By CLAUDIA BRACHOLDT & MADHURA KARNIK

Richard Prasad knelt bare-footed in the grey sand on the beach. It was a Sunday morning. Prasad, 46, and his friend had been trying to light two candles that were sitting in two small clay bowls. Prasad held two gold-colored plates in his hands, trying to block the wind coming in from the water. He wore a red cotton robe over his turned up jeans. His friend managed to light a match. Both held their hands over the bowls, until finally, the flame lit up.

The two Hindus picked up the candles and let them gently into the water. They stood at the shore in silence, facing the water solemnly and started to pray.

A photo of the Hindu God Shiv, lies on the rocks at Jamaica Bay. Photo by Claudia Bracholdt.

Scenes like this can be regularly witnessed in India or even in some parts of the Caribbean Islands with their large Hindu population. However, Prasad and his friend were at Jamaica Bay in Queens.

Prasad is a part of the Caribbean-Hindu community of Queens, which uses the bay as a place for worship. The water of the bay is perceived as a form of God, to which the people offer food, flowers, coins and sometimes cloths. The offerings are supposed to be washed away to the Atlantic Ocean, which is connected to the Indian River Ganges via the Indian Ocean. But because of the tide in New York harbor, the offerings end up on the shore again. In the past few years, the National Park Service and some environmental watchdog groups have raised concerns about the protection of Jamaica Bay’s environment.

“The problem is that many of the things that Hindus leave are not bio-degradable,” said Dan Riepe. Riepe is part of the Jamaica Bay Research and Management Information Network, an environmental watchdog group that patrols the Bay regularly.

Riepe said although Hindu rituals affect the environment, the pollution of the bay water plays a minor role in the conflict.

“It’s not a main water quality issue,” Riepe said. “It’s more of an aesthetic conflict.”

Along the beach, remains from the rituals lie in the sand: Coconuts, cloths, flowers and broken miniature statues of Hindu Goddesses.

Riepe said these leftovers would cause people to not be able to enjoy the beach as much as they would like to. He said some might even avoid the beach because it looks dirty.

Colleen Sorbera who is a Park Ranger at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge said that there is evidence of environmental damage due to the offerings to the water.

“The nutrients from the fruits causes eutrophication which results in algae blooms that decreases the oxygen level of the water which is harmful for the fish,” Sorbera said.

She said that some ducks appear to have developed deformities such as ‘angel wings’, wings that seem to be crooked, because the birds eat the food lying on the shore, which they are not supposed to eat. The deformity is caused due to a high-calorie diet among birds.

For several years in the past, the park rangers have visited temples throughout Queens to educate Hindus about rules for protecting the beach, including cleaning the beach after their rituals and also obtaining a license for performing more elaborate rituals. But not everyone in the community follows these guidelines.

Sorbera says that they have been getting different responses from the community. She said that although the community is actively participating to keep the bay clean there should be more participation in the future.

“A lot of the community leaders have supported us, but not all,” she said.

She said on occasions some people performing rituals try to circumvent the regulations by waiting until they think the ranger has left, and then continuing with leaving the ritual offerings in the water.

Prasad said he respects the work of the park rangers and the bay’s environment. He said he comes to the bay often and collects the paper plates from the water every time he offers something.

In Guyana, his hometown, people generally leave the waste from their rituals on the beach rather than properly discarding them, he says.

“Back in the Caribbean, Trinidad or Guyana, you know we are just used to go into the ocean or the river,” Prasad said. “We worship there and just leave everything there, just banked up on the side.”

Around 79,000 people of Caribbean origin live in Queens, according to the American Community Survey of 2010, a part of the US Census survey. This is around four percent of the total population in Queens. Most of these are Hindus whose ancestors migrated from the Northern parts of India to the Caribbean Islands in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The younger generations of these families have now settled in the United States.

On April 22nd, the National Park Service organized the annual cleanup day at the bay. Volunteers picked up 108 large white plastic bags full of leftovers from rituals and a small amount of other garbage. Around 60 members from the Hindu community participated in the clean up drive.

