By Hannah Frishberg, The Gothamist
For a certain breed of New Yorker, the best kind of exclusive access is not to the hottest new restaurant, the most celebrity-filled party or the hardest-to-book experience: It’s inside access to municipal infrastructure. I am this breed of New Yorker.
So when I recently learned Open House New York was distributing $10 tickets by lottery for a tour of Brooklyn’s Owls Head Wastewater Treatment Plant, I immediately entered. I’d previously toured the Newtown Creek Digester Eggs and enjoyed it greatly and was eager to see inside another wastewater plant.
Owls Head is one of 14 NYC Department of Environmental Protection wastewater resource recovery facilities treating the more than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater New Yorkers flush down the drain daily. It’s been operating at the watery edge of Bay Ridge since 1952.
Owls Head alone serves close to 800,000 people (more than the population of Seattle), treating a large chunk of southwest Brooklyn’s wastewater through a biological and disinfection process that has it clean enough to be released into New York Harbor in about eight to 10 hours.
I did not know any of this when I entered the lottery. All I knew was that I wanted to see inside the sewage plant and learn more about how NYC works.
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