Going Coastal

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Glenn Phillips of New York City Audubon, left, and William E. Morris, on the board of Mariners Marsh Conservancy, touring Arlington Marsh.

“Simply the last best unprotected New York City coastal wetland,” raved a coalition of 20 environmental groups.

“A very fine pearl,” gushed City Councilman Michael E. McMahon. “The Rolls-Royce of environmental parcels.”

The subject of all this breathlessness is a decidedly unpristine swath of Staten Island known as Arlington Marsh, a boggy green break in one of the city’s most industrialized stretches of waterfront.

After decades atop local environmentalists’ must-save lists and a few brushes with development proposals, the marsh, a city-owned parcel on the island’s north shore, got its big break in September. The Bloomberg administration offered about 55 acres of it to the Parks Department, which plans to keep it wild.

Every schoolchild should now know how important wetlands are even in cities, how they filter water, soak up runoff, provide wildlife habitat and prevent shoreline erosion. In New York City, where a report this summer found that the marsh islands of Jamaica Bay are disappearing at a rate of 33 acres a year, tidal wetlands like Arlington Marsh are growing ever more precious.

“I know people think of them as mosquito-ridden swamps,” said Glenn Phillips, the executive director of New York City Audubon. “But they’re really magnificent.”

Arlington Marsh, though it has had its share of degradation, was particularly sought after because it links an already preserved inland marsh, Mariners Marsh, to the Kill Van Kull, the waterway that separates Staten Island from Bayonne, N.J.

But what’s really so magnificent about Arlington Marsh? And what’s out there, anyway?

One recent Tuesday afternoon, at a reporter’s request, a small group of open-space advocates, including Mr. Phillips, and a city parks official gathered on the island’s northwest corner to poke around.

This is what they found.

The marsh, flanked on the west by the bustling New York Container Terminal and on the east by a string of shipyards and tugboat docks, sits behind a chain-link fence along Richmond Terrace, the two-lane road that traverses the north shore. Guarding the entrance to the marsh was a small mountain of trash. Broken bathroom tiles, coffee cups, an empty can of Alpo Prime Slices in Gravy.

But even here, an unfamiliar yellow flower forced its way up through the debris. Mr. Phillips identified it as tarweed, a plant he had never seen in New York City. “Smell,” he said, breaking off a stem. It smelled, fittingly enough, like tar.

A brief woodland separates the road from the marsh proper. Fallen sycamore leaves and the odd chunk of window glass crunched underfoot. The woods ended abruptly at a line of the tall reedy weeds called phragmites, and a trash-strewn trail of broken wooden pilings led into the marsh.

Mr. Phillips spotted an animal dropping, ripe with half-digested berries. “Looks like fox,” he said. A few pilings ahead, a large praying mantis stood in repose.

Then the phragmites gave way to a low open field of native spartina grass, the leading indicator of a functioning salt marsh — it provides shelter for juvenile fish and nutritious seed for birds. The spartina known as saltmeadow cordgrass is also called salt hay. Hundreds of years ago, said Clark Wallace, a project manager for the Trust for Public Land, it was one of Staten Island’s biggest cash crops, sold for animal feed.

“This is a window into what Staten Island used to be,” he said. “And here it still is.”

The spartina, which grows along a sheltered cove and makes up about 15 acres of the whole parcel, is what makes Arlington Marsh so dear, said William K. Tai, director of the parks department’s natural resources group. “When you have a moderately healthy marsh,” he said, “you’re way ahead of the game. You’re not trying to restore an area; you’re trying to protect it.”

Maybe so, but the site will require years of cleanup. William E. Morris, a board member of the Mariner’s Marsh Conservancy, which lobbied the city hard to preserve Arlington Marsh, said he had personally removed 9,000 tires from Mariners Marsh and was prepared to take on a similar task. “I’m ready,” he said. “I just need some help.”

Up ahead, where the tide lapped the edge of the grass, a kingfisher perched on a piling. A great blue heron stood stock still. A tiny channel sliced through the marsh, its banks lined with little snails and the odd fiddler crab.

Mr. Phillips pointed out a skinny green succulent. “Pickleweed!” he exclaimed. Pickleweed is sold at gourmet markets and fine restaurants under the name sea beans. Whole Foods Market charges $14.99 a pound for sea beans from Oregon. The ones at Arlington Marsh tasted better, though Mr. Tai cautioned against eating them because of possible contamination.

Behind a stand of reeds, an unseen pheasant cried. “Cuzzup! Cuzzup! Cuzzup!”

There were plenty more unseen treasures. Richard T. Lynch, a botanist at the Sweetbay Magnolia Conservancy, a nonprofit group based on Staten Island, said he had observed several critically imperiled annuals. The average person, however, may not be able to experience the wonders of the marsh up close any time soon, or possibly ever. The process of transferring the property, planning the preserve and cleaning it up is expected to take years. And the parks department may decide that the wildest parts of the marsh are too precious to be disturbed.

 

“Unless there’s a way to do something like a boardwalk” — a very expensive proposition — “we’re not just going to fling open the gates and tell people to have at it,” Mr. Tai said.

A peninsula at the eastern end of the marsh, scoured by the tides and therefore inhospitable to spartina, is a better bet for public access, Mr. Tai said. A dirt trail over an oil pipeline leads to a beach covered with black-and-gold sand and scattered with multicolored sea glass.

Fans of urban waterfronts could not ask for a better vista: old brick warehouses and gantry cranes across the water in Elizabeth, N.J.; the graceful arch of the Bayonne Bridge; tugs and ferries in dry dock on the Staten Island side, and, off in the distance, the Manhattan skyline. The marsh area also includes a parcel west of the cove known as Bridge Creek.

Back at the spartina field, Mr. Phillips was waxing poetic.

“To eyes that are aware,” he said, “there’s as much activity in this salt marsh as there is in a basketball game.” He gestured toward a patch of grass. “When you see the salt crystals on every leaf,” he said, “you’re like, ‘Wow.’ These are flowering plants that evolved on land and are coming back to meet the sea, and all their cellular processes are not designed for this. These are plants that even in the best of times live in a toxic waste dump. Then you add in oil spills and raw sewage.”

Susan Clark, the public affairs director for the Trust for Public Land, fixed him with a smile.

“You’re really going to make people want to come out here,” she said.

By ANDY NEWMAN

NY Times