She Plants Native Grasses and Counts Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs:

An Interview with Pamela Pettyjohn

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Photo: Pamela Pettyjohn in Coney Island Creek, Brooklyn, New York. Taken by Abby Jordan

 

On an overcast, unseasonably mild Saturday in February, Pamela Pettyjohn, co-founder and president of the Coney Island Beautification Project, lead me on a tour of her coastal neighborhood in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York.

 

She pointed out native grasses that she and her volunteers had planted years prior along the shoreline of Coney Island Creek Park. Now dry and brittle, she explained that they will explode to life with long elegant stands of green in the summer. 

 

Originally from Harlem, Pamela (as she insists I call her) grew up across the street from St. Nicholas Park. She has had a fond relationship with nature ever since she was a little girl. Pamela moved to Coney Island about 35 years ago and has been an integral member of her community ever since. 

 

Playful and sassy about her exact age, Pamela is now well into her 70’s. She is a proud Black woman, physically active and constantly on the move, long retired from a demanding municipal service career as a New York City subway train operator.  

 

Her environmental activism is her second wind. 

 

Following retirement from her first career Pamela did not expect to undertake the portfolio of environmental advocacy projects she has organized with her team, from their beautification plantings to their stormwater management community workshops. Her experiences during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 propelled her down this path, choosing to create the Coney Island Beautification Project (CIBP) in order to address the vast needs of her community.

 

Coney Island was devastated by an unprecedented superstorm which inundated her neighborhood in a terrifying storm surge. 

 

The painfully slow recovery from Hurricane Sandy presented itself with an opportunity for beautification. What once started as a team of neighbors planting flowers to spread joy and greenery among a destroyed landscape, blossomed into environmental justice work aimed at fortifying and empowering folks in Coney Island to build a resilient coastal enclave. 

 

Pamela’s neighborhood is particularly vulnerable to future storm surges and chronic tidal flooding. Pamela facilitates the community-lead enhancement of Coney Island’s built and natural environment through environmental science programming, stormwater management and coastal resilience planning. 

 

Coastal resilience can be described as the efforts communities must take to adapt to and protect their coastlines from the impacts of coastal degradation. Several of Pamela’s coastal resiliency projects piqued my interest as an environmental educator. Her work is unique to Coney Island and speaks volumes to the neighborhood’s vibrant coastal surroundings and urgent climate adaptation needs.

 

Personally, I met Pamela while volunteering as an outreach ambassador with the Billion Oyster Project, tabling during one of her annual “City of Water Day” events. She invited me back to participate in a horseshoe crab monitoring which I plan to do this summer. As a native Brooklynite, I was inspired by her leadership and was eager to learn more about her environmental justice work. 

 

On our walk along Coney Island Creek in Kaiser Park, she pointed out the beach where the horseshoe crab monitoring is hosted and identified native plants she and her volunteers planted and cared for.

 

Where else can you count horseshoe crabs with a view of the Manhattan skyline in the background? She instantly had me hooked. A condensed and edited version of our time and interview together follows. 

 

Can you tell us how City of Water Day, your annual coastal water activity engagement event, got started? 

 

City of Water Day was started with the Waterfront Alliance. We started our first year in 2014. 

 

I remember seeing a short film by the Waterfront Alliance called City of Water Day. The turning point for me was the part of the film that showed private ferries and boats coming to lower Manhattan to rescue people on 9/11. [The rescuers] could not get to folks because [the city] had built these promenades that are very beautiful. 

 

We could see the water, but we had no access to the water. They were trying to pull down the iron gates [of the promenades] and put-up ladders to try to rescue people from the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. 

 

When I saw that, I realized just how important access to the water is. 

 

Not being able to, not just look at it, but being able to put your hands and feet in it. [The water] is not just for recreation. It may be the only way your life can be saved if you need to be rescued. And so that kind of gave me that sense of urgency over the importance of our waterways. 

 

In Coney Island, we are a peninsula that's only 3 blocks wide. We are surrounded by water. This needed to be a major focus, not only for an emergency, but just… to be able to live and to thrive in Coney, [for folks] not to be fearful of the water. 

 

For last year’s City of Water Day, we had free kayaking. All the events that we do are free to the entire community, it's not just for students. Anybody that's walking by, they're more than welcome [to join]. We're very proud of that. 

 

What has been your favorite Coney Island Beautification Project event thus far?

 

I think they’re all my favorite. They’re all different, and I love them. I especially love “City of Water Day” that we do every year, bringing my community back to the water. 

 

My community, we found, was afraid of the water at the beginning, and we understood that.

 

But how do you bring people back to the shoreline and let them know that it's nothing to be afraid of, it's something to be enjoyed. 

 

It's important in case of an emergency, the shoreline may be the only avenue of egress that we may have, or getting in supplies. 

 

It was also a great way to convene, to give out information so the community knew what plans were, what was going on in the waterways and in the creek. Tabling was important. Activities, having fun was important. Education was important. 

 

[Hurricane Sandy] Commemorative Day of Service is always going to be another favorite because the students and the young people in the community took ownership of it. 

 

They would weed and clean the tree beds. They would plant flowers. 

 

They did all of this. When they walk by, they could be proud. 

 

They would come out every year. Students wrote us letters saying that they didn't know where food came from. They had never known where flowers came from. They thought they came from the supermarket. 

 

They get so excited when they're digging in the soil, in the tree bed, and they find worms! 

 

This opens up that opportunity to have these conversations. Hopefully, we are bringing that in. That sort of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] interest. 