Besides the clean-up day, the rangers from the Park Service try to reach out to the Queens Hindu community via a program that includes conversations between rangers and temple representatives to increase environmental awareness within the community. The National Park Service has also hired a Hindu intern this summer, whose main task will be to improve the relations between both sides and achieve a better understanding.

Sorbera said the Hindu religion is very complex and that she doesn’t know enough about it. She hopes that the new summer intern will help the park rangers with the outreach.

“She (the intern) can inform our staff about issues and customs important to the Hindu community, while at the same time increasing the effectiveness of how we communicate the message of ‘Leave No Trace’ at the bridge,” Sorbera said. ” ‘Leave No Trace’ is a slogan meaning what you take into the park with you, you take out, and dispose of.”

Sahadeo Shivshankar often visits the bay to pray and perform rituals. Shivshankar, a grey-haired man in his sixties came to New York from Guyana seven years ago. He said he doesn’t like people leaving things at the beach that harm the environment. His offering included fruits and flowers, lying in aluminum foil in his hands when he stood in the water and prayed.

For some non-Hindus these offerings don’t have any religious significance. They collect them for personal use. On a recent Sunday, Edward Singer strolled in the flat water up and down the beach, his eyes fixed on the ground. Singer comes to the bay regularly to collect coins. He was holding a brown rake behind his back, searching for coins that are used as religious offerings along with flowers and fruits that often end up on the shore.

When Shivshankar and a few other Hindus at the beach finished their prayers, they left food and other offerings in the water. Quickly, geese and seagulls began to gather along the shore, fighting over the food. Behind them, Edward Singer started dipping his rake into the water.

By CARLA ASTUDILLO

Isidoro Hernandez lives in a plot of land hidden deep among overgrown trees and brush by the Coney Island creek. His roof is a brown tarp held up by fallen tree branches. His floor and bed are a bundle of blankets. He obsesses over his garden, where he grows zucchini, corn and green peppers among other vegetables. When it’s warm enough, he paddles his motorless Wave Runner out in the water.

For the last five years, Hernandez’s nourishment, entertainment and even his toilet have been provided by a creek, once forgotten by history and polluted by sewage. Remnants of its neglect are still found in the abandoned, decaying ships that mark the waterside. But for Hernandez, 45, and his black cat, Diablo, this is home.

“I fell in love with this park like one would fall in love with a woman,” Hernandez said in his native Spanish.

Hernandez is one of over 3,000 homeless New Yorkers living outside the shelter system— a number that has increased by almost 23 percent since last year according to the City’s figures.

It’s the result of funding decreases in affordable housing subsidies that give many New Yorkers little choice but to overwhelm the shelters that do not have resources to keep up.

“[Shelters] are supposed to be temporary,” said Benjamin Henwood, researcher at NYU Silver School of Social Work. “But they’ve evolved into default housing for a population that can’t afford another alternative.”

Hernandez had a particular bad experience in one East New York shelter. He was so overwhelmed by the crowding in the building that he left after four days.

“Everybody ignored me,” Hernandez said. “They just forgot about me.”

He was determined to never go back.

However, unlike most of the unsheltered homeless who sleep out in the streets and subway cars, Hernandez created an encampment where he could live off the land using the gardening skills his mother taught him when he was a child.

Hernandez emigrated to California with his older brother when he was 16 years old. They worked for years in a textile factory in order to make enough money, about $5,000 each, to bring his mom and the rest of his family to the United States.

When the family moved to New York a couple of years later, Hernandez along with his brothers kept on working to provide for his relatives, especially his now-diabetic mother. However, when he started working as a janitor for a building in 72nd street in Bay Ridge, he soon grew wary of the daily routine of fixing toilets, taking out the garbage and tending to other people’s gardens.

“I don’t really know what happened to my mind,” Hernandez said. “I guess [my mind] just got tired of it all.”

He started to drink heavily which led to him losing his job and alienated him from his family. Forced out of his apartment after failing to keep up with rent, he began to live out on the streets and in park benches where police would routinely pick him up. Hernandez anxiously looked for a place to settle down, hidden enough not to be disturbed.

“I was just looking for a place where I still had a little bit of liberty,” he said.

