The shores of the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint contain some of the most polluted industrial spaces in the United States, befouled by more than a century of oil spills and toxic waste. Soon, they will also be home to a collection of new parks and green spaces, which will open up sections of the waterfront to the surrounding community for the first time in generations.

In recent months, several projects have launched that will radically transform the isolated shoreline of the creek, which is a federal Superfund site. These include the expansion of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, the impending groundbreaking for the North Brooklyn Community Boathouse, and the launch of the designs for the Under the K park and the Gateway to Greenpoint.

Each of these projects is a direct result of one of the most complicated and successful environmental justice movements in the city, which has resulted in tens of millions of dollars being granted to a host of ecological restoration projects and new public spaces. After many decades of struggle, the residents of Greenpoint may now begin to see some of the largest environmental projects in their neighborhood finally come to fruition.

“You don’t think about Newtown Creek and green space in the same thought process,” says Katie Denny Horowitz, the executive director at the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, a 16-year-old organization which is in charge of the Under the K project. “I think it’s going to be a new day for Greenpoint in its relationship with that waterway.”

Several of these projects are clustered around the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest sewage treatment plant in the city. When complete, they will create a corridor of unique green spaces encircling the entire facility. “We are excited about it. We think it’s going to help connect two sides of Greenpoint,” says Willis Elkins, the executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, a group founded 22 years ago to help restore the creek. “You are going to have more people coming to an area that was, before, this very isolated, empty spot.”

The largest of these new green spaces was announced in May, when the Department of Design and Construction broke ground on the final two phases of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, designed by artist George Trakas. Initially expected to be completed in 2015, the new sections of this park will dramatically expand on the initial section of the Nature Walk, which opened in 2007 on the waterfront behind the sewage plant. When complete, the new phases will create a second entrance to the park via a 430-foot green space and a series of bridges crossing the Whale Creek inlet.

The new entrance to the Nature Walk will be located just up the street from Kingsland Wildflowers, a 25,000-square-foot green roof that was completed in June. Designed by Marni Majorelle of Alive Structures, the rooftop provides a vital habitat for bees, birds, butterflies, and bats. It is located just across the street from the proposed site of the Gateway to Greenpoint, which will transform an empty 12,000-square-foot lot at the sewage plant into a new green space open to the public. The design plans for this project were launched in June, and the Newtown Creek Alliance is now seeking construction funding.

In June, the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance also unveiled its plans for Under the K, a major new waterfront park on the shores of the Newtown Creek. Located southeast of the sewage plant underneath the new Kosciuszko Bridge, the park will encompass nearly seven acres, and will include a mix of public event spaces and green corridors designed by the Toronto-based landscape architecture firm Public Work. The state has already begun work on the park’s footprint as part of the bridge construction.

“They have been working with our designers to do some of the initial elements of the plan, like soft landscaping, or creating pathways that are part of the framework,” says Horowitz. “But ultimately, the vision of the park is going to be phased out over years.”

While all of these new green spaces coming to Greenpoint will be an important addition to the Newtown Creek’s industrial waterfront, they cannot make up for the generations of environmental devastation that this community has suffered. For over a century, Greenpoint has been a dumping ground for some of the city’s worst sources of pollution—refineries, incinerators, trash depots—and each of the new projects being built here can trace its origins back to this terrible history of toxicity.

The funding for the development of several of these new projects came directly out of reparations from the Greenpoint oil spill, which is one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States. The spill, one of the largest in the country, left an underground reservoir of up to 30 million gallons of oil floating beneath 55 acres of Greenpoint, which has poisoned the Brooklyn-Queens Aquifer. Although it was discovered in 1978, in a plume of oil flowing into the Newtown Creek from the foot of Meeker Avenue, its cleanup will continue for many more decades to come, and will never be fully complete.

“No one really knows what the consequences of Greenpoint’s oil spill have been—or will be. It’s like the dust from 9/11, the chemicals dumped at Love Canal, the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, or even global warming,” New York reported in 2007. “The truth is that it will be impossible to remove all of the nasty chemicals lurking under Greenpoint.”

Kingsland Wildflowers, Gateway to Greenpoint, Under the K, and many other environmental projects around Greenpoint were developed with grants received from the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund (GCEF), which was created by a $20 million settlement with ExxonMobil over the spill. “What we are seeing now in some respects can be traced back to the state’s efforts at holding ExxonMobil accountable for the oil spill,” says Horowitz. “That was the seed for a lot of these initiatives … it’s literally payback from the oil spill.”

