A hot ticket in NYC? The wastewater treatment plant tour.

For a certain breed of New Yorker, the best kind of exclusive access is not to the hottest new restaurant, the most celebrity-filled party or the hardest-to-book experience: It’s inside access to municipal infrastructure. I am this breed of New Yorker.

So when I recently learned Open House New York was distributing $10 tickets by lottery for a tour of Brooklyn’s Owls Head Wastewater Treatment Plant, I immediately entered. I’d previously toured the Newtown Creek Digester Eggs and enjoyed it greatly and was eager to see inside another wastewater plant.

Owls Head is one of 14 NYC Department of Environmental Protection wastewater resource recovery facilities treating the more than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater New Yorkers flush down the drain daily. It’s been operating at the watery edge of Bay Ridge since 1952.

Owls Head alone serves close to 800,000 people (more than the population of Seattle), treating a large chunk of southwest Brooklyn’s wastewater through a biological and disinfection process that has it clean enough to be released into New York Harbor in about eight to 10 hours.

I did not know any of this when I entered the lottery. All I knew was that I wanted to see inside the sewage plant and learn more about how NYC works.

The day of the tour, I walked from the Bay Ridge Avenue stop on the R train to the Owls Head Gates.

I gathered with the other lottery winners (over 500 people applied for about 40 spots) in a conference room, where staff gave us hard hats and vests and shared some facts about the facility. For instance, the fact that NYC’s Department of Environmental Protection processes over a billion gallons of wastewater daily. Before we journeyed into the plant, they also pointed out the random owl tchotchkes in the room — six in total.

As expected, the 90-minute tour was a delight: Extremely well-informed plant staff walked us through the sprawling facility, expertly answering questions and explaining what, exactly, we were looking at. We saw settling tanks (where the water’s flow is slowed) and aeration tanks (where air is added to the sewage), most (but not all) of which were nearly odorless, although significantly outdoors. The views of the harbor were stellar. We even got to see a sludge barge, which is a vessel used to transport the waste removed from water between treatment facilities.

"I’ve had the privilege of touring a dozen such facilities across the U.S. and Canada,” said my tourmate Kendall Christiansen, a consultant for food waste disposal manufacturer InSinkErator whose home happens to be serviced by Owls Head. He has a deep appreciation for such facilities, describing them as “often hidden and overlooked, but vital to the public and environmental health of our cities."

Many in the crowd were longtime and even professional urban infrastructure fans.

“I found out about this because I’ve been involved with Open House New York for more than 20 years now,” said Moses Gates, vice president of Housing and Neighborhood Planning at the Regional Plan Association, a not-for-profit tristate area planning organization.

“There’s so much that goes into making New York work on a day-to-day level,” Gates said. “Getting to see this really gives us an appreciation for both the people and the infrastructure that make this city run.”

My biggest takeaways?

After seeing dumpsters full of them, I realized flushable wipes don't actually exist. And a mostly invisible army of machinery and employees keeps this city running and our water tasting so good.

What to know if you want to go

Intrigued? Well, you can also enter your name for a chance to win access to see New York City's inner workings. My Owls Head tour was part of “Water Works,” a yearlong series of tours, lectures and other public programs put on by OHNY in collaboration with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection.

While this particular tour isn’t offered again this year, upcoming programming includes boat tours of Newtown Creek and the Port of New York and New Jersey, as well as a walking tour of Central Park’s new Davis Center. For registration details, see the separate events on the OHNY website. The next one, a play about protecting yourself from flooding, is on April 19. It is free with RSVP.