Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: epilogue

This is a three-part post, the epilogue of my week in Mary Mattingly’s Flock House.

Part 1: Five Days of Trash

On Monday, I went back to Smack Mellon to help Ian take down the installation, so as not to leave everyone with all my trash.  I separated it by type, bagged it, and documented what I’d collected in just approximately a half-hour of collecting each day.  Here’s what I’d gathered:

It breaks down like this: one 50 gal bag of plastic, metal, and glass recyclable materials; 2 and 1/2 13gal bags of 5¢ returnable glass, plastic, and metal containers; one 10gal bag of plastic bag and other packaging waste; one 10gal bag of styrofoam and other foam waste; one 13gal bag of paper recycling; approximately 100 plastic bottles caps; 15 [re]usable plastic shopping bags; one small bag of various junk; one biodegradable “plastic” shopping bag; various odds and ends including two working lighters, three dead batteries, numerous cigarette butts, three wine corks, a toy shoe, an old softball, a shoe insole, three working pens, a plastic film canister, and a dog’s chew toy…

Part 2: The Toll

Barring any weird diseases I may have picked up from collecting some of this stuff (I really should be wearing gloves, though I always forget that part), I came away with only a few minors cuts and scratches.  The rocks were the tough part, as the skin on my knees was pretty raw each night, even though I was only climbing around for less than an hour each day:

Part 3: Waterfront Usage

Spending a week in DUMBO’s waterfront was good for me.  I had no idea how much activity there is in that tiny chunk of park right there.  In five days I saw lots of different iterations of land usage: there were kids in the little fenced-in play area, with mothers and nannies; there were large school buses full of of summer camp kids running around in the grass and on the beach; there were hundreds of people who likely work in the area eating their lunches there each day; there were countless photographers, ranging from complete amateurs to gear-head pros, shooting thousands of pictures of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, the Manhattan skyline, fashion models, and each other; there were kayakers both pro and amateur; and there were lots of dog walkers.

Here are a few images by day:

A private boat on Wednesday morning.  I believe they were fishing.

On Thursday, a NYS Police boat racing down the East River.

On Friday, the first of two days of very serious outrigger kayak races.

On Saturday, the kayak racers in action as a large barge navigates upriver.

On Sunday, the Gowanus Dredgers offer free kayaking to anyone interested.

*      *      *      *      *     

Thanks again to Mary, Sara Reisman, Ian Daniel, and Suzanne Kim for the opportunity to participate in and help with this little experiment.  Now go paddle the Brooklyn waterfront—but please don’t litter.

-paul