Hernandez found that liberty in the Coney Island Creek where he could live virtually undetected. When called, a representative from Community Board 13 was astonished to hear that someone lived in that space. They have never received calls complaining about the encampment either.

“But we should still be made aware of every homeless situation,” the representative said, adding that as long as Hernandez is not hurting anyone, he could stay.

The Coney Island creek consists of two narrow sea passages that were once joined and completely separated Coney Island from Brooklyn. In the early 20th century, the city had planned to make the creek into a shipping canal. However, developers found those plans economically impractical and instead filled it to build railroad lines and a highway. This made Coney Island into the peninsula that it is today.

The western sea inlet of the creek, where Hernandez camps out, has a long and notorious history of pollution and neglect.

One of the biggest perpetrators was Brooklyn Borough Gas, which operated a work plant that spewed pollution into the creek from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1950’s.

“They could have cared less,” said historian Charles Denson. “Back then, stink was the smell. It gave people jobs.”

A native Coney Islander, Denson founded the Coney Island Project in 2004 to archive and educate Coney Island’s past. He is planning on writing a book on the storied creek, and there is no greater story than the ghost ships that reside in the creek’s shallow waters.

Back in 1950’s, the creek was a dumping ground for unwanted boats. Owners would abandon them and leave them to decay. The crown jewel is a yellow submarine built by Brooklyn shipyard worker Jerry Bianco to seek out sunken treasure from the wreck of the ocean liner Andrea Doria back in 1956. After a storm, the submarine dislodged from the shore and became stuck in the mud where it still sits today.

In the past, the Army Corps of Engineers has studied abandoned ships in what they deemed as New York’s economically viable waterways. The ships of the Coney Island creek have never been investigated by the agency.

However, Denson argues that the ghost ships, clearly visible from Hernandez encampment, are ultimately valuable.

“They’re mostly habitat for wildlife,” he said. “They’re pretty clean wrecks.”

Despite its tarnished past, Denson said that there has been renewed interest in revitalizing the creek.

In 2006, KeySpan, whose predecessor Brooklyn Union bought out the Brooklyn Borough Gas’ polluting plant, spent nearly 114 million dollars cleaning up much of the western inlet of the creek.

In addition, as part of its Vision 2020, the city plans in 2013 on diverting the sewers away from creek to prevent an overflow of sewage and storm water runoff.

However, most of the restorative efforts have come from the local community itself. The Partnership for Parks recently gave Denson a grant to construct signage to educate the public on the creek’s ecological and historical significance. Friends of Kaiser Park, which has organized creek clean ups in the past, also gave Denson a grant to launch a kayaking program.

“If you’ve seen it 10 years ago, you’d be amazed how much it’s come along,” he said.

However, it still has a long way to go. The area is still mostly undeveloped, except for a few car repair places, and in a 2011 report, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection declared the creek as “impaired” for aquatic life and recreational use because of pollution.

That has never stopped Hernandez. He and a motley crew of seven other visiting homeless men regularly cook and eat the fish they catch in the creek over a makeshift campfire. They fish deep in the creek where Hernandez insists it’s not polluted. He has never gotten sick from eating the fish.

“On the contrary, it has made me stronger,” he said.

A couple years ago, a friend gave them a broken Wave Runner without a motor. Hernandez and his friends fixed it, although they still haven’t found a motor for it. Instead, they ride up and down the creek using a paddle.

Many residents who frequent the area have seen Hernandez and his friends, and they all give the same commentary—they drink a lot, but they’re pretty much harmless.

Indeed, Hernandez admits that many of the activities involve heavy drinking and it can have its consequences. A month, he broke his leg after slipping and falling by the creek after a few many drinks. He had an epiphany that while he loves the freedom living outside has provided him, it has also given him the liberty to drink— an addiction that he has been struggling with for the last few years.

“I have to overcome this,” Hernandez said. “I need to at least attempt it.”

In order to make money, they collect empty cans and bottles and redeem them at local supermarkets, a crucial tactic for surviving the winter when the garden is bare.

To keep warm, Hernandez and his crew pick up discarded wooden slabs from the nearby Home Depot. They put them up against the tarp to protect from the cold and burn the rest in a big bonfire while wrapping themselves in blankets.

