Improving the Community, One Planter at a Time

The BCEQ and HRWG are leading an effort to connect the communities of Harlem and the rest of Bronx and New York Counties to their waterfront of the Harlem River through outreach and green infrastructure. The redevelopment of the Harlem River to provide parkland and water access to the local community, while simultaneously preventing contaminated stormwater from reaching the waterway, is a small but important part of the bigger picture. Currently, the BCEQ and HRWG, working with engineers from dLandstudios and volunteers from Greenbelt Native Plants, have developed and maintained a one-of-a-kind Pop-Up Wetlands, which uses a floating Gaia Soil (developed at the Gaia Institute) that retains water and offers a growing media for native marsh plants, at Pier 5 that captures some of the stormwater runoff that would have otherwise reached the Harlem River. By reaching out to the community for volunteers, the Pop-Up Wetlands have been constructed and planted to allow for evapotranspiration of the water captured, with debris cleared on a regular basis by community groups such as Sustainable South Bronx to allow for the Wetlands to continue operating smoothly. A local community college, Eugenio María de Hostos Community College of The City University of New York (Hostos), has also joined the effort to maintain and study the Wetlands and how the environment might benefit from more stormwater being diverted to additional planters.

For more information on the Pier 5 stormwater capture planters, and other BCEQ projects, visit: http://www.bceq.org/2013/12/10/pier-5-pop-up-wetland-plants-clean-harlem-river/

Volunteers for the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, Harlem River Working Group and others, plant a variety of wetland flora in the engineered soil that fills the planter boxes of their unique Pop-Up Wetlands. Photo courtesy of Paul Mankiewicz, the Gaia Institute, who helped design this project