New York’s waters are being reborn

For reassurance that Americans can still work together with patience and vision, look to the waterways of New York. Nine humpback whales recently surfaced there together, spouting and breeching against the city skyline as though vying for the most dramatic selfie. Fin whales and right whales are also appearing in startling numbers—along with bottlenose dolphins, spinner and hammerhead sharks, seals, blue crabs and seahorses. Oysters, which all but vanished decades ago, are clamping themselves to bulkheads from Brooklyn’s Coney Island Creek to the Mario Cuomo Bridge, almost 20 miles up the Hudson from the city.

Humans, too, can be seen in profusion, on the water and in it. One can forget, when the horizons are bounded by skyscrapers a bus-length away, that New York City is an archipelago, a fringe of North America trailing into the Atlantic. Only one of its five boroughs—the Bronx—is on the mainland, and the three rivers that wind through them, and the harbour into which those rivers drain, are cleaner than they have been in 100 years. They are becoming New York’s great decentralised park.