Paulie Milioto, 47, stands on Newtown Creek’s polluted north shore in Long Island City, Queens. He is wearing a grey t-shirt, tan Carhartts, and work boots, with a little steel poking through the worn-out leather at the toe. A car tire hanging from the creek’s dilapidated sea wall serves as a makeshift ladder for Milioto, nimbly making his way to the sailboat that was his home for eleven years.
His is the third boat out from the shore in a small, ramshackle marina on the west side of the Pulaski Bridge. Close to the mouth of Newtown Creek, this spot is home to about 30 small vessels, mostly sailboats except for Milioto’s houseboat, which he bought off Craigslist for a dollar in 2017. The boats, like the creek itself, are in bad shape. Ripped sails cast ragged shadows on trashed decks, their paint peeling like bad sunburns. The boat next to Milioto’s houseboat sank a few weeks ago; it is now back among its battered fleet, wearing a coat of dried mud.
The shorelines of Newtown Creek are an industrial ghost town, lined with recycling centers, food and beverage factories, abandoned lots strewn with piles of metal scraps and refuse, and a lone pink brick building called SugarDaddy’s Gentlemen’s Club which sits on the edge of Dutch Kills — the first branch of the creek reaching up into Long Island City. More notably, the creek’s shores have been studded with gas and oil manufacturers for over a century, including several arms of J.D. Rockefeller’s greasy Standard Oil conglomerate, one of them the infamous ExxonMobil.
“It’s not even a marina. The fucking sea wall is falling apart,” Milioto said, grinning at the derelict harbor bobbing around him. “There’s tons of sketchy shit around. It varies depending on where you are, yet somehow it just keeps going, and nothing bad enough has happened where the authorities have threatened us all.”
Newtown Creek has been overlooked for as long as he’s been anchored there, Milioto said. With neglect comes isolation from mainstream society. “It’s like we’re little islands, you know, there’s no address to send mail to me,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a community. Along the forgotten banks are fire pits, shells and empty bottles hanging from tree branches, canoes carrying eager guests, and sprouting community sites where occasional musical performances and environmental activist meetings occur. It’s remarkable to think that people congregate on the creek’s shores in the wake of lingering toxins and lethal pollution.
In 1978, after years of heavy industry along the creek, a large sheen of oil was spotted on the water’s surface. Millions of gallons of oil covering 55 acres had oozed from the ExxonMobil plant in Greenpoint, under the Apollo Street bulkhead, and into the creek. Nearly a half century later, it remains the largest terrestrial oil spill in U.S. history — a human-made disaster that, more than any other, publicized the wounds of America’s industrial legacy.
In January of this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized an early action plan to dredge the East Branch — arguably the most polluted half-mile stretch of Newtown Creek— 15 years after its original designation as an EPA Superfund site. The creek’s designation in 2010 came under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which prioritizes the cleanup of hazardous, often abandoned, waste sites. The EPA’s efforts will target Newtown Creek’s toxic underwater sediment lingering from centuries of industrial dumping — soil known to many as “black mayonnaise”.
The sediment is contaminated with non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and volatile organic compounds — all of which pose health risks to surrounding residents and aquatic life. This interim remedial plan is currently in the pre-design investigation (PDI) stage, and the EPA has not produced a start date for the construction yet. Once started, it will likely take three years to complete. And after that, there’s another 3.3 miles of creek to clean.
Some boat residents, like Milioto, are skeptical — the cleanup is a storm brewing, a fog of rumor-building tension. Newtown Creek is on the precipice of a long-anticipated change. The waterway has been bobbing on the periphery of government action for decades, and January’s EPA determination rode out on a riptide. Against the noxious backdrop of its industrial legacy, boat dwellers, activists, and environmentally-focused communities have seen creative and utopic potential in the creek’s abandoned shores and currents. Partially a result of government negligence, they’ve been reimagining the use of this area over the past decade. The cleanup marks a shift in public perspective — the creek’s potential has become more widely recognized, and gentrification threatens to plow over a vision backed by renegade creatives. Those who have invested care and attention in the creek despite its toxicity wonder: How will this ostensibly positive environmental change challenge the imaginative and grassroots initiatives that have found a home on the creek?
Milioto, who moved onto the creek a few years after its 2010 Superfund designation, is certainly concerned. Originally from New Jersey, Milioto spent most of his life moving by freight train or by sea. After learning to sail on a voyage from Miami to the Bahamas with a ragtag fleet, Milioto bought his own vessel the summer after Hurricane Sandy. He tied up on Coney Island Creek and Bushwick Inlet before anchoring on Newtown Creek.
