Reimagine Collect Pond // Chalk the Waters!

We welcome you to close out Climate Week with us as we dive into the deep past, current realities and possible futures of Collect Pond.

Collect Pond was once Manhattan’s largest fresh water source, a lush home to diverse fauna, flora and the Lenape people. Throughout its history since the Dutch arrived, it has been notoriously polluted by settlers, filled in and over by everything imaginable, pillaged by industry and enterprise, sunk into swampy cesspool of Five Points lore, abandoned and cemented over again and again.

Now contained as a small park with a tiny nod to the expansive natural water body it once was – the space today is dry and barren, even as an underground stream still flow below, under the halls of justice and proposed mega J*il.

But what would happen if we imagined the waters returning? If we let the underground water rekindle our connection with the land as an active participant? What halls of justice exist in the preservation of our ecosystems? What can we learn from our histories in how they echo our possible futures?

Join us on the last day of Climate Week in reflection and reimagining as we gather at a site that holds both the past, present and future simultaneously.

Stacy Levy will guide us in a community Chalk Painting of the Collect Pond waters in their precolonial contours, and the possibilities of what could be.

As we chalk, we will be invited to learn about the history, engage with the present realities of Collect Pond and imagine the many possible futures.

Participants will be invited to consider their relationship to the water within themselves as well as the environment and to recall the ways water has been a conduit of learning, healing, and change with Chanon Judson. They will be guided through reflection, somatic movement and Story Circle, a humanizing process that allows us to listen to others and share our experiences, and consider our interconnectedness.

*Chanon is a Tradition holder of Story Circle Tradition by way of Stephanie Mckee Anderson of Junebug Productions.

Details

On Sunday 9/28, we will gather at the center and deepest point of the original Fresh Water Pond at the present-day intersection of Leonard and Centre Streets. This point is the corner of today’s Collect Pond Park which is surrounded by NY County Criminal Court, NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene, NY County Family Court and NYC Civil Court – and a hop across Centre Street to the site where a 100-story Manhattan mega J*il is proposed.

In the Collect Pond Park, we will gather to honor the land, the waters now buried over, and the Indigenous ancestors for whom this area was home as well as remember the free & enslaved Africans buried on the pond’s southern shores and the Black & White revolters of the Slave Insurrection of 1741, who were executed near today’s 26 Federal Plaza. In what is now Chinatown and the municipal halls of NYC government, we’ll give a nod to the present day complex ecosystem. As we contemplate and reimagine possible futures, we’ll begin the process of daylighting the cultural and political journey that led us here.

The day will center around the living questions:

• Can we humans reimagine a new relationship with the land and waters?
• Can we reimagine where we live and how we construct our buildings in partnership with nature?
• Can we re-imagine how we relate with each other as we re-imagine a new relationship with our ecosystem?

ABOUT THE SCAVENGER HUNT (09.01 - 09.30)

This is part of Holes in the Wall Collective’s Imagined Futures // WaterWAYS

An interactive climate experience and city-wide scavenger hunt to reconnect, ready, repair, and reimagine the future of NYC. All September long 2025.

We invite you to connect with people all over the city and find ground in what climate readiness means in ourselves and our communities. From survival toolkits to the playlists to survive these times, it’s an invitation to recommit your love to our city and our wider ecologies— connecting to the deep and lasting legacies of community-based climate work in every borough of NYC. Let us imagine the future we want, while supporting the work that will get us there.

This event has a special sequence of missions, reflections and actions. To get the full experience download the Goosechase appand plug in the join code: WATERWAYS (available starting 09.01)

Find out more at: holesinthewallcollective.org/imaginedfutures

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ABOUT THE PARTNERS

/The MYA Group

Marion is a septuagenarian focused on transforming the New York City built environment into a city of “Humans with Nature”→ a future of “Nature with Humans.” Biophysicist, coalition builder, real estate broker, co-founder of gardens, and proud owner of the Green Garden Truck that she doesn’t drive.

Holes in the Wall Collective connects people to place and possibility. We love creating experiences that give the public fresh ways to engage with difficult subjects and our changing climate. Whether by supporting people and organizations with new audiences and resources or bolstering community and civic engagement through our city-wide climate programming, we support an ecosystem of change and transformation to step further into a sustainable, viable, and thriving future for all of New York City.

​​Stacy Levy works with rain, urban tides, watersheds and ghost waterways, using a blended language of science and art to tell the ecological story of a site. Her work helps make urban nature more legible, giving viewers a way to understand their neighborhoods’ natural history.

Chanon is an investigative-innovator. In the tradition of a litany of makers that have used the arts to unmask history, mend, learn and access liberation, Chanon collages multiple modalities of performance practice to craft solutions. She is a performer, facilitator, director, deviser, choreographer, collaborator, and SpiritWoman. Largely, Chanon innovates by way of dance-theatre, performance visual design, and the curation of art-based communal practices that encourage play, self reflection and engagement with jazz as an organizing aesthetic - valuing the individual, with awareness and accountability to the collective.Chanon is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, served as a visionary organizer during Urban Bush Women’s leadership Evolution as Co-Artistic Director (2019-2025) and is a holder of Story Circle Tradition by way of Stephanie Mckee Anderson of Junebug Productions.

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