One more reason

The walk across the Pulaski Bridge from Long Island City in Queens to Greenpoint in Brooklyn is nice enough, I suppose. It crosses the Newtown Creek and serves as the unofficial halfway point in the New York City Marathon. The name, if you even care, honors Kazimierz Pulaski, a Polish revolutionary war fighter. As you walk up the ramp, you cross over the MidTown Tunnel tolls. So far so good.

From midspan the western view is glorious. Where else in New York City can you see iconic skyscrapers and sailboats all at the same time?

But the view to the east is a bit odd. What IS that weird collection of giant stainless steel Hersey’s Kisses out there?

At first I thought... “above ground natural gas tanks?” Um, no. That’s the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment plant. Those 8 tanks are called “digester eggs”, 24 million gallons of that which we mercifully flush away. Whoa.

from Google Earth

From the New York Times:

What goes on inside the digesters is ... vital to processing millions of gallons of waste water every day. Sludge, which is removed from sewage, is broken down within the digesters into more stable materials: water, carbon dioxide, methane gas and digested sludge, which can be formed into dry cakes and then, after additional processing, used as fertilizer. The shape of the egg helps concentrate grit in the bottom of the tank and gas concentrations at the top. Each egg holds three million gallons of sludge.

Eight huge tanks of you-know-what placed in Brooklyn and viewable from Queens? Ha.

One more reason to love living in the Bronx!