 

I am interested in learning more about your annual horseshoe crab monitoring events with the NYC Parks Department. When did the horseshoe crab count start? 

 

So, I don't remember exactly how long it's been going on, but the Coney Island Beautification Project started participating in 2015. We started working with Cornell University, and the NYC Parks Stewardship team. We have been hosting it ever since. 

 

Why is the horseshoe crab count important? 

 

It is important for the Coney Island Beautification Project to be involved because it was a very important [ecological] study. We are looking at the migration of these horseshoe crabs that come up every year. I'm not sure their origin of migration, but they come right up the Eastern Seaboard, and they like to come back to the same areas. 

 

Horseshoe crabs are known as keystone species. Their presence indicates the health and prosperity of their ecosystem. What type of questions are you trying to answer by collecting data on these animals?

 

Now we have been tagging them and tracking them to see if the same crabs come back to the same area, or are they just coming in the general area? The ones that we've tagged here in Coney Island Creek, are they now in Jamaica Bay? Or are they in Montauk, you know? Or where are they? Where are they coming back to? 

 

The most important thing is, the cleaner the water the more the horseshoe crab. We almost lost them all. Horseshoe crabs are important for humans living together in and with nature. They will give an indication of pollution [levels]. When pollution is really bad, they won't come back to that area. If they're thriving, then the water in that area is safe and clean. 

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How many on a typical count, are you guys able to see and service? 

 

In the beginning, like, the first few nights when we start because you're…

 

Oh, it's at night?!

 

Oh, yes. Always at night. 

 

They don't come ashore until high tide in the evening. It's two days before and two days after a full or a new moon. 

 

It's like dating. You know, they like to date in the evening. 

 

They like to get together, you know, when it gets dark and so in the very beginning, everybody's active. Everybody's in love. And so we may have anywhere from 2 to 300 tags in one night!

 

How do you tag horseshoe crabs?

 

Oh, well we have a drill that we use to drill a hole [in the horseshoe crabs shell]. Then we have these round tags that have a little, little piece of plastic that goes into the hole, and when you snap it in, it stays. They have numbers on it, and that's how we're able to track them. 

 

Whenever you, if you ever come out, and you see a horseshoe crab with a tag on it, we will contact the Department of Environmental Protection. 

 

We will make a big deal that you found this! 

 

They will send you a pin and a certificate saying that you were able to document an already tagged horseshoe crab, which is very important because we're trying to track their migration patterns! 

 

You had mentioned future volunteer projects focused on the construction and maintenance of bioswales. What is a bioswale and where would you want to see them in Coney Island? 

 

Bioswales are catchment systems used to manage rain. It's a way for rainwater and [stormwater] flooding to have some place to sit, where you can release [stormwater] later on or just absorb it into a modified tree bed. 

 

Instead of having ugly holes in the ground, you can instead have trees, green spaces with flowers and gardens. Water will go into these bioswales instead of into our storm drains. 

 

I would like to see the first group in low lying areas, areas that we know flood over and over again. There are always multiple reasons why there is flooding, like at West 33rd Street and Neptune Avenue, where Public School 188 is. 

 

Now we already know that it floods to the point where the teachers and parents form a bucket brigade to hand the kids off. 

 

You know, just like they used to do before there were fire trucks. You had to, you know, pass a bucket of water to put a fire out. 

 

Well, you do the same thing with the kids here at 188! 

 

That should not be happening now. But we have said it over and over again, and everyone knows it floods, but nothing has been done. 

 

Part of that problem is not just the flooding. You have a combined sewage overflow (CSO) pipe that runs through West 33rd that gets clogged up with sand. 

 

Then you have these high rises on both sides that have grease spurts. You know, people will pour grease and all kinds of things clog up the storm drains and cause blockage. 

 

Coney Island is a very low-lying area, so things like elevating the sidewalk, permeable sidewalks, bioswales - all of these things are small projects that can be done. They're not very expensive, but it would help. 

 

I just found out recently from the coastal resiliency workshops that we've been doing at the New York Aquarium that a local kid was killed trying to jump over floodwaters and was hit by a car! It's a sad history that the community has with flood waters. 

 

Your experiences with environmental science education and citizen science, are these all things you've been academically trained in? 

 

My community are the experts. My community has observed nature, climate change. They can tell you the changes. They can tell you which way that water is gonna flow, where it's gonna flood, where there used to be trees, how’s the temperature. 

 

They've been here forever, but nobody wants to talk to the people that live here because they don't have degrees. They think that they don't know. 

 

I see value in everybody. And everybody here knows history. 

 

They know they have, just by observation. You can't live somewhere forever and not see the changes. 

 

My neighbors are all experts. So, I try to listen to what they're saying and learn from them and elevate their voices to make sure that people are listening to the people who are the experts. 

 

The engineers and architects, I love them, but they go home at 5 o'clock.

 

We're still here. We can tell you at midnight what's gonna happen.

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Abby is a Brighton Beach, Brooklyn native, the daughter of immigrants from El Salvador. Passionate about helping educate and build resilient coastal communities, Abby has field science education experience with the National Wildlife Federation Resilient Schools Consortium as an educator and community advisor. She previously worked for Liberation Diploma Plus High School, a small but mighty public transfer high school, where she helped students and families in Coney Island. She is currently a SIPA Environmental Fellow at Columbia University where she is working to earn her Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy at the Columbia Climate School and School of International and Public Affairs. Fun Fact: She is an avid open water swimmer and loves swimming in the ocean year around, check out @CIBBOWS the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers on instagram to learn more!

She can by reached at: aj3241@columbia.edu

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