This bicycle tour was held on May 17, 2026, with funding from City Parks Foundation through the NYC Green Fund. View the full route and stopping locations for this 5.5-mile tour here. Photos by Elias Parise.
On a sweltering spring morning in mid-May, Newtown Creek Alliance staff joined Sane Energy Project, along with a dedicated cohort of cyclists and Creek enthusiasts, for a bike odyssey tracing the history of fossil fuels along the shores of eastern Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
This tour covered over 200 years of energy history on Newtown Creek, starting from the whale oil industry of the early 19th century, past the development of kerosene, and into the rise and fall of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire. There were once roughly 60 different petroleum refining operations existing along the Creek in the late 1800s, with the last oil refinery (Mobil Oil, formerly SOCONY) closed in the mid 1960s. Since then, several industrial oil buildings have found new uses as storage units, waste transfer stations, and sound stages, with historic brick facades still lining both sides of the waterway. Early stops in the tour include the Newtown Creek Nature Walk and Whale Creek, followed by the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment facility, where we discussed National Grid’s “biogas-to-grid” project, which diverts materials from curbside organics collection to generate methane gas.
Tour attendees traced the perimeter of the former Mobil Oil Refinery, crossed the footprint of the Greenpoint Oil Spill (the largest upland oil spill in US history — between 17 and 30 million gallons), and looked at some current recovery operations conducted by ExxonMobil and other responsible parties. Along the way, we passed dozens of bulk petroleum storage tanks and active fuel transfer operations that utilize trucks, tugboats, and pipelines to circulate petroleum products throughout the city.
The last half of the tour was spent circling the 120-acre National Grid property, a fracked-gas facility and NYS Superfund site currently occupying nearly 2,000 feet of Creek shoreline. Sane Energy Project’s director, Kim Fraczek, walked us through the legacy of pollution associated with the site, impacts on local residents, and urgent calls to shutter the facility in support of a green energy transition. As we biked the perimeter of the property, attendees could see methane flares, the looming white LNG storage tanks, and the shuttered Greenpoint Little League Field (closed in 2022, due to concerns of contamination from the National Grid site).
We ended the tour at Maspeth Avenue with a view of the Turning Basin — an expansive section of the Creek dredged in the early 20th century to accommodate marine traffic — for a conversation about the Superfund process and opportunities for investment and access along the Newtown Creek waterfront.
Thank you to Kim Fraczek from Sane Energy Project, and all who joined us on this trip! Stay tuned for more Newtown Creek bike tours later this year.
Check out more photos by Elias Parise here on the Newtown Creek Alliance Flickr.