GATEWAY

Gateway National Recreation Area is one of the most diverse and underused parks in the national park system. Spreading across the coastline of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey, it includes wildlife estuaries, bird-nesting areas, salt marshes, historic military forts, beaches, and NYC's first municipal airport, to name just a few of its exceptional features. It also contains sewage treatment plants, sewer outfalls, landfills, and acres upon acres of "black mayonnaise." Due to neglect and misuse, this extraordinary natural and national resource is at risk. Ninety percent of the salt marshes in Jamaica Bay one of the most biologically productive habitats in the region will have disappeared by 2011. This book presents the collaborative efforts of the Van Alen Institute, the National Parks Conservation Association, and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation to investigate and document the diverse ecology of the park and re-envision a more sustainable future for it.

Alex Brash was born and raised in NYC. An early love for birds evolved into a passion for quantitative community ecology and then a devotion to conservation. Along the way he worked on Great Gull Island and in the AMNH, graduated from Buckley School, Hotchkiss, Connecticut College, Yale School for the Environment and worked on a PhD at Rutgers University. After a hurricane wiped out his study site, he took a job with NYC Parks, and rose to be the Chief Park Ranger, managing the agency's uniformed officers, Natural Resource Group, Communications, Historic House Trust, and Special Events. At NYC Parks he initiated the Forever Wild Project, now 47 park preserves covering over 8,700 acres, Project X, the city's first program to re-introduce extirpated species, and he was a first responder at 9/11. After nearly two decades in the city, he joined the National Parks Conservation Association as the NE Regional Director, lobbying for our national parks, particularly bringing attention to Gateway and the nation's urban national parks and cultural icons, as well as initiating the effort to establish Katahdin Woods, Stonewall Inn, and Patterson Falls as new National Parks. Alex then spent three years as President of Connecticut Audubon, which he re-invigorated by moving its finances into the black, tripling its endowment, doubling the size of its nature preserves, and re-aligning its educational programs with STEM. Retired in Connecticut, he has been consulting, writing, traveling, birding, and spending time with family. Happily married to Jane, they have two great millenials, Ian and Emily.