“I love the water,” Blis Laurel said this afternoon, standing beside the choppy waters of the East River. A fierce wind was blowing in across the esplanade where the East River Ferry lands—when it hasn’t been docked to wait out a possibly horrendous storm. Ms. Laurel had ventured down from her apartment on Bedford Avenue to read and reflect, to take in the scene and the energy.
“Mother Earth is so powerful,” she continued. “I love to connect with her; I wanted to come down before the storm and feel the energy. And I want come out in the storm, too, and see what that feels like.”
Ms. Laurel was wearing a white- and rainbow-colored knit cap with white tassels and a green down vest. She had a chain around her neck with a crystal hanging from it. She is from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and thus well accustomed to the ways of a fierce storm. “Andrew was my first, when I was 3,” Ms. Laurel explained. “Hopefully I won’t be spending any time hiding in the closet again.”
Ms. Laurel said she was not afraid of the approaching Hurricane Sandy or the Frankenstorm it might manifest if the weather conditions turn out to be especially fierce, but she did know it would be something special. “It’s exciting because two celestial events are happening at once,” Ms. Laurel explained. “It’s a harvest moon and a hurricane, which I hear can mean a big storm surge. I don’t know what that would mean energetically, but I think it’s important to be with our thoughts and be in a place of love and not a place of fear.”
She was not the only one feeling the pull of Mother Earth—or Mayor Bloomberg—to this spot on the Williamsburg waterfront.
Behind us soared The Edge and North Side Piers, 30 stories of luxury condo glory, offering some of the best views of the city in the city, for those who can afford it. The condo towers are some of the biggest, some might say gaudiest, pillars of the Bloomberg administration’s physical legacy, the result of a 2005 rezoning of the waterfront to replace old factories and warehouses with these gleaming piles of apartments. Standing tall on the east side of Kent Avenue, these high-end high rises are squarely in Zone A, the first of the flood zones to be hit in the event of a severe weather event.
