The North Pier at City Pier, Seaport District. Photo: Julius Shulman/Corbis via Getty Images
In March, Giselle MacDonald, a photographer living in the North Brooklyn section of the City Pier Residences project, snapped this picture of a decrepit wooden box housed in a vacant lot at the water’s edge in the Seaport District.
The box on which she stood was disordered, its floors had fallen and windows were boarded up. The water around it was so murky it could be hard to see out, but if you looked at it from the water, a narrow lane was visible, just underneath and over the floating boxes. The neighborhood water tank towers were visible on the foreground, and under the boxes lay the remains of corncobs, popcorn, and other debris, as if accidentally pushed in. For a moment, it didn’t look like the North Pier, where 21 other towers are finished and the water above drops almost entirely in July. But then I remembered that nearby, the Bronx River Parkway had turned completely dirty in recent days.