One of the longest-running art projects in New York happens on the water rather than in a gallery. Since 2005, the artist Marie Lorenz has operated “The Tide and Current Taxi,” a transit service that ferries passengers through the city’s waterways in a handmade rowboat. Over 21 years it has become a record of how the New York waterfront has changed.
Lorenz built the project out of a DIY ethos, at a time when getting onto the water in New York was difficult. Over two decades she has rowed hundreds of people through the harbor and the creeks, including out of Greenpoint’s Newtown Creek. What began as a way to reclaim access has become a 21-year study of the shoreline from a rowboat.
The project documents climate change and gentrification at water level. From the boat, Lorenz and her passengers have encountered debris from the Fresh Kills landfill that washed out after Superstorm Sandy, the choppy wakes from an explosion of ferry traffic, and landing points closed off one by one by high-rise development crowding the waterfront. The water is the one place from which you can see who has been walled off from it.
On a recent trip, the artist spoke with a fellow artist, Nancy Nowacek, while Greenpoint residents recalled regularly swimming and playing on the East River in the 1970s and 80s, a sense of public right to the water that, as the reporting puts it, is “all but impossible to imagine today.” A working-class neighborhood once treated the river as its backyard. Now that frontage is luxury.
You probably cannot book a ride on a whim. Next time you hit a railing, a fence, or a private esplanade where the water should be public, it was not always that way. Lorenz has spent 21 years documenting the change from her boat. The river belongs to the city. She keeps asking whether the city still acts like it.
