Walking New York’s Shoreline: Policy Meets Art

shoreline walk – A waterfront art walk designed to build public support for New York’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan turned into a pandemic-era project spanning years and miles.

A person can’t truly grasp New York’s waterfront from a map alone, and one long-running walking project is betting on that fact.

The effort follows the art and architecture of the city’s coastline. using an extreme. mile-by-mile public experience to translate planning goals into something people can feel.. It was shaped by a group of artists and organizers collectively known as Works on Water and partnered closely with New York City’s Department of City Planning. with the aim of helping New Yorkers recognize the reality of living on an island city—an urban archipelago defined by roughly 520 miles of shoreline.

The walking project traces back more than a decade, beginning with a chance encounter in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood.. There. an art director and conceptual artist. Nancy Nowacek. described a plan called “Citizen Bridge. ” a proposed footbridge stretching across the Buttermilk Channel from Red Hook to Governors Island.. The project raised support through T-shirts and was rooted in a political idea that citizenship itself had been “weaponized. ” prompting her to refer to the effort more simply as “The Bridge.”

What wasn’t fully understood at the time was that Nowacek intended to do more than propose the bridge.. Over several years, she worked full-time on the project, pursuing grants, lectures, and a Kickstarter campaign.. As the idea developed. she also connected with other artists focused on water-based work. eventually forming Works on Water. an experimental organization built around artworks. performances. conversations. workshops. and site-specific experiences exploring water in the urban environment.

The bridge itself ran into a familiar obstacle: approval and construction became impossible.. By 2016. the team had developed prototypes for a floating structure. but the project was stalled by regulations tied to a waterway described as about 1. 400 feet wide.. That impasse led to a new partnership—this time with the city and its planning apparatus.

Nowacek’s path through the permitting maze sharpened her understanding of how waterfront decisions are made.. After navigating the detailed process of getting approvals—described as requiring seven or eight permits—she found herself in meetings with a City Planning official. Michael Marrella. who offered a blunt assessment of the political and practical realities of waterfront land.. In New York City. he emphasized. multiple interests collide over every square inch of real estate. and those pressures intensify at the water’s edge and over water itself.

Instead of ending the effort, the experience pushed the team toward waterfront planning engagement.. Nowacek began inserting herself into the waterfront advocacy and planning world. including attending meetings organized by groups focused on the shoreline.. She and other artists deepened their relationship with city planners and helped shape a new idea: a project that became the walk along New York’s 520-mile waterfront.

They held an early planning meeting in 2018 at a “Waterfront Planning Camp” on Governors Island.. The goal was to support public outreach connected to the city’s forthcoming Comprehensive Waterfront Plan.. Bringing artists and the public to the physical edge of the water was treated as a way to make planning goals visible in real life.

In January 2020. the project received formal cultural support when New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs announced a Mayor’s Grant for Cultural Impact worth $50. 000 shared jointly among Works on Water. the Department of City Planning. and Culture Push.. Culture Push is a nonprofit whose executive director, Clarinda Mac Low, is also part of Works on Water.

At the time, the walking plan was designed for an outsized public rollout.. It was meant to encourage exploration, art, and activism tied to the city’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan.. The concept included artists walking the entire waterfront in shifts for 24 hours a day over 20 days. with the trek beginning May 20—so the calendar itself would align with the schedule.. Nowacek described the original ambition as coming-one. coming-all. with the pace calibrated to complete the full route in about two weeks.

Then the pandemic arrived and the timeline shattered. The world stopped, and the original plan—already ambitious enough to resemble an arts spectacle—was no longer feasible as conceived.

With the project delayed, its supporters returned to the work in a different form.. In 2025. as the fall semester unfolded. an educator associated with the School of Visual Arts used the waterfront as a teaching focus. sending graduate students to examine waterfront places and infrastructure.. While planning the syllabus. an email about the 2025 Works on Water Triennial on Governors Island provided a new doorway into the subject.

That triennial offered a wider lens on the shoreline.. One artist used the surface water of Newtown Creek—a waterway described as notoriously polluted—to create prints and patterns on paper.. Another work. “Sunk Shore. ” staged a speculative. experiential tour of a climate crisis future conducted by Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low. which Mac Low described as “analog virtual reality.”

