Man Made Lake

Newtown Creek

    At one time Newtown Creek was a beautiful site. Full of seafood, surrounded by wooded hills, the four-mile-long estuary was a popular swimming spot with the local Mespat tribe. Dutch explorers first surveyed the creek in 1613.

    America's first modern oil refinery opened on its banks in 1867, and before long it was home base for Standard Oil. Other industries moved in and the creek was widened to accommodate bigger barges. Over the last 15 decades, 17 to 30 million gallons of oil (Exxon Valdez was 10) have spilled into Newtown Creek, a water body that is essentially stagnant. Add copper contamination from the Phelps Dodge superfund site, runoff from unsewered industrial sites and waste transfer stations, and combined-sewer overflows of human waste. Many call Newtown Creek the most polluted waterbody in North America.

Doors of New York

South Williamsburg, Brooklyn | Hamilton Heights, Manhattan
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn | India Square, Jersey City

San Ysidro

      Imagine a large metropolitan area, say five million people, physically split in two by a river or a mountain or any other physical barrier, the two sides connected by a single crossing.  Now take into account that this crossing doesn't just link the two sides of the metropolitan area but is also a critical segment of a vast transportation network that links people and places far beyond the limits of the local region. 

      Finally, consider that this physical barrier separates not just two sides of a region but two nations, one vastly wealthy and one tremendously poor, and you have the perfect recipe for a memorably chaotic bottleneck.

      While large flows stream into Tijuana unfettered, an endless queue of cars and pedestrians await their turn to convince American border patrolmen to let them in.  Some are San Diegans and other American tourists who made a day trip to TJ to buy cheap drugs and get drunk.  Some have traveled all the way from Chiapas and points south to risk their lives jumping the fence.  But many, if not most, are Tijuanitos who commute through the border madness everyday to jobs in San Diego.  For them it's about as exotic as a Starbucks drive-thru.

Greetings from Philadelphia

    Philadelphia is the quintessential American city.  Forget New York.  It's too educated, too rich, too diverse, too pompous.  In New York, people of all colors and tax brackets take public transit into a vastly wealthy inner city.  There's nothing American about that.

    In Philly, the city is poor and black and the outskirts and suburbs are white and rich.  SEPTA, the city's transit agency, is constantly fighting bankruptcy.  Junk food dominates the local cuisine, city government is notoriously corrupt and shiftless, and, occasionally, people actually look you in the eye and smile.

Street Art in TJ

At the entrance to a pedestrian overpass for the Tijuana River Canal.