Flickr photo by nikandsimon
Even though an arborist tells the Brooklyn Paper that the Brooklyn Heights trees assaulted by the salt water spray of Olafur Eliasson’s NYC Waterfalls will not be permanently damaged, it’s enough for the BHA to shout “never again!”:
Brooklyn Paper: A Salt of the Earth: Soil near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade — which is further away from the artificial waterfall that Eliasson installed between Piers 4 and 5 — registered 1.69 mmho/cm.
“Those levels are amazingly high, and if that level of salt was in the soil for a long period of time, the plants wouldn’t survive,” Ameroso said, adding that he’s never seen numbers this high — except when novice gardeners drastically over-fertilize, but even then the readings only make it up to 2 mmho/cm.
The report, commissioned by the Brooklyn Heights Association, is the first hard data to confirm what residents have been complaining about for months: that Eliasson’s salt-spewing art project is a tree-destroying monster.
“We just hope that they never do another art project that does this kind of damage again,” said Association Executive Director Judy Stanton, referring to tree damage at the River Cafe and along the Promenade.
