Larry Desgaines sat on a piece of cardboard atop a damp rock near the mouth of a major sewer drain in Queens on a recent Friday night. “It’s a privilege to be here,” he said without irony.
It was just before sunset and he was among a concert audience of about 50 who also sat on rocks, overlooking the waters of New York City Combined Sewer Outfall #BB 029, where the buried Sunswick Creek flows into the East River.
In the water, which probably didn’t smell like sewage, two men sat motionless in a canoe. The bow of the boat pointed to land. As the sun set behind Roosevelt Island, another man hit a metal pipe with a stick at the entrance to the tunnel. The resulting sound was that of a ringing bell.
The front man of the canoe, wearing a Tyrolean hat, yodelled, “Willkommen!” He drew out the last syllable and his voice amplified and echoed in the tunnel. When the song ended, the canoe disappeared into the sewer, leaving only echoes.
This was the last night of Drain Bamage, an unlikely concert hosted by musician and composer Stefan Zeniuk, along with veteran designers ND Austin and Danielle Isadora Butler.
Mr. Austin and Mrs. Butler are co-founders of the Tideland Institute, which encourages New Yorkers to treat their home like a maritime city and rethink how different waterways can be used.
“The water in New York has become something of a backdrop for the city,” Ms. Butler said. “When it’s really the why and the how of how the city was made – and how the city still functions.”
Mr. Austin has been involved in several watery, ephemeral experiences in the city over the years: a speakeasy in a shipping container, an extremely long-distance agency floating on a raft in the East River, a bar in a water tower.
Like his previous events, the sewer concert had a secretive, treasure hunt aspect.
At 7:30 p.m., attendees gathered at the end of a large box office, near a sign that read “Attention Shoppers.”
Instructions came in via SMS:
Follow the fence along the water. The sidewalk curves away from the river as it reaches a thick row of shrub hedges at the far end of the car park. Keep discreetly following the gate, *behind* the trees. There is a small hole through the fence. Be respectful of the fishermen.
One by one, people trickled down to the rocky banks of the East River, and the banks of the underground creek turned into a sewer overflow. The concert was timed to match low tide, which allowed watercraft to float in and out of the tunnel.
After the yodel echoes died down, there was a pause. Then came the silver sound of a trumpet and the low moan of a tuba. Slowly a wide boat emerged from the sewer, containing four horn players – Mr. Zeniuk on saxophone – who acted as Mr. Austin and an employee who stopped the boat.
The horn piece, entitled “Low Tide”, was composed especially for the evening by Mr. Zeniuk. Foghorn-like tones swirled and reverberated wildly, drowning out the noise from the adjacent parking lot.
For the musicians, much of the event’s allure was in the incredible, immersive, reverberating acoustics produced by the sewer tunnel.
“It’s nature and magic, it’s chemistry,” said instrumentalist and vocalist Yuli Be’eri. ‘It’s alchemy. It is all combined together.”
Mrs. Be’eri followed the horn piece by emerging from a ship’s drain, playing the piano (with its legs removed) while singing a song that was “part made-up, part Hebrew poetry, part random noises”.
That night the sky was clear, but the concert lasted four nights — including one in which New York City was gripped by wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada.
“On Wednesday we weren’t even sure if we were going to put on a show because that was the day the whole sky was blood red,” said Mr Zeniuk. Battling elements to sit next to a sewer made for a “common sort of situation,” he said. “It was really beautiful.”
The little cove on the water was pretty quiet. Birds giggled. Passing ferries occasionally caused waves to gently crash against the rocks. Trees rustled in the wind, and when people walked there was the warm sound of dry leaves crunching and small twigs snapping.
Dusk fell, darkness crept in around us, and the show ended with another yodel. ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, Sylvester Schneider, the man in the hat from Tyrol, sang from his place in the canoe.
Ms. Butler thanked everyone for supporting New York’s “alternative underground culture.”
“It’s still alive!” she said.
As if for a sign, a few bats, squeaking and fluttering, appeared at the drain hole and flew into the air.
“Nowadays with social media, everything looks cooler than it is,” Ms Be’eri said afterwards. “Here it was the opposite.”
She added, “Doing that was cooler than any picture you can ever see.”