Another intern, a darkskinned Pakistani girl about fifteen, has been doing a feasibility study about establishing a beach somewhere below 14th Street, on the Hudson. The girl is keeping track of water quality, by testing the fecal matter to see on which days it would be safe to swim, and on which not. The risks occur with rain, when excess runoff pours directly into the river, bringing with it all the debris and excrement from the streets. For days after a hard rain, the rivers around New York Harbor are too polluted to make swimming advisable; hence, locating a sandy beach on Manhattan's shore remains a problematic, if alluring, idea. "Aren't there devices for handling that runoff?" I ask Cathy. "Yes. You can put filters in the rocks to capture some of it. You can put filter drains in the streets. But the main way is to have holding tanks inserted in the highways. When Route 9A [the replacement for the West Side Highway] was first on the drawing board, there were provisions for holding tanks, but they fell out of the plans somewhere, most likely for budgetary reasons," she says. "You could lobby for holding tanks, I guess. The old activist spirit surges back. Cathy shows me an art piece, commissioned by the River Project, by the sculptor George Trakas, which consists of two steel staircases leading down from the pier to the water, with landing and seating areas. She wants people to "get to the river," not to be afraid of it. Mix it up with the river: a connection that's worked for her. She trusts it, why don't they? Originally she wanted to have the staircases lead right down to the water, nothing j but the city regulatory agencies made her install two fences- as warnings that you were approaching the edge. "These people d n't travel outside of New York, they don't realize that in cities all over the world you can get to the water. The Hudson River Park Trust put lots of references to 'getdowns' in their literature, but then they didn't include any in their final plans." So she made a getdown. And they made her put up the fences. For all the good stuff the River Project does, its continuing existence on Pier 26 remains precarious. The Hudson River Park Trust, which has jurisdiction over the property, would prefer to put some incomeproducing facility on it: a slicker, themeparkstyle estuarium, say, run by a university or a prestige institution like the San Diego Aquarium, which would become a magnet for tourist families, at eight dollars a head. The conflict between the River Project's scruffy, improvisatory manner, all oaktag and Scotch tape, and the Hudson River Park Trust's corporate, buttoneddown style, is alluded to, with barely concealed sarcasm, in a River Project leaflet: "Now there is the opportunity to understand . . . them [the returning fish populations] before the Park redevelopment eliminates these naturalizing areas on rotting piers in favor of new pavements and managed landscapes.