Another source of funding for several of these new projects was the expansion and renovation of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, which was staunchly opposed by the Greenpoint community when it was announced in 1996. “Community leaders, nauseated by the stench from the plant and fed up with having so much of the city’s waste dumped in their backyard, would rather see the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant dismantled,” the New York Times reported. “But conceding that a shutdown is unrealistic, they are instead pressing the city for trees, new street lights, an in-line skating rink and other attractions for their industrial corner of northern Brooklyn.”

While the skating rink is nowhere to be seen, the Newtown Creek Nature Walk is one direct benefit from the expansion of the plant. It was funded by the city’s Percent For Art program, which sets aside one percent of the city’s construction budgets for public art. The North Brooklyn Community Boathouse is another direct outcome from the plant’s impact on the environment. A major source of its funding, according to the boat club, is a grant from the Newtown Creek Environmental Fund, which was “created from fines levied by New York State DEC against New York City’s DEP for violations incurred during the construction of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.”

“It’s environmental justice for the communities,” says Elkins, reflecting on the funding and development of these new green spaces. “Greenpoint has an awful history of people having to deal with the stuff that was here, and honestly, there are major things we are still dealing with, in terms of truck traffic, and plumes of chemicals and oil in the ground.”

“So there is that component, which is justice for the people, but then there is also justice for the other animals and ecosystems that were erased from the area,” says Elkins. “Just because it was a dumping ground doesn’t mean it should continue that way.”

This overgrown lot at the end of McGuinness Boulevard next to the Pulaski Bridge is the future site of the North Brooklyn Community Boathouse. Up until this year, the site was home to the headquarters and boat launch of the North Brooklyn Boat Club.

The club has temporarily relocated its operations as it waits to break ground on the new boathouse. The facility “will include storage for dozens of kayaks and canoes, an ADA-accessible dock, a boat-building workshop, an environmental education center, and office space for nonprofit organizations working on revitalizing our local waterways,” according to a press release from the boat club.

The club has been working towards building a boathouse on the creek since at least 2011, with an earlier proposal that was supported by the state. In the ensuing years, the organization has also created several projects that have been the recipients of grants from the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund (GCEF).

The Newtown Creek Nature Walk is located further east along the waterway, on the other side of the Pulaski Bridge. It borders the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, and is one of only two official access points in Brooklyn to the waters of the creek.

Opened in 2007, the first phase of the Nature Walk includes a green pathway lined with native plants, which ends abruptly near the head of the Whale Creek inlet. This is the only public park currently located on the Brooklyn shores of the creek.

Work is already well underway on Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the Nature Walk, which will connect visitors to the far side of the sewage plant, over the waters of the Whale Creek inlet.

Phase 2 includes a series of walkways over the water, leading to a bridge which has already been put in place. “It’s going to bring more people to the Nature Walk itself. Right now, I run into a lot of people that are unaware that it exists that might even live a few blocks away,” says Elkins.

In Phase 3, which is also under construction, a second entrance will be added to the park as part of a 430-foot green space, which will include fossilized trees and native plantings. “I do think that having two entrances, it will hopefully be more on people’s radar as a place to visit,” says Elkins.

The new entrance to the Nature Walk will be located next to the North Henry Street site, a GCEF-funded project that seeks to create a more natural shoreline on a 20,000-square-foot city-owned space behind the sewage treatment plant. “We have been working on this for five years now,” says Elkins.

The North Henry Street site is currently home to the Living Dock, another GCEF-funded project from the Newtown Creek Alliance. “We are pushing to make it a place for people to experience a more natural shoreline condition,” says Elkins. “The focus is really on the planting and the ecology of it.”

Kingsland Wildflowers is located a short walk from Phase 3 of the Nature Walk, at a warehouse complex owned by Broadway Stages. “We have five roofs and a total of 25,000 square feet,” says Marni Majorelle, who created the green roofs with her company Alive Structures. Three of the roofs are accessible to visitors during public hours and field trips, which are managed by the Newtown Creek Alliance.

“What’s incredible is you take an elevator in this industrial building and it opens up, and you are in the middle of a prairie,” says Majorelle. “That’s what’s so stunning about this space, is the contrast with the area, which is perfect for learning about green infrastructure in the urban environment.”

The highest rooftop at Kingsland Wildflowers includes a panoramic view of the sewage plant next door, and of a nearby recycling facility, the Newtown Creek, and the Manhattan and Queens skylines. It also provides a vital habitat for bees, butterflies, bats, barn swallows, and many other species not usually seen in this industrial landscape.