“We can overcome the cold because we know how to take care of ourselves,” Hernandez said.

Despite his affection for the creek, Hernandez isn’t sure if he can take another harsh winter outside. He hopes to move in with his brother when fall arrives or maybe even move back to Mexico. That is, if he can stop drinking first.

But no matter if he stays if he stays or if he goes during winter, he’s determined to come back when the weather warms up and continue to take care of his waterside home by the creek.

“I don’t plan to completely abandon it,” Hernandez said. “Like I told you, I fell in love with these lands.”

By JACKIE SNOW & LINDSAY ARMSTRONG

One day in 2006, Paul Klein was riding the A train when he noticed that the subway map didn’t include City Island.

According to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the Bronx ended where Orchard Beach met the Long Island Sound. Klein knew better. He had lived on City Island, a mile-and-a-half long strip of land that juts out into the Sound, for several years. He was also a local business owner and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce.

Klein decided to take action. He called the transit authority to convince them that City Island deserved a place on the map, even if it wasn’t accessible by subway.

“I mean, if nobody knows that we exist,” he reasoned, “how will they ever know to come visit us?”

By KEN CHRISTENSEN & TRISTAN HALLMAN

On a warm summer night, Crystal Reyes and a group of five friends decided they would cool off the next day by taking a dip in the tree-lined Bronx River Park.

“We didn’t necessarily know where a pool was, and the river was way cooler,” said Reyes’ then-boyfriend Aaron Ortiz, who was 16 at the time. “And the pools around there, they’re not usually open.”

Edwin Cruz (right), 53, takes a break at the Bronx River with a friend where Crystal Reyes and David Luccioni drowned two years ago. Cruz almost drowned at this very spot when he was 15, when there weren't fences to deter children from swimming. He tried to stand on one of the slippery rocks below the water's surface and went under. The current looks mild, he said, but it kept pulling him down. Now a resident of Hunts Point, Cruz said children often swim downriver at Riverside Park, where they often jump off a floating dock into the deep water. Photo by Ken Christensen.

Headlines read that a heat wave was rolling through. The temperature reached about 94 degrees when the friends arrived at the park. Among them were Reyes — who had been dating Ortiz for a year — and one of the Ortiz’s close friends, David Luccioni III. Ortiz and Luccioni planned to go into law enforcement together. David would become a cop, and Ortiz would become a detective.

Nondescript red metal signs, tied ten or so feet off the ground, indicate that swimming in that part of the river is forbidden. But before the river flows down a man-made concrete waterfall to a shallow, rocky area below, it is calm and deep enough to swim in. Here at this tranquil spot, the bottom isn’t visible like it is below the waterfall.

Reyes and her friends hopped the short wrought-iron fence that blocked their way. They descended the rock wall with convenient footholds to a flat concrete slab where canoes dock after a trip downriver.

Other teens were already swimming in the river, Ortiz said. The group plunged into the cool water. The girls were in swimsuits and the boys mostly wore clothes.

About 20 minutes after the teens went in, Ortiz accidentally drifted away from the others. He felt something pulling at his foot. He tried to shake out of it. There was more pulling. He knew how to swim a little bit, but he couldn’t get free. He kept going under.

“I was scared,” Ortiz said. “I didn’t want this to happen.”

Seeing his panic, Luccioni III swam toward him. So did Crystal Reyes, Ortiz’s sister Jazzmin, 11, and David’s brother. Luccioni, who was wearing hiking boots, went under water and pushed Ortiz up so he could get enough air to swim to safety.

Then Reyes and Jazzmin Ortiz began to drown too. Luccioni went for Jazzmin, and dove under her to push her up to get air too. That left Reyes, who was flailing around, panicking. An experienced swimmer could possibly escape. Reyes wasn’t. In her distress, she pulled Luccioni under too. Neither would come back up.

The others who were in the water waded out to look for the two. Maybe one of them could dive in there and rescue them. But they couldn’t see Reyes or Luccioni.

All Ortiz could do was wait for help to arrive.

