Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant

3239 Greenpoint Avenue 1965-79
expansion: Polshek Partnership, 2009

The largest of the city’s 14 wastewater treatment plants, the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant was constructed in 1965-79 and underwent a vast upgrade and expansion in 2009. It features futuristic buildings with swooping roofs and a series of immense, stainless steel, egg-shaped “digesters”. The 3.5-mile Newtown Creek, a major industrial waterway in the second half of the 19th between Brooklyn and Queens. As one of America’s most polluted industrial waterways, it was designated a Federal Superfund site by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection in 2010. Along with the plant’s modernization, a nature walk around the creek was laid out and the plant established a visitors’ center that runs monthly tours of the facility. The nature walk, from which visitors can get a good view of the egg digesters, begins at the eastern edge of Paidge Avenue.

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