeline and reasons for the collapse in the following chapter by a different author. “A Hinge in History” reads as more of a report than a history, with little feel for the people working on the bay and consuming its shellfish. There is an interesting exploration of the rights to fishing, shell-fishing, leases, poaching, and the attendant legal battles that could have been given more detail and a consideration of the aquatic commons might have gone deeper.

By chapter three the analysis is clearer, though the waters in question are murkier. This well-written chapter on the Metropolitan Sewer Commission’s investigation of New York harbor, completed in 1914, more directly addresses the themes laid out by the editors. Kara Murphy Schlichting gives a clear picture of this commission, which was the first in New York history to consider the underwater environment. She demonstrates that certain economic interests benefited from polluted waters, using the example of marine boring worms that “could not survive in the decimated ecosystem of polluted wharves.” Thus a polluted harbor harmed the fishing and shellfish industry, but saved shipping interests from having to pay for pier repairs, and she is able to highlight the “chasm between economic and ecosystem health.” When there is a gap between economic benefits and ecological benefits, it became customary for economics to take precedence. As a result, the remainder of the 20th century saw any attempt at environmental reforms framed as economically beneficial; highlighting the volume of dumping that impinged on waterflow, for example, those concerned about harbor pollution noted the difficulty that this would create for navigation of large ships. The outcomes of these struggles are not addressed, but Schlichting shows the competing interests that continue to this day, and suggests that when economic and ecological needs cannot be made compatible, the economic wins out.

A delightful chapter on the Rockaways follows, reminding us that New York is “a city divided by water.” We learn about the ecological transformations undertaken to unite the Rockaways with the central city (including building up the islands and creating breakwaters for train tracks in Jamaica Bay). Given the struggles for better transportation today, the chapter explores the difficulties in overcoming these divides. While modern day boosters push for people to “view the city’s rivers and bays not as obstacles to many commuters but as much-needed alternatives,” David Soll shows the real barriers (the comparatively small number of residents in the Rockaways, the long journey by train, and the cost of running a ferry service) to making this so.

Our journey along the coast takes us up the Hudson River to Storm King where we learn of a long-abandoned project for a hydro pumping power plant that was meant to help stabilize electrical power delivery in New York City but that ended up bringing regulation to power generation all along the Hudson. In the following chapter, author Adam Charboneau explores restoration projects along the Bronx River, which gives him a chance to show how “cleaning up” the river gives a pass to the social crisis of gentrification that real estate development masks with so-called “green amenities.” In the process he makes use of innovative sources, reading marketing materials to explore the use of images of the country and frontier to show how working class people are displaced through a process of “greening” the city.

A chapter from Martin Melosi tracing dumping on various islands around the city, from Ellis to Rikers to a host of less-famous islands, is adapted from his epic book on the Fresh Kills Landfill. Here, in different form, it offers an opening to consider the role of small islands around the metropolis and perhaps to expand our thinking about what gets dumped and other ways we might approach humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, I was primed to read more in this collection that would take up the interrelated themes of treating some people and some environments as expendable. Ellis Island, that famed spot in the middle of New York harbor, gets a passing mention in the book. Yet given its use as a quarantine site, a containment center for people and diseases, I was hoping for a fuller engagement with its environmental history. Similarly, an exploration of Rikers Island could bring together the history of carceral studies and environmental history. Alas, that is not on offer here.

Perhaps the most conceptually interesting chapter in the collection comes from Tina Peabody, who asks us to look at waste not simply as a nuisance to be dealt with, but to understand how it was transformed into a commodity, centrally as fill to build land. Whether to feed the real estate market, or to create spaces of recreation and consumption, she shows how some in the city actually had an interest in generating more, not less, waste material. Two of the following chapters on ocean dumping approach the topic from different perspectives, one on the interplay between activists and legal rulings, and the other on the relationship between scientific research and the struggle against dredging waste. Both authors engage the relationship between the state, activists, and environmental reform, and offer a useful comparison of approaches and source material for students and scholars.

The major focus on waste in this collection is not surprising, especially if one knows the work of the editors (and the series editors). But for someone picking up the book based on its title and description, this may come as a surprise. If a paperback version is to be released, it would benefit from a title that adds this descriptor. In fact, one chapter, “Composting and Garbage in New York City” is so focused on waste I had to read it a second time to try and find how it related to the “coastal” in the book's title. The author offers a fascinating look at the history of composting in the city, including an exploration of a little-known entity called Ecology, Inc. Yet other than a passing reference to early days of dumping organic waste into the ocean, the waterscape is not present.

Other drawbacks are more significant. The collection engages in a very limited way with questions of environmental racism, environmental justice, and civil rights more generally. Given its focus on New York City, a major location of these struggles, this is a notable omission. While the index doesn’t contain entries for any of these terms, the editors do write about the importance of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance in their conclusion. Each editor also spends a few paragraphs in their respective chapters noting a struggle for environmental justice, but a more sustained engagement with these issues and the activists organizing around them would be welcome.

There are other omissions that may be understandable editorial decisions but would have been valuable inclusions in this book, and are certainly important for students of this topic to explore alongside the material contained in Coastal Metropolis. For instance, I expected a chapter on the Gowanus Canal, a storied waterway in Brooklyn and one that intersects with the environmental justice movement. Thinking globally, I was hoping for a look at the imperial and military history that connects the environmental justice focus to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. While Steven Corey has a couple of paragraphs on the fight to stop an incinerator at the Navy Yard, the original damage done by the Navy polluting the land with hazardous materials is not addressed. I also expected that though this is a New York focused book, that the port of New Jersey and the environmental connections would be examined as part of the larger metropolitan area. While New Jersey does get an occasional mention, and dredging of the shipping canals is the partial focus of one chapter, a more sustained engagement with New Jersey’s close connection to New York harbor is missing.

While some topics attract the focus of multiple authors, some of these other important areas of New York City’s coastal environmental history are absent altogether. A tighter focus on the themes and a broader collection of locations and issues would have made this a stronger volume. Still, it’s exciting to think about how the ideas assembled here might be expanded and how they might transfer to other port cities. Hopefully this collection, a first to bring together these “coastal” environmental histories of the metropolis, will inspire others to go deeper into some less traveled waters.

Erik Wallenberg is a PhD Candidate in history at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation examines the portrayal of environmental crises, politics, and science in activist theater in the US across the 20th century. He has a BS in environmental studies and an MA in history, both from the University of Vermont. He is acquisitions editor at Science for the People.

[1] The idea of a “metabolic rift” has been explored historically and applied to contemporary situations most prominently by John Bellamy Foster in his many books, starting with Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000) and has also been taken up by dozens of others in the fields of sociology, history, science, and beyond. The editors miss an opportunity to engage with this concept, which has been one of the most useful frameworks in recent scholarship for understanding environmental crises.

[2] See editor's note on this chapter, p. 249 in Coastal Metropolis that says the “chapter was originally published in somewhat different form” in The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Change in the Biosphere over the Past 300 years in 1990, and again in The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective in 1996.