Love Stinks! Brooklyn Sewage Plant Offers Special Valentine’s Day Tour

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Todd Maisel / New York Daily News / Getty Images

Plant superintendant Jim Pynn promises visitors a romantic, fun-filled and rather unconventional tour of the Newtown Creek sewage plant this Valentine's Day.

On Valentine’s Day, love is in the air. But you might not want to sniff it, especially if your idea of a special day is a tour of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s a unique date, and one they’ll never forget,” plant superintendent Jim Pynn, who will be hosting a special tour of the sewage treatment plant on Tuesday morning, told the New York Daily News.

The 53-acre plant located in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood offers monthly tours, but they’re offering the Valentine’s Day tour as an alternative to the more generic dates typical of the holiday. Skip the fancy meal (you won’t be very hungry after seeing your waste being processed) and forget about the flowers (the stench of the sewage will promptly kill them); this is a “bucket list” date, Pynn says, ideal for those that eschew the typical lovey-dovey fanfare of the day. And out of fear that the tour offer won’t attract lovebirds, the plant is plying potential visitors with the offer of free candy – Hershey kisses.

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The plant’s website touts the facility’s quarter-mile-long waterfront nature walk and unique foliage, but Pynn seems more enthused about showing you how your waste is broken down. That includes a tour of the eight massive digester eggs that actually do the dirty work, breaking down New York City’s human byproducts, which they affectionately call sludge, into methane gas and fertilizer. After the tour of the innards, Pynn will show visitors to the top of the 130-foot-tall eggs, which offer sweeping vistas of the New York skyline.

The memories of this tour may not last forever. But the stench of sewage on your clothes, well, that just might.

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