By Carla Zanoni
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
INWOOD — City Council Speaker Christine Quinn took to the Hudson River Sunday after Manhattan’s oldest canoe club recognized her with its "Favorite Daughter" award in honor of her commitment to keeping the city's waterways clean.
"I’m honored to receive this award," Quinn said before hopping in a kayak at the Inwood Canoe Club. "We are literally and figuratively a city that has turned its back on its water. It is wonderful to support a group that gets people out onto the water and thinking about the river."
Antonio Burr, commodore of the Inwood Canoe Club, presented Quinn with a plaque and club T-shirt and called her a "great friend of water enthusiasts and adventurers."
"We’ve long admired Speaker Quinn’s dedication to our City’s harbors and waterways. She is a special friend of Inwood and the Inwood Canoe Club," he said.
Quinn’s family has deep roots in Inwood, where her grandparents once lived and her mother was raised. But the canoe club came as a surprise to her family.
"When I told my father I was coming to a canoe club in Inwood he said there was no canoe club, that someone had made a mistake," she said. "I’ll happily report back that I was here."
After the award presentation on the docks, Quinn liberally applied 50-SPF sunscreen before joining the club's free weekly summer tours down the Hudson River toward the George Washington Bridge with a group of paddlers and her partner Kim Catullo.
"The river was wavier than I expected," she said when she returned to the dock. "It’s so green you could be anywhere. Kim said, ‘I think we’re in upstate New York'."
