About This Item

  • Call NumberGEHP_0061
  • Summary(0:30) Growing up and career start in civil services -- (4:48) Transferred to Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant and history of it -- (5:20) History of wastewater treatment plants in New York City -- (9:55) NYC in violation of Clean Water Act -- (11:00) Using aeration tanks -- (13:30) Rebuilding the Plant -- (17:30) Issues of odor from plant -- (21:50) Going to Community Board 1 meetings and getting yelled at -- (23:11) Working with Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee -- (25:30) Wastewater treatment process -- (43:01) Reporting to the community about plant renovation -- (44:00) Working with Ned Ostojic, odor control expert and responding to odor issues in Greenpoint -- (47:20) Opening plant to public tours of plant and using as educational tool, Valentine’s Day tour origin story -- (57:19) Proving to community good engineering can aid in city infrastructure -- (58:50) Film industry using facility as filming location -- (1:02:15) NYC waterways historically polluted with solid waste and sewage -- (1:04:15) Robert Moses influence on sewage system -- (1:05:30) Sea captains would spend time in NYC because polluted water would kill ship barnacles -- (1:08:30) Engineering behind where plants are located -- (1:10:50) Feelings about Greenpoint and neighborhood changes
  • Date2019-05-01
  • Physical Description1 sound file (1hr 14 min.) : digital, WAV
  • CreatorPynn, Jimmy
  • Cite AsBrooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History
  • Digital Public Library of AmericaThis item is represented in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
  • Formatsound recording-nonmusical
  • Genreinterviews
  • NoteAudio interview conducted on May 1, 2019, by Acacia Thompson at the Central Library. Collected through Our Streets, Our Stories, an oral history project of Brooklyn Public Library. This project is funded through the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund.
  • SubjectCivil Servants ; Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn, New York, N.Y.) ; Newtown Creek (Kings County-New York County, N.Y.) ; Water--Waste ; Sewage ; Water treatment plant residuals ; Aeration tanks ; Environmental Protection Agency ; New York (N.Y.). Department of Environmental Protection ; Immigrants--Polish ; Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (New York, N.Y.) ; Combined sewer overflows ; Community Board 1 (Brooklyn, New York, N.Y.) ; Sewage sludge digestion ; Chlorination ; Waste disposal in rivers, lakes, etc. ; Industrial tours ; Watersheds ; Real estate development ; Gentrification
  • PlaceGreenpoint (New York, N.Y.)
  • RightsThis work is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Users are free to share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is given to the source and new material created with this work is shared under the same conditions.
  • TitleOral history interview with Jimmy Pynn conducted on 1 May 2019.