How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ike Dike - a Prelude

Life on the coast(s) in the era of anthropogenic climate change

The first time I ran through East River Park, I knew I was where I was supposed to be. It was my first week living in Manhattan after a two-year sojourn in New Jersey. I was waking up with the sun again after a feels-illegal-but-isn’t bedroom without an external window had wreaked havoc on my circadian rhythms. The sun had just peeked over the horizon, and a golden light danced on the waters as it lapped onto the shores of Brooklyn. It was on that run that I also found the maze of blocked off entrances, thruways that were no longer through, and turnarounds that characterize East River Park in the wake of then-Mayor DeBlasio’s East Side Coastal Resiliency project — part of a broader effort to make Manhattan’s shores more resilient to rising sea levels in the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. On the surface that might seem like an uncomplicatedly good thing, but what began as a community-led “nature as buffer” approach that would allow the park to flood during particularly tough storms, costing a mere $770 million, ballooned into a $1.45 billion series of more traditional flood gates and barriers without proper input from said community groups. 

East River Park around E 10th St, September 2023

20th century solutions to 21st century problems are a quandary I know well as a Houstonian. At first glance, the difference between the East Side Resiliency project and the Ike Dike (the series of floodgates proposed to protect Houston’s ship channel in the wake of 2008’s Hurricane Ike) seemed plain: the East Side Resiliency project actually got funded and off the ground.

My initial introduction to the project had been through the poet Eileen Myles’s Instagram. I’ve oft heard Myles talk of their rent-controlled East Village apartment, notably in the “Why I Write” lecture at the Windham Campbell Prizes (for the curious, you can read their lecture in the collection For Now from Yale University Press). They have an eclectic IG feed of handwritten sharpie missives advertising either readings or direct actions, screenshots of dogs that are up for adoption, and photographs of East River Park. 

But before I can tell you the story of the Ike Dike, of East River Park, which will be my mission in the coming weeks and months, I have to tell you how I came into the world. In September 1998, when my mother was eight months pregnant with me, she lived in a basement apartment in New Orleans. She was living alone at the time, about to start a new job at Tulane University. On what was supposed to be her first day of class, Tropical Storm Frances slammed into the Gulf Coast. Water began to seep in through her bathtub drain. The landlord told my mom to stuff towels into the toilet to keep the water from rising. The story has been told to me many times, but the part that always sticks with me is the image of my abuelita, my father’s mother, who came in the storm’s aftermath to help her clean, peeling pieces of wet sheet music apart and hanging them up to dry. “So that’s how you came into the world,” my mother said when I asked her to tell me the story. “Through a flood.”

I’ve written versions of this sentence so many times it’s started to feel like a cliche. The story, the storms and I have felt so interchangeable I’m no longer sure where they end and where I begin. When does it become fact? When does it become fate? But I will speak in “I feel” statements:

Because I want to talk to you about how it feels to be left behind. To have your future put on hold, to be told you don’t get a future. Your future isn’t worth investing in, your input in your future isn’t worth considering. Oh you thought you had a choice? You thought this was your home? It belongs to DiBlasio, it belongs to Ray Nagin, it belongs to Exxon, it belongs to the sea.

Even then, well, you’re not a good enough tenant. You owe back taxes, seems you have not behaved. Do you deserve a future? Do you deserve a park? How bout we rebuild it, but your kids don’t get to live here? How bout we change our minds? What’s your credit? Who’s your people? Turns out some are more equal than others. The decision wasn’t final. The decision wasn’t yours. We’ve brought in a committee, an engineer, a president, a mayor, a butcher, a baker, an analyst. You know, someone whose job it is to analyze. No, not like you, not like that.

Well, there’s a three-year delay. Well, we have to consider all sides. Well, the choice was never yours to begin with. What would Robert Moses do? Is staying really worth it? Have you thought about leaving? No, really thought about leaving. Are you really worth it? The new plan takes all these factors into account.

Well, the salt’s already coming in. Well, it’s the office of environmental justice, the office of budgetary management, the housing office, the department of parks and recreation, the one in whose name all decisions are made. They’re all responsible and no one is responsible. Outrage. Condemnation. 

We’ll fill the land with your dreams, with woodchips, with broken promises, the bricks from the tenements we tore down. 

The city is rebuilt in your name without you in it. Manhattan to Tchapitoulas. Congo Square, Loisada. Here I am, an outsider to this city, only neighbors to call kin, in a building I can barely afford. Here I am, a witness. Let me in. Let me in and I will tell you what I know.

Hope you enjoyed this first missive from a sprawling project on the Ike Dike and the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project! What questions do you have (if any) about the project?  

Currently reading: Palestine by Joe Sacco

Spinning: The Land, The Water, The Sky by Black Belt Eagle Scout