He said it took 12 minutes for the police to arrive on the scene, and another eight minutes or so after that for the paramedics to get there.

“I just wanted them to hurry up and come so they could save her, and him,” he said. “But since they were underwater that long, I was thinking they would probably end up with brain damage even if they were saved.”

When the EMTs arrived, they recovered Reyes and then Luccioni from the bottom of the river and took them to St. Barnabas Hospital 15 blocks away. They were pronounced dead on arrival.

Reyes was about a week away from her 15th birthday.

Luccioni and Reyes were two of 21 people in New York City reported to have accidentally drowned in 2010 – it could not be determined whether seven additional deaths were accidental – according to the city’s latest figures. Studies have shown that minorities like Reyes, who is Puerto Rican by ethnicity, are three times more likely to drown than whites. New York is currently making efforts to increase recreation in its waterways by opening up 20 miles of waterfront park space. But the city and its private partners are waging an uphill battle to bring swim safety to black and Hispanic communities where — for economic, historical and cultural reasons — many people don’t know how to swim.

“Drowning is a public health problem,” said Jeff Wiltse, a history professor at the University of Montana at Missoula who wrote a history of swimming pools in the U.S. and New York in his 2007 book “Contested Waters.”

It’s a public health problem that is most pronounced among minorities. Nationwide, black children between the ages of 5 and 14 are three times as likely to drown than are white children in the same age group, according to the Centers for Disease Control. A study by USA Swimming, the national governing body for competitive swimming, showed that Hispanic children were almost twice as likely to not know how to swim as white children.

The reason for the disparity is that swimming became a culturally white activity due to racial segregation, Wiltse said. The two waves of popularity of pools — municipal pools in the 1920s and private pools in the 1960s-70s — both left minorities on the sidelines, he said.

During these periods, blacks were often excluded outright from pools in small towns and cities with Southern heritage, Wiltse said. In cities like New York, segregation resembled Jim Crow laws. Minorities could access pools in their neighborhoods freely, but were harassed at pools in white neighborhoods. Wiltse said New York City was late to provide municipal pools and left many in disrepair for years. That was especially the case in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

As a result, many people grew up without ever learning to swim and then had children, Wiltse said. The fear and lack of swim safety was passed down among generations, he said. The built-in cultural fears are major hurdles to teaching kids to swim, said Dwayne Lindo, the aquatics director of the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club.

“Most of the kids I talked to, they get a fear from their parents because their parents never learned to swim,” Lindo said. “They tell them, ‘Don’t go in the water. Don’t go in the deep end,’ and they pass that fear on to their own children.”

Sharlene Brown, the director of the Bronx YMCA, said that’s also true at her organization and in her own life. Brown said that when she was growing up, her mom was so terrified of the water that she didn’t let her children learn to swim.

“My mom almost drowned when she was young. I couldn’t even get her into a tub,” Brown said. “She would panic.”

When Brown was 29, she decided that it was time to overcome her fear. She took swimming lessons at the Bedford-Stuyvesant YMCA, where she worked before she came to the Bronx.

Brown said that more and more adults are taking swim lessons now too.

Christine Aleman, the Bronx YMCA aquatics director, said that her mom was also terrified of swimming. The 28-year-old Hunts Point-native said she didn’t learn how to swim until her mom found a free-swimming program that was offered nearby when Aleman was 16. Aleman said her family wasn’t able to afford swim lessons before that, and the free program gave them an opportunity.

Brown and Aleman learning swimming at a later age is uncommon. The best and most common age for people to learn to swim is about ages 6 or 7 — if not younger — said Sue Anderson, a director of diversity at USA Swimming. Children who are about 6 have not fully developed a fear of the water, she said, and they don’t have as many body issues with being in swimsuits around other boys and girls.

The YMCA and Asphalt Green have both partnered with some of the city’s public schools to teach second-graders to swim. And the city’s Parks and Recreation Department is currently holding a swim lesson program for the city’s children and adults.

The efforts fit one of the tenets of the city’s Vision 2020 waterfront plan, which places a heavy emphasis on an increase in water recreation: to “encourage growth of programs for water-related education for youth and schools, including swimming classes.”

