Low Tide Junk
Two Dan's Automotive
Dan of Two Dans
Leonard Thomas
The Chicken Man
The Oily End
1999 Dredging
For over thirty years, Mark D Phillips has documented the historic Gowanus and the surrounding urban environment. Phillips has organized and developed Gowanus Canal: Brooklyn’s Superfund Waterway as a photography stock photo location for general editorial use, with minimal licensing fees.
Long ago, the native Americans who populated this part of what is known today as Brooklyn named it Gowanes Creek in honor of Chief Gowanes of the Canarses tribe. The creek served as an important access point from New York Harbor. On August 27, 1776, Gowanus was the scene of the Revolutionary War’s biggest battle, 10,000 American rebels versus 20,000 redcoats, and the selfless sacrifice of 250 members of the Maryland 400 at the Old Stone House. Their mass grave is one of the lost secrets of Gowanus.
Over the years as New York City grew, it blossomed with industry, with tidal grain mills taking advantage of the six-foot tides bringing brackish water along its two-mile course.
As the surrounding neighborhoods boomed through the end of the 19th century, sewers and streets were laid out, draining engine oil, antifreeze and all the muck of New York City into the water. Sewage flowed into the canal as early as 1858. By the 1880s, the waterway had gained the moniker “Lavender Lake,” a snide joke about its malodorous qualities. Over 30 businesses handling lumber, coal, firewood, hay, grain, oil, building materials, and chemical fertilizers dumped waste along its length.
At the start of the 20th century, the Gowanus Canal was the busiest industrial and commercial canal in the world, with more than six million tons of cargo annually. By the 1950s, most of the businesses had moved away as water transport fell away to trucks. The fall continued for the next fifty years.
All these businesses brought the canal to its current state of toxic nightmare. When Phillips moved to Brooklyn in 1989, the Gowanus Canal was a smelly blight, an industrial wasteland tucked between two quickly gentrifying brownstone neighborhoods. In the 1990s, community leaders were doing their best to bring the woes of the waterway to the public. Owen Foote founded the Gowanus Dredgers, a canoe-club and advocacy group. John C. Muir, as executive director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, began boat tours teaching the history of the destruction of an ecosystem. The late Buddy Scotto founded the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation to help facilitate the cleanup and development of the canal.
Their efforts led to a 1999 cleanup effort, involving repairs to the flushing tunnel that was built in 1911. It runs underneath the width of the Cobble Hill neighborhood, bringing water from Buttermilk Channel off New York Harbor to the head of the canal on Butler Street.
Inside the Pump House at the head of the Gowanus Canal at Baltic Street in Brooklyn in 1999, during the city-led 1999 cleanup effort that involved repairs to the flushing tunnel and a partial dredging at the head of the waterway. ©Mark D Phillips The results were immediate, with a marked increase in fish and wildlife springing to life in the canal. But, although the water quality improved, the underlying sediment within the canal was still at a dangerously polluted level.
Phillips’ photographs captured these early attempts to rejuvenate the wretched Gowanus. Still, over the next decade, changes in the banks of the waterway were merely cosmetic, even as real-estate values soared on the trendy blocks of Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, the desirable neighborhoods surrounding Gowanus.
The Environmental Protection Agency designated the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site on March 2, 2010, which should have pumped in enough federal dollars to clean the fetid waterway. The area seemed to be on the verge, with real-estate speculation at a fever pitch, and multimillion-dollar condos springing up on the Gowanus’ shores. But, for the next decade, nothing much happened in the water.
That all changed in 2020, when the cleanup started in earnest
“We’ve come a long way to get where we are today,” said Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez on November 16, 2020, as the EPA officially began dredging the entire length of the canal. “Full-scale dredging is a welcome and long-awaited step toward full cleanup of the polluted Gowanus Canal.”
Dredging is a slow and laborious process. The canal’s grotesque ooze is removed from the bottom with a backhoe, a single shovelful at a time. This is repeated, over and over, until the entire length of the Gowanus is cleaned.
We hope.
But that doesn’t mean the Gowanus Canal will be ready for its grand reopening anytime soon. According to the Brooklyn Paper, the city’s construction of two massive tanks and a filtration facility designed to help keep the Gowanus clean following the Superfund project won’t be completed until the end of 2032. The facility captures and sanitizes raw sewage and stormwater runoff from the streets. The infrastructure upgrade will cost a whopping $1.3 billion in city funds – $748.5 million for the upper tank and facility, and $558.5 million for the mid-canal tank, according to NYC Department of Environmental Protection calculations.
So even with all the dredging and capping – laying a rubber seal on the canal’s bottom – the Gowanus may get dirty all over again, thanks to the inept and overwhelmed city. Taxpayers could end up footing an even larger bill due to delays, according to EPA’s project manager for the cleanup, Christos Tsiamis, who said that the city would have to pay for dredging of any additional viscous toxic material known locally as “black mayonnaise.”
Since 2016, the patch of graffiti on a warehouse by the Carroll Street Bridge on the bank of the Gowanus Canal welcomed visitors with the tagline ‘Welcome to Venice’ with the signature “Love Jerko.” But just like the Canal itself, it became a victim of gentrification. ©Mark D Phillips
And, as the project accelerates, so does the demolition of structures that have stood on canal’s banks for generations.
In 2014, the New York State Preservation Office shelved a plan to designate the Gowanus Canal area as a state and national historic district. So much has disappeared just during the pandemic.
As the area around the Gowanus Canal gentrifies, a grass root effort is underway to save historic buildings around its shores including the City of New York Water Supply Distribution Gowanus Station, with Beavers and Barrels adorning its crest..
©Mark D Phillips
Gowanus Station, a Beaux-Arts brick industrial building at 234 Butler Street built by the city in 1913 as a pumping station for the canal, was privately owned and prominently defended by the owner and neighbors. The city took control of the 106-year-old building through eminent domain in September 2020 in order to raze the structure to make way for the upper cistern and head house. The EPA modified its proposal to allow the city agency to dismantle the building and reconstruct certain elements into the new facility as a way to ensure “both the Canal and its historic district, which had been in the works for about a decade. DEP will preserve parts of the building including its well-known terra cotta pediment that reads “City of New York Water Supply-Distribution Gowanus Station,” stone window sills, and bricks for reuse in the construction of the head house’s facade. Welcome to the new age of historic preservation, in which precious little is preserved.
And while this is all going on, the public can’t even access the waterway.
“No boating is going to be allowed during cleanup operations that begin in November — no boating, no canoeing,” said EPA’s Tsiamis in November 2020. The industrial waterway will be off-limits from its head at Butler Street all the way to the Ninth Street Bridge, 0.8 miles of its 1.8-mile length.
Panorama of the Pasta World building at corner of Bond Street and an empty Degraw Street leading to the water of the Gowanus Canal. ©Mark D Phillips I hope one day to be able to continue my journeys along the Gowanus Canal aboard my kayak. Time, and my photographs, will tell.
