Thinking like a Creek
" What is the sound of one rock? " When I was much younger, I worked for the Appellate Division in the New York City court system. We were tasked by Mayor John Lindsay with bringing the city jail, known affectionately as The Tombs, into compliance with a court order requiring a significant population reduction, among other things. Conditions in the jail were abysmal. Prisoners were herded into standing-room-only cells in ankle-deep water. As I wrote here in 2023, “I saw the rain coming from the ceilings and how some corridors would become ‘ trails to the wading place .’” For 200 years, the city had been trying to engineer its way out of that situation without any attempt to ask what the water wanted. The jail was constructed on an infilled swamp, formerly a sparkling-clear body of water in the middle of Manhattan Island. When it was a 48-acre, 18-meter-deep lake, it had supplied the Munsee villages with fish, beaver and turtles. A stream flowed north, then we...