“I was traveling on and off for ten years and living on and off in punkhouses,” Milioto said, turning his head to watch a tugboat named Sea Lion push a barge piled high with New York City waste. As it passed, blue and green plastic aboard the garbage scow glimmered in the sun, mimicking the water’s reflective dimples. His eyes followed the wake, waiting for the fading ripples to lick the side of his boat. “This was the longest I’ve lived anywhere,” he added. “It’s such an amazing place, you know?”
Close to the mouth of the Dutch Kills branch of Newtown Creek resides one of the creek’s newer residents, 40-year-old Stonie Clark. Clark has been on the creek for almost two years, buying her first boat for $600 to rescue its motor (worth twice the asking price), which she then installed in her new boat — a 1960s 30-foot sailboat named L’Spree.
Almost always seen in windswept braids and a toothy grin, Clark has long found comfort on the outskirts of mainstream society, much like anyone who’s recognized the creek as something more than a dump.
Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, Clark’s mother was a hairstylist who held Clark accountable for practicing guitar for 30 minutes each day. After arriving in New York at the age of 26, her friend introduced her to Silent Barn — a music venue with a hair salon tucked in the back. “It was like a super punk, dirty barber shop,” Clark said excitedly. She watched bands rotate through the venue while she snipped and styled anarchist hairdos.
With a friend, Clark started a musical project of her own in 2016 called Straw Pipes, an amorphous eight-member band. After a hiatus during the pandemic, Straw Pipes is slowly transforming into a performance art project.
It was through her job at Silent Barn that she found out about Newtown Creek — one of her clients was living in a sailboat. It seemed like an offbeat paradise for someone like Clark. “I’m not fully functional in regular society, living in a normal way with a normal job,” she said. “I just always want to work in a field that does not harm people. And I have a fairly broad definition of what might harm people. Like, I wouldn’t want to be a marketer.”
Along her meandering path to Newtown Creek, community has always rooted Clark, and it’s something she hopes she can bring to the creek residents. “I think I’m one of the most social boat dwellers. I am going around in a canoe, meeting all the other boat people, going to little boat parties, or inviting people sailing,” Clark said.
“It’s obviously not purely utopian. There’s definitely a lot of conflict and a lot of mismatched personalities,” Clark said of the boat community living on Newtown Creek. “Not everyone is there for the same ideals.”
Even though dozens of people live in sailboats, Clark and Milioto are some of the only sailors on the creek. Being on the east side of the Pulaski Bridge means that the tide dictates most of Clark’s ventures off the creek. “I can only go under the bridge at low tide or a tiny bit higher,” she said, peering up her mast. “So whenever it’s high tide and I gotta leave, I set up an appointment [for a bridge opening] two hours in advance.”
The boat dwellers of Newtown Creek live at the whims of the natural elements — the pull of the moon wakes them and rocks them to sleep. But in New York City, nature is mostly an afterthought, distorted and polluted unless it features an NYC Parks Department leaf on a nearby gate. In the city, the roles are reversed: the natural world exists at the whims of humans and their toys.
“You see really crazy trash floating in [the creek] all the time. I mean, I see bumpers of cars … There’s like these massive trash barges all around, and sometimes the stuff will just fall down off of them. I saw a couch floating in there the other day,” Clark said.
“We wouldn’t be able to [live in the creek] if we were in a clean body [of water]. [The government] wants to clean it up and I get it, but why do they really want to clean it up? Do they actually care?” Milioto asked, with a wayward edge in his tone. As he climbed down the ladder from the boat deck to the cabin, he glanced through the circular windows, the view beyond their ringed frames rising and falling with the tide.
“They want to do it for real estate,” he claimed. “They could put a park and condos here. Every year, I see more and more industrial buildings come down and new buildings go up. They’re creeping this way,” Milioto said.
The creek is wedged between neighborhoods that have also seen hypergentrification over the last decade. In 2024, the New York Times reported that Greenpoint saw a noteworthy 47% increase in rental inventory with the median rent being $4,350, a 4.1% increase from the previous year. Long Island City has seen similar spikes — 7,200 new apartments, mostly luxury and high-rises, were built between 2020 and 2025, with an average rent $625 more than the typical rent price in the area. Greenpoint has also added numerous new apartments; the housing crisis in both these neighborhoods is not due to a housing scarcity per se, but an affordability scarcity.
Meanwhile, a waterfront south of Newtown Creek, in Brooklyn, lives out Militio’s prophecy. Gowanus Canal — another EPA Superfund site that’s sped ahead of Newtown Creek in terms of remedial action — has seen intense rezoning over the past two decades. In 2013, a Whole Foods went up along the shoreline, an infamous mark of gentrification. Additionally, the New York City Council approved a Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning project in November of 2021, including a plan to build a 950 unit housing complex where a manufactured gas plant once stood.
