Protecting a Wild Patch of City Marshland

“Simply the last best unprotected New York City coastal wetland,” raved a coalition of 20 environmental groups.

“A very fine pearl,” gushed City Councilman Michael E. McMahon. “The Rolls-Royce of environmental parcels.”

The subject of all this breathlessness is a decidedly unpristine swath of Staten Island known as Arlington Marsh, a boggy green break in one of the city’s most industrialized stretches of waterfront.

After decades atop local environmentalists’ must-save lists and a few brushes with development proposals, the marsh, a city-owned parcel on the island’s north shore, got its big break in September. The Bloomberg administration offered about 55 acres of it to the Parks Department, which plans to keep it wild.

Every schoolchild should now know how important wetlands are even in cities, how they filter water, soak up runoff, provide wildlife habitat and prevent shoreline erosion. In New York City, where a report this summer found that the marsh islands of Jamaica Bay are disappearing at a rate of 33 acres a year, tidal wetlands like Arlington Marsh are growing ever more precious.

“I know people think of them as mosquito-ridden swamps,” said Glenn Phillips, the executive director of New York City Audubon. “But they’re really magnificent.”

Arlington Marsh, though it has had its share of degradation, was particularly sought after because it links an already preserved inland marsh, Mariners Marsh, to the Kill Van Kull, the waterway that separates Staten Island from Bayonne, N.J.

But what’s really so magnificent about Arlington Marsh? And what’s out there, anyway?

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