As a child, Lisa Garcia spent her summers in a South Bronx where playgrounds had more cracked pavement and asphalt than grass. She biked or hung out on stoops with her friends. She considered herself outdoorsy, even if the outdoors looked a little different in the working class neighborhood of Soundview.

“Literally no one I grew up with knew that there was actually a Bronx River,” Garcia said. “When we were growing up, the Bronx River was a parkland.”

The 24-mile waterway—New York City’s only freshwater stream—runs beneath the Bruckner Expressway and Sheridan Boulevard and parallel to the Bronx Parkway. Back then, few children knew it was there. Fewer went near it. Green spaces were squeezed in pockets between concrete. Garcia, who was asthmatic, remembers the air as acrid with exhaust t

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