Milioto has seen some of this change firsthand. “I saw the K Bridge in pieces get barged out,” he recalled the reconstruction of the Kosciuszko Bridge which was completed in 2019 to accommodate an increase in traffic. “I saw it one morning pass me in pieces as they took the old one away and brought it wherever they brought it.”
History warrants Milioto’s skepticism. Long ago, the creek fell in the Minnehanonck territory of the indigenous Canarsie people. Minnehanonck roughly translates to “place at the mouth of the tributaries where plums grow in abundance.” Pre-colonization, the estuary was an emerald marshland laden with cord grasses where ribbed mussels nestled and beach plum trees sprouted. Salt water from the Atlantic coursed through it, bringing nutrients to a healthy ecosystem.
As industrialization surged in the early 1800s, a new kind of environment was born — factory smoke polluted the air, the waterway was a highway for cargo ships, and profit was the undertow. Refineries sprung up along the banks of Newtown Creek, including J.D. Rockefeller’s legendary Standard Oil Trust.
“All of those industries left different marks on land here,” said Sandy Li, the Community Engagement Coordinator at Newtown Creek Alliance, a community-led non-profit organization based on the creek. “They completely changed the shape of the waterway, and they just dumped waste and different kinds of chemicals into the water.”
As the creek’s purpose shifted to line the pockets of businessmen and stockholders, the United States Army Corps of Engineers designed a new shape for Newtown Creek to make the corridor more suitable for boat traffic. Dredging, imported soil fill, and the installation of bulkheads along the shoreline hardened the creek’s edges to 90-degree angles, corralling the tidal current.
“It’s the story of how New York was built in a lot of ways,” said Daniel Wendlek, a Queens resident active in cleanup initiatives along the Dutch Kills branch of the creek. “Which is: ‘We are going to change the shoreline. We’re going to change the composition here. We’re going to just deal with our waste in a way that also benefits [economic] growth, without regard for ecosystem or environment.’”
Due to development, 75% of natural wetlands in the area were lost, and an annual $139 million (in 1912 prices) worth of cargo took their place.
As industrialization accelerated, New York’s population climbed, and its surrounding waters quite literally became communal toilets. The pattern of dumping raw sewage into Newtown Creek started in the mid-19th century, but the situation has been further exacerbated by the city’s archaic sewer system.
With 22 Combined Sewage Overflow (CSO) outfalls, an estimated 1.2 billion gallons of combined sewage overflow are discharged into Newtown Creek each year, resulting in harmful algae blooms that reduce its dissolved oxygen levels.
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has been working to address the CSO issue, and submitted a Long Term Control Plan to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in June of 2017. The plan, estimated to be completed by 2042, proposes building a 39 million ton storage pipe tunnel to capture 62.5% of the annual CSO volume. Considering the CSOs adds the City of New York to a list of responsible parties in the creek’s cleanup, slotted under the oil industry giants the EPA is attempting to hold accountable.
The rolling list of polluters complicates government action: which agency is in charge of what? Most of the government’s stagnant pace in remedial action is a result of what Wendlek calls “bureaucratic alphabet soup.”
Community-organized groups like NCA are working to hold the maze of agency acronyms — EPA, DEC, DEP, DOT — accountable and individually productive. “Our role is to work with them as much as we can and let them know we appreciate their work,” Li said. “But a lot of times we want them to do better.”
Candace Thompson is more blunt. Thompson is a self-described land steward of Stuy Cove Park, located on the other side of the East River, opposite the mouth of the creek; she and Wendlek were also part of grassroots remediation efforts on Dutch Kills. “The people who make these decisions, they all sit at desks at a great remove; these spaces are definitely not their priority,” she said.“It’s a place with so much potential, and you have to understand the gravity of what those legacy contaminants are.”
Gil Lopez, a compost professional and environmental educator for the New York-based non-profit organization Big Reuse, is trying to reimagine the future of Newtown Creek for community and environmental consciousness. Lopez is also the founder of Smiling Hogshead Ranch, a community garden and urban farm collective that began in 2011 on abandoned MTA-owned land. It’s connected to the creek via a rickety set of abandoned train tracks that cross over Dutch Kills. Through the ranch, Lopez became more acquainted with the creek’s shores.
“I never stayed on a boat — I usually stayed in a hammock,” he said. “I discovered the spot at Borden Avenue early in that time. It was derelict, trashed, used for various, non-approved uses, such as drug use and sales, prostitution, solicitation, illegal dumping.”
The site has been a work in progress for close to five years. During COVID, the Borden Avenue street end and neighboring vacant space underneath the Long Island Expressway became a space for recovery, born out of a need for a place to congregate outside, around a fire.