Asphalt Green, the YMCA and Parks and Recreation are trying to teach thousands of children to swim. But their reach falls far short of their goals of teaching all of the roughly 70,000 second-graders in public schools in New York.

Carol Tweedy, the executive director of Asphalt Green, said that there still aren’t enough pools in the city to teach every second-grader to swim. There need to be more pools in schools, she said.

Wiltse said New Yorkers are better off than a lot of people across the country in the number of pools available to them. But that’s not to say there are enough pools. The nation as a whole has a municipal pool shortage, he said.

“You could make a strong argument that in a city of about 8 million people, the number of public swimming facilities is woefully inadequate,” Wiltse said. “If they are going to plunge in the water in the summer, and if they’re not provided facilities like swimming pools, they are going to jump in rivers and lakes, which are much more dangerous.”

That’s what happens in the Bronx River, said John Decolator, a Bronx attorney who represents the Reyes and Luccioni families in a lawsuit against the city for negligence.

“Apparently, the kids go there a lot because there are so few public swimming pools in the area,” Decolator said.

Decolator and his law partner Stephen B. Kaufman said that paramedics were often called to the spot in Bronx River Park to help children who had almost drowned even before Reyes and Luccioni died.

The city has denied that there were not enough pools available.

But locals say the problem still persists. On a hot day, kids will go in the natural water to cool off.

“The problem is, most of the kids who jump in there can’t swim,” said Richie Torres, who regularly hangs out at the park with his fishing buddies. “It was sad, man. But people still go in there.”

Anderson said many children who can’t swim still think that they can simply because it looks easy when other people do it.

“They think, ‘Oh I can do that,’ and they don’t know how hard it is,” Anderson said.

What children often don’t realize is that swimming requires the swimmer to be relaxed, Anderson said. Panicking or tenseness will cause safety problems, she said. Like it did for Reyes.

Ortiz said they had been swimming in the river before that day. Lots of children and teens had. The gate and the stone pathway are the only things standing between the still water and the playground just a few yards away.

Ortiz walks by the park from time to time, but hasn’t been inside since. And he doesn’t want to. Not after what happened.

“We should have never gone there,” he said.

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– Joseph Mitchell

One of the the notorious legacies of famed city planner Robert Moses is that his vision left New Yorkers disconnected from their waterfront on the island city. Roadways, pollution, signs, fences and other impediments kept people out and away from the water.

The spaces available for residents to enjoy their lives has dwindled as the isolated city has become more crowded. Park space has dwindled to 3.5 acres per 1,000 residents, one of the lowest ratios in the country.

The city is trying to alleviate the crowd by expanding to one of its greatest underused resource – water. After all, New York City is made up of four islands and a peninsula. Major waterways are never more than a few miles from any place in the city.

While announcing the city’s waterfront initiatives, Mayor Michael Bloomberg likened the city’s waterways and the New York coastline to a “sixth borough.” New York has 520 miles of coastline. If the many nooks and crannies were straightened out, the coastline would reach Toronto with some miles to spare.

These miles are being rediscovered by local government. New York City Department of City Planning put out the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan in 1992 with a goal to open up New York’s waterways. The city renovated the West side Promenade and prompted the $500 million facelift Brooklyn Navy Yard. Vision 2020 expands on the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan with a mission to open up access to the water. Over the next 10 years, the city will invest $3 billion into 130 funded projects across every borough. The city wants its inhabitants to find new ways to interact with the waterways and create some more space.

But plenty of New Yorkers have been using the water as an integral part of their lives, without the help of the city. He is part of a small, diverse community that has forged a dynamic bond with the water without waiting for the structured formality of a bureaucrat or urban planner to lead the way. Some found their homes along the shorelines. Others found their livelihoods. There are people who believe the water is sacred, a place of worship. Children go to the water to cool off and have fun, despite the danger. And some enthusiasts tired of waiting for the government to clean up their water; they took it upon themselves to make a change.

The Sixth Borough offers city dwellers a new territory full of possibilities. But as was the case when Columbus discovered the “New World,” New York’s developers will find that there are already people who inhabit its newly-discovered territory.