I watched this video recently.

It's from 1999, and it shows a man in shorts opening the trunk of his Dodge Van and pulling out a little homemade boat.

The man is George Trakis, and he's an artist.

George hauls the boat to the water, a creek in Brooklyn that's among the most polluted

industrial waterways in the U.S. But as George plops his boat into the creek, he sees more

than just toxic water. So this whole area that we're in was

originally swamp. And all these inlets in here are probably all kinds of clams and oysters and

sea heather and all kinds of stuff. So I have a feeling that this area will be well-used. People

sitting, talking, picnicking, fishing, kayaking, whatever. We'll clean all this stuff up.

That day in the little boat, George was scouting out locations for what would be his biggest

art installation yet.

He would dedicate more than 20 years of his life to this project.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we visit Newtown Creek, where I'm sitting right now, recording this episode.

We'll learn how one man, armed with a homemade boat and an artistic vision, transformed this place,

and how he impacted the lives of artists and locals for years to come.

After this. Here's the thing about Newtown Creek. It used to be nice. It's a tributary of the East River, and today the creek splits

Brooklyn and Queens. But before Brooklyn or Queens existed, this stream overflowed into marshes.

It brimmed with fish and shellfish. People swam here. The Lenape built villages and farmed fields at the

head of the creek. It was once so wide that little islands sprang up in the middle of it.

And then industry showed up.

By the mid-1800s, more than 50 refineries lined the shores of Newtown Creek, glue factories, sawmills, oil refineries, petrochemical plants, coal yards. During World War II, Newtown Creek was one of the busiest ports in the country. Boats carried in fuel and carried out metals and chemicals.

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