Even with the range of artworks on display. one element drew particular attention: an enormous grid of what looked like ordinary snapshots.. The images, totaling about 350, represent one mile walked by Works on Water artists and others involved with the effort.. The project’s pace changed after the pandemic but continued in consistent bursts.

Walking the Edge began on May 20, 2025, and has been running through ongoing weekly activity: two walks every week.. For participants. the walking itself became a bridge between policy language and lived experience—turning the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan from a document into something you can physically track and talk about.

By late October, an eight-mile segment offered a glimpse of what that engagement looks like on the ground.. The route ran along the Queens shoreline beginning at Fort Totten. a Civil War–era Army base now owned by the city.. It continued along Little Neck Bay and through Douglaston.. Along the way. the group paused every mile for someone to take a photograph to be added to the larger grid. connecting the daily act of walking with the longer-term public artwork.

Marrella’s earlier description of the walk’s intent also became clearer: the engagement was meant to plant a seed in the public mind. encouraging advocacy for the waterfront.. That outreach may not have followed the original 24/7 mass-participation model. but it still appears to have done something similar—building a sense of ownership and understanding among people who would otherwise only encounter the shoreline at a distance.

The route itself reflected the city’s complicated relationship with its waterfront.. Much of the walk followed a footpath pressed between the Cross Island Parkway and Little Neck Bay—an area that is described as both beautiful and emblematic of how waterfront access has often been reshaped by highways.. The story of Robert Moses looms in the background of that kind of landscape. where transportation corridors can narrow the space for public enjoyment.

Still, the day also brought the project’s most vivid surprises: a private enclave on the water’s edge.. In Douglas Manor, homes displayed Halloween decorations, but the key detail came from nautical-looking blue-and-white signs installed at intervals.. The signs stated that Douglas Manor’s private shoreline was owned and maintained by the Douglas Manor Association and reserved for members only. with no trespassing.

That moment raised a question about boundaries along the city’s shoreline—how much of New York’s waterfront remains off-limits by design, and how those limits shape what the public can know and claim. Participants carried that question forward as the walk continued to a public site.

At the tip of the Douglas Manor peninsula. the group reached Udall’s Park Preserve. a waterfront space open to the public.. The preserve is named for Richard Udall, who in the 19th century owned a mill on the cove.. It also reflects an older civic battle: residents organized in 1969 to prevent development and promote public ownership.. Udall’s Cove was first mapped as a New York City park on December 7, 1972.

Organizers had hoped for a version of the walk that would have been bigger and more collective—what Nowacek called come-one. come-all. with New Yorkers marching along the water’s edge in the original two-week framework.. That full-scale participation never materialized, though the project’s experiential core persisted.. Even as logistical complications likely would have tested the original concept. the lost version is described as a kind of event that could have widened attention around the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. which calls for resilience. water transportation. and job creation.

Yet the walking has become its own argument.. The policy idea—there’s no inherent conflict between economic development and an environmentally thoughtful approach to waterways and wetlands—now carries a personal dimension.. Knowing the waterfront, participants seem to learn, changes how people think about what should be protected, improved, or kept accessible.

The project’s transformation—walking the walk—turns planning goals into art that moves through neighborhoods rather than staying confined to galleries.. In the Queens landscape. the people who advocated for private stewardship in Douglas Manor and those who fought for public ownership in Udall’s Cove both share an understanding of what the shoreline represents.. The difference is in who controls the access.

The day’s final steps landed at Virginia Point. a small section of Udall’s Cove described as a sliver of wilderness on a Little Neck Bay inlet.. It’s portrayed as so bucolic that it almost feels out of place in New York City. which is precisely why the project matters: it shows how the city’s shoreline can be both ordinary in appearance and extraordinary in experience.

As the walk ended. the mood shifted from exploration to celebration when Nowacek played Ace Frehley’s version of “New York Groove. ” the same song used to mark the conclusion of the very first segment.. For participants. the music made the milestone feel personal—then sobering—because reaching the end of that particular route meant arriving at mile 520. with the walking stretch along the city’s edge complete for the day.

New York shoreline walk Works on Water Comprehensive Waterfront Plan waterfront planning Governors Island climate resilience public engagement