New York City is surrounded by water — but many of us hardly seem to know it.
In a city teeming with ambition, strolling across New York in swim trunks to take a dip in the East River shouldn’t be seen as a radical act.
New York City contains, after all, 520 total miles of coastline, and its residents are starved for public swimming areas during the region’s stifling summers. In comparably warm European cities like Paris, Vienna, London, Zurich, Munich and Berlin, bathing in city rivers is taken for granted, and local bodies of water are treated as recreation spaces as much as commercial passageways.
In New York City, however, centuries of hazardous dumping, combined with an outdated sewer system, have made it a contemporary anathema to consider swimming in any of the city’s waterways. Standing on the esplanade separating the Stuyvesant Cove water treatment facility from the East River today, taking in the olfactory blend of stormwater and sewage gurgling into the tidal estuary’s current, the idea of diving in for a casual dip is practically inconceivable.
What bothers me is that this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. This contemporary relationship between New Yorkers and our waterways is emblematic of a more general perception of the separation of the city from the natural world. For city residents trapped within New York’s gridlocked, concrete streetscapes, it can often feel as if the city occupies an ecosystem of its own, distinct from the rhythms of nature. From a historical standpoint, though, this perception is a ruse, a symptom of a citywide affliction the author Jared Diamond has dubbed “landscape amnesia,” a gradual, multi-generational disconnection from nature whose end result is a population that cannot remember the natural world that preceded it.
Despite the modern normalization of New York’s relationship with its waterways, the present state of the rivers is in fact a historical aberration.
As early as 1609, Dutch colonists encountered pristine aquatic conditions in the New York Harbor. Water quality then was maintained naturally by the filtration of billions of oysters, clams and mussels, a process which attracted the millions of fish and thousands of porpoises, whales, sharks, dolphins, seals and sea turtles who once called the water home.
“It is not possible,” Jasper Danckaerts, a Dutch journalist visiting New York in 1679, recorded, “to describe how this bay swarms with fish, both large and small, whales, tunnies and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish.” It doesn’t require gazing back to some precolonial halcyon, either, to understand that swimming in the river can coexist with a modern New York lifestyle; in the middle of the 19th century, swimming in both rivers was commonplace, and beginning in 1870, the City embedded 22 popular public pools (complete with dressing rooms, offices and gas lighting for nightswimming) into waterways around the city. Since then, adventurous open water swimmers like Gertrude Ederly, Eileen Burke and Ira Gershenhorn have braved suboptimal conditions to successfully swim long distances in both New York Harbor and the Hudson River.
For city residents trapped within New York’s gridlocked, concrete streetscapes, it can often feel as if the city occupies an ecosystem of its own, distinct from the rhythms of nature.
A legacy of local negligence, though, overshadows that history today. Beginning at least as early as the mid-18th century, when the City sabotaged its local supply of drinking water by permitting a tannery to operate adjacent to Collect Pond, New York’s emphasis on economic growth often came at the expense of the health of its waterways, which were exposed to petroleum residues, heavy metals and chemicals dumped carelessly by factories along the rivers through the industrial revolution. The water’s dubious history extends into the present; today, rainfall triggers 21 billion annual gallons of raw sewage flow into the city’s waterways through a Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) system which dates to the 19th century. Simply put: when it rains, the rivers are disgusting. As such, just 14 miles — less than 1% — of New York City’s total shoreline is open to public swimming today.
This reality has devastating consequences not only for the region’s ecosystem but for the public health of New Yorkers, especially as urban temperatures in summer months escalate as a result of climate change. As Julie Sandorf chronicled in Vital City last year, New York trails nearly every other major American city in public pool availability, and the pools that are open during the summer are notoriously overcrowded and understaffed. The lack of current free swimming spaces in the city not only exacerbates the heat stress faced by an increasing number of vulnerable New Yorkers but limits the opportunities low-income residents have to take swimming lessons, a resource which can cut the risk of drowning by up to 88% for young children. Responsibly opening up more of those 520 miles of coastline for safe, lifeguard-enforced swimming would be the most obvious strategy to alleviate the challenges New Yorkers face to gaining reliable water access.
