Rosebank’s City of Water Day Pairs Paddling and Performance to Spotlight Staten Island Shorebirds

By mingling art, activism and kayaking, New York’s ‘City of Water Day’ tests whether small-scale communal rituals can shift civic attitudes towards the city’s imperiled waterfront.

On a crystalline July morning, the Brooklyn skyline shimmered behind Buono Beach as paddles sliced the Narrows and the odd cormorant fluttered overhead. The gathering was modest: a few dozen Staten Islanders, a flotilla of battered kayaks, a performance artist in a feathered wetsuit. Yet amid the driftwood and flotsam of Rosebank’s shore, a hybrid ritual unfolded—half pageant, half primer on environmental peril—which sought to remind New Yorkers of the world at their doorstep and the fragility of its inhabitants.

“City of Water Day,” now in its eighteenth year, is an annual bunting of the city’s often-neglected shoreline. Orchestrated by the Waterfront Alliance and local partners, its purpose is simple: get New Yorkers onto and near their waterways, if only for a day, and ignite a flicker of stewardship. This year’s program sprawled from Westchester to New Jersey, but at Buono Beach the collaboration between the artist DB Lampman and Kayak Staten Island added a sharper edge to the festivities.

Volunteers, led by Annette Pierce and James Limperopoulos, shepherded would-be mariners into nylon vests and 12-foot kayaks, dispatching them for panoramic views of the Verrazzano Bridge and the city’s restless skyline. Onshore, Lampman, clad as “The Waterfowl”—a shorebird costume inspired by Cornell University’s 2022 State of the Birds Report—stalked the wrack line in a somber dance. Each whistle and gesture drew the crowd’s gaze to abandoned buoys, echoing the threats that imperil New York’s actual birds: habitat loss, plastic waste, and indifferent human neighbours.

The implications for New York are manifest. Only a sliver—about 160 of 520 miles—of the city’s waterfront is actually accessible to the public; large slices remain hemmed off by industry or left to decay. Artful as Lampman’s performance was, its deeper message chafes: beneath the civic hoisting of kayaks and kites, New York’s coastlines are battered by pollution, erosion and rising seas. Bird populations, once blithely abundant, have suffered sharp declines—31% since 1970 for North American shorebirds, according to the Cornell study.

That matters not only to avifauna, but to New Yorkers themselves. As New York claws at climate resilience—witness the $1.45bn East Side Coastal Resiliency project and Sea Gate’s $336m dune fortifications—local knowledge remains alarmingly thin. Buono Beach, described by a local as “ungroomed,” could double as an emblem: a buffer zone more neglected than cherished, its fate governed by remote agencies (the Department of Environmental Protection, the Army Corps) and rarely consulted neighbours.

Yet events like City of Water Day expose a second axis of consequence: the quiet role of community rituals in urban life. In a city quick to file lawsuits or commission consultants, such folk gatherings—part science, part pageant—may nurture forms of concern less amenable to funding metrics but not less valuable. The inclusion of paddlers as audience for Lampman’s avian choreography invited an unusual intimacy with the aquatic landscape, rendering the vagaries of policy and ecology eerily palpable.

There are, inevitably, costs and limitations. The number of Staten Islanders reached by such efforts is paltry compared to the borough’s nearly half-million residents. Many remain unmoved by performance art, and the broader influence on policymakers or zoning boards is dubious. Still, volunteer collectives like Kayak Staten Island persist, buoyed not by city grants but by stubborn civic pride and a taste for the brackish unknown.

Similar exercises are sprouting nationwide. In Boston, the Charles River Conservancy dangles “swim days” to coax Bostonians to the once-toxic river; in Chicago, lakefront festivals spruik the promise of verdant, shared space. The ambition is not mass mobilisation, but a subtle shift: to argue, amid the commuter chaos, for seeing the urban edge as vital habitat rather than peripheral wasteland.

Art, access and stewardship on the urban shore

Globally, waterfront cities are rediscovering that placid riprap and marshes offer more than idle scenery—they anchor resilience, civic identity and even public health. London’s Thames riverbank, once a byword for grime, now teems with runners, anglers, and birders after decades of investment and gentle nudges from artful events. New York, demographically richer but bureaucratically knottier, sometimes lags behind these exemplars. A patchwork of agencies and decades-old land-use legacies render progress uneven and, at times, glacial.

Yet we reckon that such small-scale spectacles, combining art and kayak, portend a salutary stubbornness. They reframe the waterfront as commons, not commodity. Data on downstream effects—on policy, bird counts or flood resilience—remains sparse, but the growth of local stewardship groups is noteworthy. Even tepid engagement may yield cumulative dividends: volunteer cleanups, nascent urban ornithology, or the odd civic campaign to open locked gates.

There is, of course, a risk of overinvestment in symbolic gestures at the expense of boring but vital infrastructure: bulkheads, sewage upgrades, storm-water management. But the binary critics pose—pageantry or policy—is an unhelpful one. New York has proved, time and again, that durable civic transformations begin in the minor key, where shared experience precedes legislative consensus.

Besides, in a polity as fractious as New York’s, a measure of participatory spectacle may be the price of sustaining focus. The city’s engagement with its edges—once a source of only collective anxiety—has assumed new urgency with rising tides and multiplying floods. If volunteerism and artistic whimsy can nudge even a fraction of New Yorkers to care, the city’s odds against climate adversity improve incrementally.

There is, finally, something reassuring in the notion that a public park, a handful of kayaks, and a lone bird-woman might, for an afternoon, reorient our gaze. New York’s waterfront remains an unstable frontier—sometimes neglected, sometimes revived, always contested. That is both its curse and its peculiar promise.

■