This is what the plant and creeks looked like in 1996.

The first phase of this environmental sculpture, completed in 2007, explores the rich history of the waterway from its use by the Lenape prior to the arrival of Europeans, to the bustling 18th-and 19th-century waterfront cooperage, ship-making, and lumber industries along its shores, to its current context abutting New York City’s largest wastewater treatment plant.

These themes are drawn through dramatic site features like the 170-foot-long “Vessel” passage to the waterfront that evokes the angled timber construction of ships, and in details like trash receptacles designed to look like barrels, carefully selected plant material, and integrated graphics that have proven invaluable to DEP’s educational program at the plant. The Vessel begins near the Paidge Avenue entrance.

The Vessel’s portholes allow peeks at the plant.

Other views include the Manhattan skyline as well as the creek’s fascinating shoreline of scrap metal recycling, warehouses, and manufacturing.

Between the Seven Stone Circles and Watershed Bollard, granite steps connect to the creek. The earliest period of geologic time (the Precambrian) starts at the bottom step in the water and progresses up the steps to the most recent period (the Pleistocene), at the top step. The steps also show the names of the significant group of living things that thrived in that time period. Handrails mimic water molecules.

The steps also serve as a boat launch for kayaks and canoes.

The Newtown Creek Armada took place in September 2012. For this installation by artists Laura Chipley, Nathan Kensinger, and Sarah Nelson Wright, Nature Walk visitors guided remote-controlled miniature boats to document the creek with cameras and microphones.

The Nature Walk’s final phases opened in 2021. Three 60-foot-long bow-shaped vessels with bridges and a central “turret” seating area connect the original Nature Walk to the opposite side of Whale Creek and provide the experience of being out over the water.

The easternmost section is a landscaped area with trees, shrubs, and grasses that provides seating, shade structures, bicycle racks, water fountains, and rain gardens, plus access from Kingsland Avenue. Plants along the Nature Walk are native to New York City and were selected because they attract wildlife and grow well along the banks of a tidal estuary. Many have historical industrial and medicinal uses that are explained in signage. Sugar maple trees, for example, offered leaves to cover fish for cooking in pits, hard wood to carve bowls, spoons, and canoe paddles, and sap that was boiled down to make maple syrup!

These last phases also expand the artist’s conceptual focus from the local histories to ruminations on a broader history of ecology and human existence. George Trakas imbued the Nature Walk with thought-provoking language, materials, and historical artifacts, notably tree fossils unearthed during construction of the Gilboa Dam, the northernmost point in the City’s water supply system. Common NYC street trees, ginkgoes are an apt choice for the fossil garden since they go back 270 million years, giving them a distant kinship to the 385-million-year-old fossilized tree stumps.