LOOK UP CURRENT & PLANNED CAPITAL PROJECTS NEAR YOU
(Or: The Creepy Case of the Rampant Remediations)

In New York City, a capital project is defined as any project involving "the construction, reconstruction, acquisition, or installation of a physical public improvement with a value of $35,000 or more and a 'useful life' of at least five years. This may include everything from buying garbage trucks to reconstructing bridges to building housing." (Source.) Capital projects fall under the purview of a variety of city agencies, including the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) & the Department of Transportation (DOT). Looking up capital projects in your neighborhood -- ongoing or planned -- is oh so easy, and who knows, you just may stumble on the existence a creeping, city-wide terror that has yet to be covered by a single news outlet. So shall we begin? Yes let's!

1. To find neighborhood capital projects, type your address here & your building information will come up. Below the building information box, you’ll see “show additional data on map." Click this:

2. A list of categories will pop up, the first of which will be “Capital Projects.” Click "Federal Stimulus" to see federally funded capital projects, NYC DOT to see capital transportation projects, and Design/Construction to see just about everything else (likely all DDC projects) -- which may include anything from library improvements, to water main and sewer replacement, to museum expansions, to the building of sidewalk extensions, to the building of massive municipal building complexes (for instance, the $750 million police academy being built in College Point), to the building/renovating of parks, and oh so much more. As for me, I click "Design/Construction". . . 

3.  . . .  and see the the whole of Jackie Robinson park highlighted. There's no construction going on there at the time of writing, so I assume there must be a project forthcoming. Perhaps a park renovation? I click the park to find out. (Any project you click on, a box will pop with project information.)

4. As it turns out, Jackie Robinson Park is slated for remediation -- environmental clean-up -- not renovation. According to the info-box, it's one of 110 "petroleum contaminated sites" in the Bronx & Manhattan slated for such remediation:

Now, I hear "petroleum remediation," I think Newtown Creek: it used to be lined with refineries, there were multiple spills there, now it's a massive petroleum remediation site. Makes perfect sense. But little Jackie Robinson Park? With its outdoor public pool? And bandshell? And super-kid-friendly rec center? It's surrounded by residential blocks. It isn't near a gas station or refinery, or anything else one might associate with petroleum contamination. So how did Jackie Robinson Park wind up contaminated? In looking for an answer, I stumbled on this letter written to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, about a 10,000 gallon fuel tank stored under the park.  ("The Jackie Robinson Recreation Center...was assigned spill number 0102259 in May 2001 because a 10,000-gallon #2 fuel oil tank located in a vault failed a tightness test....[on] June 6, 2001, the tank was re-tested and passed....URS requests spill number 0102259 associated with the site be closed.") In one of the documents attached to the letter, the vault is referred to as "underground": 

So at least one 10,000-gallon fuel tank was, and perhaps is, stored in an underground vault beneath the park--and while the document I found about the tank is about how it ultimately passed a tightness test, the tank presumably leaked at some later point, since the park is now contaminated. (However, I looked for mention of said leak in New York State's "Spill Incident Database" and found nothing. And as I discovered, both in NYC and across the country, such massive underground tanks are surprisingly common, to the extent they have their own acronym: "UST" for "underground storage tank.") As for other USTs in NYC, they've apparently been leaking all over Manhattan and the Bronx, as how else to explain those 100+ "remediation of petroleum" sites? And lest the other three boroughs feel left out, there's also a massive petroleum remediation project slated for sites around Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn. Read the DDC's original 2009 RFP for both multi-site projects here. Here, you'll find an updated RFP, from 2014. ("RFP" is short for "Request for Proposal" -- in such a document, the city will lay out the specifications & budget for a specific project that needs to be completed, after which various companies and organizations will submit proposals/plans as to how they'd go about doing so.) Note: while the box that pops up above Jackie Robinson Park -- and every other remediation site -- lists the project completion date as 1/2014, considering I found an RFP about the project dated from as late as 3/2014, I suspect none of these remediation projects have yet begun. Curious, I called the DDC; to date, everyone I’ve spoken to seems confused when I ask about current/planned petroleum remediation sites; they say the DDC doesn’t do that kind of thing; they give me another number to someone else, who will likewise seem not to have heard of any five-borough-wide petroleum remediation project. To find remediation sites in your borough, zoom out of your neighborhood capital project map, click whatever's orange and you'll find them all over.

Everything orange = capital project. Everything circled = petroleum remediation site.