“In the fall of 2020, we had a huge cleanup effort. We filled a dozen large 30 cubic yard containers that the DEP gave us, with over 50 volunteers in cooperation with the Newtown Creek Alliance,” Lopez said.
Then, in 2022, Lopez, Wendlek, and Thompson dug through gnarly soil contaminants on the creek’s shoreline to build a bioswale. Charcoal colored bricks curved in a swirling path to create a channel that infiltrates water runoff from Borden Avenue when it rains.
“[The bioswale’s role is] infiltrating stormwater coming off of streets in order to clean it before it goes into the broader ecology of the Newtown Creek…cleaning that water, holding it, growing plants that increase biodiversity along the creek, [is] creating what we hope is a cascading effect of biodiversity,” Lopez said.
“There’s still so much more work that needs to be done in order to actually create an environment that begins to generate its own positive feedback. But water is life. So just having, slowing, keeping water in the ground, there’s already going to be a net benefit,” Wendlek said.
On the brownfield surrounding the bioswale, a layer of spent mushroom blocks and wood chips cover the contaminated earth. “We’ve tried to create a barrier to separate the soil, which is contaminated with lead, for sure, and cadmium, and other metals and other toxins,” Wendlek said.
“I am working to secure the spot under the bridge for material resource storage that could be used for gardens — mulching, woodchips, compost, spent mycelium blocks from mushroom farmers, outdoor furniture that people are getting rid of that need to be rehomed,” Lopez said, reinforcing that this work is not a capsule project with a completion date, but an ongoing creation of a self-fulfilling ecosystem.
“If you simply go out and create and you bring enough caring people into the project and work together, to build the world that you want today, then the world that we want is here a day sooner,” Lopez said.
Today, the spot under the bridge looks like a patchworked backyard bar. Mismatched tables and chairs are scattered atop the wood chips, two fire pits encircled with stones hide among the seating, and a few half-full wine bottles line a small stone bartop propped against one of several teal blue shipping containers. “It’s almost like a cool secret club for land stewards,” Thompson said. “It’s cool how this kind of activism works, then aligns with different artists.”
In late April, Clark used the spot as a performance space. Paddling from the Greenpoint edge of the creek, near Whale Creek, Borden Avenue was the first stop on a traveling canoe concert weaving up Dutch Kills. The artist The Spookfish strummed a few soft melodies on the shore, the audience in a ring around him — some strung across the rocky bank and others listening from parked canoes. Milioto was in attendance.
Unlike the bureaucratic obscurity amid government agencies, the grassroots remediation of Borden Avenue, steered by Lopez, has clear intentions — results have already appeared as products of communal care. “[Gil] is a really great example of somebody just kind of doing it for free and not waiting for permission,” Thompson said.
“I work towards creating an attitude of creation, and moving away from consumption,” Lopez said. This ideology intertwines the beliefs of grassroots remediators and many boat dwellers, and recognizes material consumption as one moral flaw that gentrification of the area is likely to endorse.
Milioto, Lopez, and Clark have diverse approaches to facing the ethical plight drifting down the creek.
While he still has several boats docked on the creek, by alleged accident, Milioto moved off the creek approximately a year ago while apartment hunting for a friend who never responded. He kept it a secret at first, “I was embarrassed that I wasn’t living on a boat because it was so much a part of me,” Milioto said. Accident or not, Milioto has made sense of his move as more or less a rejection of what the future of the creek may bring. As the weather warms, Milioto tries to get down to Newtown Creek once or twice a week, all his time devoted to repairing and fixing up his boat, and getting it ready to sail. For Milioto, it’s time to leave home again.
Alternatively, Lopez is keeping both feet on the shoreline and has attempted to bridge the gap between government agency action and grassroots bioremediation. “We’ve invited our councilwoman out for a fire to show her what’s happening,” Lopez said.
Grant funding is an achievable point of collaboration between government and community-based environmental activism; it’s a dose of hope from the higher-ups that Clark has also taken advantage of. She applied to the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art and the New York Foundation for the Arts Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant to fund her art activism. In May, Straw Pipes took the stage at Grace Exhibition Space with a performance art piece titled “Heavy Metals” centered around a creek oyster named Scat.
Maybe Clark’s optimistic outlook can be credited to her more recent arrival on the creek, not yet tattered by the toll of boatlife like Milioto. No matter its origin, an eager smile carries every sentence when she talks about the future; her buoyant spirit no doubt fosters a community of similarly creative and renegade members.
Whether or not that community can stay afloat in the coming years remains uncertain. The future of Newtown Creek’s unearthed culture depends on the resiliency of the creek’s residents, but, most importantly, it relies on meaningful collaborations between activists, government agencies — and really any New Yorker who cares enough to turn the tide on gentrification.
All photos by Cecily Parks.
Beautiful prose and still informative and an easy read