cody herrmann

fully intended to post a 2025 homage before january ended, oops, anyway— one of my fav parts of the year was powerpoint roulette on the lawn at 11pm on a summer evening upstate, but i didn’t take any pics during so here’s everything else 💕

Happy 100-year anniversary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, "The Great Gatsby"! As GoFB board member and artist @americanbabe always reminds us on her walking tours, the book notably coined the early 20th century landscape around Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek “the Valley of Ashes.” While on the train crossing over Flushing Creek, the book's characters peered out onto the Corona Coal Ash Dump’s 90 ft tall mountains of coal ash, often seeing visions of a god-like capitalist force in the dusty clouds—a vision not so different from today’s landscape 100 years later. Here are some photos of Cody’s walking tours through the Valley of Ashes—present day Willets Point—and ways she uses the book to show how those in power impact our watershed. As the last line of "The Great Gatsby" so aptly notes, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." 📸 Photo Credits: Jonathan Baron (photos 1 & 6) Cody Herrmann (photo 5 & 7) Neha Gautam (photo 3) Margaret Mulligan (photos 8, 9, & 10)

hi, here to let u know u can RSVP for a guided tour of flushing meadows corona park titled “a walk in the park(ing lot)” on friday, may 3 at 1pm, with me and @guardiansofflushingbay + friends, as part of @mas_nyc ’s @janeswalk nyc. i’ll read you several passages from ‘the great gatsby,’ then we’ll ask the flushing waterways oracle/tarot deck to tell us the future while we discuss public space and stormwater management…if u ever dreamed of taking a walk that starts at the andy warhol robert moses mosaic, and ends at low tide looking at dead rats and bivalves in the riprap along flushing bay, you found it! link in bio. xoxo.

it’s not goodbye, it’s see you later 🌊🌾💕 there used to be a decades old willow tree in willets point. for most of its life it grew among the autobody shops between what was once 36th and 35th avenue, near 127th street. in the wake of the 2013 rezoning businesses were vacated and the roads were demapped— from 2013 to 2022 while developers plans stalled in court and had to be redrawn, a shallow wetland formed around the willow tree. cattails, phragmites, and pools of water sat comfortably atop the foundations of former autobody shops, which had been built on top of a coal ash landfill, which had been sited on…a wetland. it was so beautiful, it was so disgusting, it was the past, it is the future. it was everything wrong, and it was everything right. some authority pulled up the willow tree in winter ‘18/‘19, and everything was razed and covered with gravel in fall 2022 for the brownfield clean up. this site is likely going to be buried under 12ft of fill, and sit under the pitch of a professional soccer stadium. we know this development will sink, just like LGA airport and the USTA stadium are sinking, and we know at some point 12ft won’t be enough— with time, it will undoubtably return to water. as the ULURP concludes i’m coping by sharing some of my fav willets point swamp pics on instagram with you!! they’re all more or less taken from the same spot. most are from walking tours i led, or my iphone 8: 1. september 2018, the willow tree, baby willow trees, cattails, and phragmites 2. june 2021, @jonabaron 3. september 2018, Zbigniew “Joe” Zolkowski used the swamp as his studio 4. october 2021, @wlodarczyk 5. july 2019, more of joes work 6. 2018 (?), deff saved this pic by @nathankensinger from his 2018 curbed photo essay cause it’s so good ♥️♥️ 7. july 2021, @jonabaron 8. march 2019 9. november 2019, with pieces by joe 10. december 2023, someone used the communal disposable camera on a tour to take this photo. i like to assume the puddles the birds are standing in behind me are…you know…

about to go dumb again !!!!

six months ago in saigon. thank you @apexartnyc for getting me there 💕 thank you @socialpracticecuny for your support 💕 thank you everyone that hung out with me 💕

born too late to fist fight claire shulman, born too soon to pretend i didn’t know what was going on, born just in time to…

2022 was for the girls

i'm hosting my only public walking tour of willets point this year as part of @guardiansofflushingbay 's 'Saturday on the Bay' fundraiser this Saturday, September 24! The tour starts at 12pm, leaving from the Mets - Willets Point subway station. We will take a convoluted route through willets point to Flushing Creek, i will show you where my favorite trees used to be, and then we'll wind up at the @guardiansofflushingbay party at Flushing Bay! Saturday at the Bay runs from 12-4pm at the Flushing Meadows Corona Park Kayak/Canoe Launch! @harborlab will host free kayaking, @stoishere will show ya how to decorate a boat with litter, you can learn about the wetland restoration along flushing bay, hoop with @wildhoops , practice movement and breath work with @holistic_blyss , and much more! use the link in my bio to get a ticket for my tour and other 'Saturday at the Bay' events, and/or make a donation to @guardiansofflushingbay . but like, you can also just show up and hang out in the park!! (-: donations will support things like waterfront clean ups, collaborations with artists, water quality monitoring, advocating for equitable development around the waterfront, and giving area residents and local elected officials opportunities to paddle on Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek. guardians is made up of two part time staff and an active volunteer board, so everything and anything makes a big difference. 💙💦 photos by @wlodarczyk

got to play around a lot this spring with a new project that visualizes the distribution of affordable housing, market rate (luxury) units, and hotel rooms in the recently rezoned Special Flushing Waterfront District (SFWD)— the combined 2604 new units were represented as 160 cardboard blocks, a scale of about 6%. all 1719 units of market rate (luxury) housing were represented as 102 blue blocks 🟦, 879 hotel units were depicted as 54 orange blocks 🟧, and 61 units of affordable housing at 80% AMI were represented as 4 grey blocks ⬛️. the SFWD recommends 13 new towers to be built in 29 acres along the flushing creek coastline. kids got to build up a lil city while it continuously crumbled around them (relatable…?!), but also sometimes local community board members, developers, and urban planners act like children… big thanks to @korea_art_forum for inviting me to maple playground in flushing, @southeastqueensartists for having me at the @queensbotanicalgarden earth day event, and @moreartnyc for hosting the 2020/21 fellows at @queensmuseum . photos 1,4, 7, 8 and 10 by Sihan Cui, and photo 3 by @manuel_martagon_projects .

saw some nice trees, nice friends, and nice critters, but most notably went to the tide pools @officialpatrickstar was named after and geeked.

ephemeral creek