Because eventually the river rises here. It overflows to claim it all and to show us what we lost, like it always had.
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME about the experience, both hilarious and heartbreaking, of watching her son realize that, where there are buildings now, there once were plants. “Were there plants where our house is?” he asked, wide-eyed, a little horrified. “Were there plants everywhere?”
Years ago, growing up on a perpetually soggy plot of land, in a town named for a brook I had never seen, I asked my parents a version of the same question. Had there been water where our house was? Their straightforward, adult answer—yes, it was wetlands—was still enchanting, hinting at the hidden paths of water in my own backyard.
Now, whenever the rain holds steady for more than a few hours, I recognize rivers and streams, with direction and purpose, running through the streets of New York. Over time, I’ve spotted more and more of them: gushing down the cement steps of a nearby park hill, snaking through the crooked streets of the West Village, filling the Prospect Expressway, and pouring into restaurant cellars and basement apartments. In a city that, like others, is currently raising shorelines and planning floodwalls to defend itself from rising waters, it is alarming to see these glimpses of an underwater New York—a vision of the city’s future, and also its past.
Yes, there were plants everywhere, and there were rivers and streams too, running through urban areas that have now erased most evidence of them. Many are now buried below city construction or hidden in sewer systems, where urban planners diverted them to clear the way for construction. After centuries of stewardship by Indigenous nations, these urban waterways—which once formed the basis of life in cities around the world—have largely disappeared. But they remain alive in collective memory, safeguarded both by Indigenous ancestral knowledge and subcultures of eagle-eyed city dwellers who track evidence of them. And many of them still course along the same pathways, only now underground.
In recent decades, these rivers have also rallied a growing chorus of advocates in the fields of restoration, architecture, and city planning who champion an idea once seen as extreme or even dangerous: to bring them aboveground again. This idea is known as , the exhumation of streams from underground and reintroduction of them to the surface. There is ample research-based evidence for what seems intuitively true: natural waterways—meaning, those that flow through the topography of a landscape and not through a sewer—support healthier ecosystems than those encased in concrete darkness. Daylighting brings benefits to water quality that include nutrient retention, prevention of algal blooms, and overall more supportive environments for a diversity of species. It also keeps clean water out of the sewer system, where, currently, huge volumes of