The more tragic implication of the present waterway situation, though, is that the region’s creeping decimation of the natural world has resulted in the near-total separation of the city’s image from nature. As the landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson argues convincingly in his seminal 2009 book “Manahatta,” coming to terms with New York today requires an understanding of its natural history, of the profound role nature played not only in its precolonial era but in its modern economic development (the foundation of the island’s first Dutch economy, for example, was the beaver pelt). As Sanderson argues, New York’s greatest modern “conceit” is that the city is separated from, and not a continuation of, the natural world. As much as the city’s imposing streetscapes may trick us into believing we’re living outside the laws of nature, New Yorkers are reminded incessantly — through curiosities like Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo in 2023, and the recent preponderance of marine life in the East River — that we remain entrenched in the natural world.
Despite the modern normalization of New York’s relationship with its waterways, the present state of the rivers is in fact a historical aberration.
Encouragingly, many New Yorkers are embracing a more integrated ethos, and thanks to a series of local and federal interventions, New York’s waterways are in better shape today than at any point in the last century. Spurred to action by the 1972 Clean Water Act, the City has spent around $45 billion since the 1980s to eliminate industrial toxins and upgrade sewer lines across the region, an effort which has significantly improved water quality. In 1985, 110 billion gallons of sewage was dumped into the waterways annually; today that number is closer to 20 billion. Exceptional present day initiatives from nonprofits like Riverkeeper and the Billion Oyster Project have both aided efforts to clean the water and created a heightened sense of public awareness around the natural processes undergirding modern life in New York. In the past year alone, whales, dolphins and seals have been spotted in the East River, each sighting proof that, with coordinated, serious investment, environmental progress in the city is indeed possible. On some days, water levels may even be safe for the odd adventurous swimmer.
Though bathing options are still limited, both the contemporary transformation of Lower Manhattan’s West Side Highway into a pedestrian parkway (Gansevoort Peninsula, opened in 2023, even features a small beach which descends into an off-limits Hudson), and the ongoing East River kayak sessions operating out of Brooklyn Bridge Park show that New Yorkers are increasingly comfortable interacting with city waterways. Future planners can look to cities like Copenhagen, Boston and Paris (the Seine is set to open to swimmers this July with a barrier system specifically designed to separate bathers from commercial traffic), to find contemporary models suiting the distinct challenge of clearing New York’s water for safe swimming. With the right political will, it’s not a stretch to imagine the City harnessing the strategies and technologies already in place in cities around the world (including an existing local proposal from the organization +Pool, whose alleged 2025 plan for a filtered East River pool remains elusive) to implement an equitable and sanitary rollout of more public water.
Just 14 miles — less than 1% — of New York City’s total shoreline is open to public swimming today.
Any implementation plan depends, of course, on consistent water quality levels throughout the city. Despite the environmental improvements of the last half-century, New York’s waterways will remain untenable options for consistently cooling off during the city’s hot summer months until its sewage and runoff issues are addressed. The fiscal reality of that challenge is stark: a Gothamist report last year indicated it would take roughly $36 billion to redirect those 21 billion annual gallons of sewage away from public waterways. Given that the City’s total 2025 budget was roughly $115 billion, generating enough local support to tackle the challenge anytime soon seems improbable (not to mention the current odds of receiving any imminent federal aid).
A more pressing concern than any daunting financial reality, though, has to do with our perception of the city itself. From the West Side Highway improvement project to Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York’s 21st century effort to more fully incorporate its waterways into public life demonstrates its capacity to enact significant upgrades along the waterfront. Still, the ongoing implausibility of swimming in the East River speaks to the broader lack of integration between city and nature here, the wide underlying gap which remains between the pristine natural history of the region and the contemporary difficulty of meaningfully immersing oneself in that nature today. Until residents can drop the delusion that the city is a separate entity from nature and work to reimagine New York as a place embedded in, and not distinct from, the natural world, no financial windfall will transform the city into the sort of integrated landscape the realities of a changing climate and a nature-starved population demand. Will New Yorkers ever dare to jump?