Row, row, row your boat! That was exactly what 100 fourth-grade students did down the Newtown Creek advised by staff from the North Brooklyn Boat Club (NBBC). The boat ride at Broadway Stages' Boatyard is part of an educational program designed to teach students about the history of the creek and how to keep it clean for the future.

The local creek was once a high-density highway for transportation between New Jersey and New York and a common destination for dumping waste. It eventually became a Superfund site marked for environmental cleanup. However since then, in part thanks to the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment facility and increasing awareness and government intervention, it has become considerably cleaner and safer. Though the water has significantly improved, there is a continuous need to educate locals and boost communal efforts to prevent it from reverting back to how it was.

As a Brooklyn business, Broadway Stages believes that it is part of our duty to the Brooklyn community to increase awareness about the environmental importance of the iconic creek. Believing it is important for future generations to appreciate and preserve the natural ecology of our shared creek, Broadway Stages wishes to improve the Newtown Creek for all Brooklynites to enjoy and works to achieve that dream by setting up educational programs with NBBC. By working with NBBC, Broadway Stages has invited many Brooklynites, with a focus on students, to come to the Broadway Stages Boatyard to learn about the ecology of the Newtown Creek.

Leading the success of the partnership program between NBBC and Broadway Stages are the fun but educational teaching methods. To allow students to thoroughly enjoy the creek, staffers take them on 12-man boat trips down the creek to experience firsthand the amazing ecology of the creek, in the hopes of inspiring them to preserve its current state and work to improve it even more in the future.

Broadway Stages and NBBC hope to restore the Newtown Creek to its natural beauty completely and can only do it with the help of Brooklynites of the next generation. Let's keep Brooklyn clean and eco-friendly!