On a wooden piling in the waters off Brooklyn Bridge Park, a lone red fruit grows between Pier 1, right next to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Pier 2. Sure, it’s tomato season, but this one seems to have materialized without the aid of any planter or gardener.
“I saw the yellow blossoms and paddled over to it,” said Matthew Frey, a kayaker who discovered the rogue tomato on Monday while kneeling on a paddleboard. He tried to hold steady enough to take a picture on his iPhone.
“I’m used to seeing things grow here, but nothing as special as that,” said Mr. Frey, 54, a board member at the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boat House. “Things like that just make me happy.”
Other pilings — those that poke above the East River waterline, that is — also sport plants. There are a few tufts of green, a few of red, weeds growing out of reach from the estuary’s saltwater. But there’s nothing like the tomato.
“I can only guess” how it arrived and thrived, said Zhangjun Fei, a plant geneticist at the Boyce Thompson Institute and an adjunct professor at Cornell University who researches the tomato genome. “If it had some moisture, it can germinate.”
Tomatoes are famously adaptable: They can survive in high elevations, dry deserts and the salty soil of the Galápagos Islands.
“That’s one of the reasons everyone grows tomatoes,” said Jim Giovannoni, a United States Department of Agriculture molecular biologist at Cornell who has been studying tomatoes for more than 30 years. “They taste great, look nice and they’re really easy to grow. It’s a very hardy plant.”
The Brooklyn tomato is a domesticated breed, both scientists said after looking at Mr. Frey’s photos.
About eight pilings back, it is tough to see from shore. But viewed through binoculars on Tuesday, the solitary fruit gleamed red and healthy.
“Did you plant that?” asked Tyrome Tripoli, 52, who was building a driftwood sculpture with his 7-year-old son, Giamo.
“I didn’t,” Mr. Frey said. “I don’t see how anybody could have gotten that close.”
Mr. Tripoli bent to point out the plant to Giamo. “It’s a bird, for sure,” he said. “They eat it, and they crap it somewhere else.”
Mr. Tripoli recalled that tomatoes had once grown from the side of his house without being planted. He thought they must have come from pigeons that gorged themselves on fruit from neighborhood gardens.
That, Mr. Frey said as he handed Giamo his binoculars, is the only explanation: A bird must have eaten a tomato and flown by at just the right moment. (Dr. Giovannoni agreed: “A bird’s probably the best bet.”)
But it’s crazier than that, Mr. Tripoli mused. Not only would the bird have to have hit the piling dead on; It would also have had to hit a small hole in the center, likely made by a large boring nail when a pier stood.
“Brooklyn Bridge Park is full of surprises,” said Sarah Krauss, the chief of staff for the park, in an email. “Many are by design, but some are simply nature’s whims.” She called it “one of these sweet accidents.”
In his years kayaking, Mr. Frey said he has seen a lot of animal life in New York Harbor. Local waterways have been the focus of decades of ecological activism, from the 1960s, when the folk singer Pete Seeger sailed his boat, the Clearwater, advocating for a Hudson River cleanup, to last Wednesday, when Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, sailed into the harbor on a zero-carbon emissions vessel to speak at the United Nations.
Now, the water smells cleaner, Mr. Frey said. It’s swimmable. Whales have even been spotted. There are more birds now, common terns and healthier sea gulls. The tomato is just another piece of life returning to the harbor.
“More birds mean more bird poop,” Mr. Frey said, shrugging. “And if that’s what’s in the bird poop, bring it on.”
