The ninth annual City of Water Day will splash, sprinkle, and spritz Lower Manhattan with fun tomorrow (Saturday, July 16) at downtown venues along the Hudson and East Rivers, as well as on Governors Island. The New York area’s largest and most popular waterfront festival, presented by the Waterfront Alliance throughout the five boroughs and New Jersey, will include free activities like rowing, kayaking, paddleboarding, a cardboard kayak race, the Waterfront Activity Fair, and children’s activities sponsored by Disney and other organizations.
There will be free boat tours, compliments of Circle Line Sightseeing, Classic Harbor Line, Manhattan by Sail, New York Water Taxi. NY Waterway, the historic fireboat John J. Harvey, and South Street Seaport Museum. For more information about boat tours, please click here.
On Governors Island, there will be the ever-popular Con Edison Cardboard Kayak Race, in which 25 teams (including competitors from the U.S. Coast Guard, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Con Edison, plus local boat clubs, universities, high schools, and family groups) will race their handcrafted paper boats in heats beginning at 2:30 pm. The public can watch the contenders build these vessels starting at noon.
Governors Island will also host the Waterfront Activity Fair with children’s activities sponsored by Disney; and music, food, and many more fun family activities.
In Manhattan, the South Street Seaport Museum’s Bowne Printers (209 Water Street; 10:00 am to 6:00 pm) will provide demonstrations of 19th-century printing techniques, along with a discussion of the historical importance of printing to the development of the New York City seaport. The Museum will also host at Pier 16 (on the East River, between John and Fulton Streets) a dockside program, from noon to 4:00 pm, that showcases the history and ecology of the East River.
At Pier 25 (in the Tribeca section of the Hudson River Park, near North Moore Street), the Lilac Preservation Project will host an arts festival, as well as classes in teaching knots like a sailor, from 1:00 to 8:00 pm. Lilac staff will also offer tours of the 1933 steam-powered former Coast Guard lighthouse tender.
Also on Pier 25 (from noon to 4:00 pm), the Hudson River Park Trust will provide rods, reels, bait, and instruction for fishing in the river. Aside from angling, the program will also offer a first-hand opportunity to learn, through hands-on activities, about river ecology and the many fish species found in area waters.
On Pier 26 (also in the Hudson River Park, near Hubert Street), the Downtown Boathouse will offer free kayaking from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm.
At Pier 40 (in the Hudson River Park, near Houston Street), the River Project’s WetLab will shed light (from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm) on some of the river’s tiniest residents: local plankton will be on view through microscopes. Also on tap: tours of the River Project’s 3,000 gallon “estuarium” and explore the touch tanks, which display live samples ofmany of the local estuary’s aquatic species.
For more information about these and other City of Water Day events, please click here.
“City of Water Day is all about fun and recognizing the potential of the untapped resource that is our harbor,” says Roland Lewis, MWA president and CEO. “Get yourself on a ferry, in a kayak, or even — if you dare — in a cardboard boat, but most of all just get yourself on the water. Let’s make every day in our magnificent harbor a City of Water Day!”
City of Water Day is organized by the Waterfront Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group that works to protect, transform and revitalize the New York/New Jersey harbor and waterfront into a place where sailboats, kayaks and pleasure craft share the waterways with commuter ferries, barges and container ships; where cared-for parks are connected by affordable waterborne transit; where dozens of exciting waterfront destinations reflect the vitality and diversity of New York and is accessible to all. For more information about the organization, please visit: www.waterfrontalliance.org