Laura Hofmann’s tiny apartment is filled with pictures of her six children and her grandchildren.
“This is my eldest son and his wife. And this is their son,” she proudly explains.
Hofmann’s teenage children rush in and out of the apartment.
“Bye, mom,” says one of her sons, kissing her on the cheek. His friend does the same.
Not far from this picture of domestic felicity lies a reminder of Hofmann’s work. She pulls back her lace window curtains to reveal two white domes, several blocks away. It is the Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant.
Hofmann is a community activist who champions environmental causes, parks and green spaces in her hometown of Greenpoint,
“It all started with the playground,” she explains, referring to the Greenpoint and Newtown Barge Terminal playgrounds along the
“We (the parents) were all shocked,” she said. “We always thought it was just some round building. No one had ever told us what it was.”
That discovery prompted Hofmann to form Barge Park Pals, a community group that aims to “help maintain and improve Newtown Barge Playground & Greenpoint Playground … and the surrounding waterfront community environment for the health and well being of community children and their families,” according to its website. The group’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the parks’ confusing names that were changed by the Parks Department in the past decade. Originally known as
As Hofmann dug deeper into the environmental issues concerning her neighborhood, she began to realize that her family’s troubling medical history might not have been just a quirk of nature.
“My family’s medical history is like ‘Area 51’,” she said, referring to the tract of governmental land in
Hofmann has lupus, and she strongly suspects her eldest son has the disease, where the body’s immune system attacks cells and tissue. Her mother is terminally ill at
“All through the years, people I know had cancer,” she said. “My daughter’s friend died of brain cancer. The softball coach’s wife had lymphoma, just like my mother’s. One of my neighbors died of lupus.”
Hofmann came to believe there is a strong link between the diseases she and her neighbors have and the industrial pollution in her neighborhood, even though no health or environmental study has ever been conducted to prove it. All in all, she has documented ten cases of brain cancer within a ten-block radius of her home.
“Everything is connected around here,” she said. “I have a lot of questions about health and the environment, but it’s clear to me that you shouldn’t have a PVC manufacturer, incinerators, a sewage plant, BP and ExxonMobil half a block from here.”
Duraflex Hart, the PVC manufacturer, closed two years ago, but Hofmann still remembers the terrible smell that would come from the factory.
“PVC is made with plastic softeners called phthalates,” she said. She gestured towards the air conditioner and said, “It was always clogged. When I’d wash it, a thick glob would ooze out.”
Hofmann and fellow activists successfully fought off a proposed Con Edison power plant from being built in the neighborhood, but more often, she says, her efforts result in a combination of frustration, failure and agonizing waiting. The Parks and Open Space Committee that she chaired voted unanimously – and unsuccessfully – against the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning proposal because they weren’t satisfied with the parks and open space that were proposed at that point. The proposal went ahead despite her committee’s objections, and Hofmann says the commitments that were made with the proposal have yet to materialize.
“We're not going to have enough greenery. More people coming in, the pollution ... it's an environmental disaster. In terms of green space, Greenpoint is rock bottom in the city besides JFK airport."
Hofmann’s anger and sense of betrayal is evident when talking about the Newtown Creek oil spill. She said that even as a child, she knew there was an oil spill but never knew how bad the situation really was.
“You could taste it in the air,” she said. “We just took it as normal because no one ever told us anything. The DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) signed a consent with ExxonMobil to deal with it slowly. In my mind, they (DEC) are just as guilty. What have the politicians been doing? It’s all about power and money.”
Environmental advocacy group Riverkeeper stumbled across the Newtown Creek oil spill in October 2002, during a boat patrol that detoured from the usual
“People in the community have tried for a long time to do something about it (the oil spill),” said Hofmann. “But nobody in the community had the muscle that Riverkeeper has.”
Since Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit against ExxonMobil in 2004, of which Hofmann and her husband are plaintiffs, progress in the actual clean up however has been slow. Basil Seggos, chief legal investigator of Riverkeeper, admits that while substantial progress has been made in getting support from
“Things are in place for long-term progress,” he said. “But the community has yet to see changes on the ground.”
While Hofmann is a popular and well-known figure in the community, she has her share of detractors who have criticized her in cyberspace, in comments posted on blogs such as Scienceline and Gothamist.
“It’s so appalling what these people wrote,” said Heather Letzkus, creator and writer of newyorkshitty, a popular Greenpoint blog. “It’s an added insult to say that someone like Laura would be making this up and trying to make money.”
For Hofmann, the playground that started it all is a symbol of the slow justice that she fights for in her neighborhood.