“We plant for the insects. This is a place for the insects,” says Majorelle. “We have a lot of wild strawberries, we have purple coneflower, goldenrod, asters, salvia, rattlesnake master… It is covered with bees and insects constantly. We have so many different bees up here, it’s a bee heaven!”

Kingsland Wildflowers was funded by several grants from GCEF and its final roof garden, a 2,000-square foot-educational space on the third floor, was completed in June. The roofs here may soon become part of a larger green corridor. “We are doing three more buildings with Broadway Stages, the owner of Kingsland,” says Majorelle. “We are expanding 60,000 square feet starting this fall, hopefully.”

The rooftop also offers a view of the Gateway to Greenpoint site, which the sewage plant has offered to the community as a public space. The Newtown Creek Alliance recently announced its design plans for this site, which was funded by a GCEF grant. The group hopes it will connect the public to Kingsland Wildflowers, North Henry Street, and the new phases of the Nature Walk.

“I think it will be a really unique experience, in terms of the city, for people to come and visit all of this in one continuous way,” says Elkins. “For people living in the area, this will become a regular route for them, the same way that someone might go to McGolrick Park or McCarren Park to walk around, to enjoy the open space … and the benefit is that people will form more of a connection with the waterway.”

Less than a mile south of the sewage plant at the end of Meeker Avenue is the Penny Bridge site, another green area that the Newtown Creek Alliance is working to restore. This public street end is also home to one of the pumping wells from the ExxonMobil oil spill cleanup.

The street end here floods frequently, allowing trash and other pollutants to flow directly into the creek. This site is where the Greenpoint oil spill was first discovered in 1978, when an oil plume was spotted flowing out into the creek.

The Newtown Creek Alliance has been working to restore the Penny Bridge site for years. “When we first started, it was all broken up concrete and inaccessible,” says Elkins, during a recent cleanup with students from LaGuardia College. “We had dumpsters full of trash, tires, construction debris. It looked like half a house had been dumped here.”

Though it is still surrounded by intense pollution, the site is now an informal green space, visited by local workers during their lunch breaks. It is also increasingly a home to other species, and during the recent cleanup, bees, butterflies, and a praying mantis were all seen among its small grove of 12 wild-growing trees.

The Penny Bridge site looks out towards the new Kosciuszko Bridge, where a much larger park is planned. “Potentially, this could be a little pocket park,” says Elkins. “One of the things we have been really concerned about over the years is that not a lot of people see the waterway, and when no one sees it, it’s easier for it to remain in a challenged state.”

At the Kosciuszko Bridge, work is already underway for some of the elements of the Under the K park project, whose design was funded by a GCEF grant. The park will connect to a bike ramp on the new bridge, via a green corridor named “The Arm.”

The Arm will run parallel to the BQE, leading visitors down to several larger spaces underneath the new bridge. “I feel like it’s on the fast track because its connected to the bridge,” says Horowitz. “We have ideas for more intricate gardens and green spaces, and connection to the creek, and more defined walkways. But when its turned over to us, which will be by the end of the year, it will be more of a blank slate.”

The park will include two large flexible spaces below the Kosciuszko Bridge. “It’s open space, but it’s covered. A lot of it won’t be green space. And so the traditional elements that you think of with a park, you know, grass or sky, aren’t necessarily going to be aspects of this park,” says Horowitz.

“You have sky, but it’s through this really visually stunning slice that is in the middle of the two sides of the bridges,” says Horowitz. ”Until you are under the space you don’t realize how massive it is. It’s like these massive industrial rooms, that offer an opportunity for different uses.” Because of its remote location, which is surrounded by industry, the park will be designed as more of a destination, featuring a robust slate of public programs. “We want to activate it with programming,” says Horowitz. “I would love to do public art installations there, we want to put music down there, we are talking about cinematic experiences, light installations, recreational uses.”

The proposed park spaces are bordered by a variety of industrial businesses, including waste management, concrete plants, and trucking operations. “There is a long history of active industry there and so we don’t want to disrupt their day to day operations,” said Horowitz.

The park will end underneath the new Kosciuszko Bridge, next to a concrete plant at the edge of the Newtown Creek. “We don’t really expect too many passersby,” said Horowitz. “You are not going to accidentally come across the creek. You will not only have to have chosen to go, but you make a commitment to take the walk down there.”

When complete, the park will offer up a rare opportunity to access both the creek and the newest bridge in the city. “I hope that it’s a welcome change to the area,” said Horowitz. “People are welcoming the creation of new space, and are just curious about how it’s going to work, because it’s not your traditional park.”