Gowanus Canal
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The Gowanus Canal, also known as the Gowanus Creek Canal, is a canal in northwestern Brooklyn, New York. Connected to Gowanus Bay in Upper New York Harbor, the canal borders the neighborhoods of Red Hook and South Brooklyn on the west and Gowanus/Park Slope on the east. There are five east-west bridge crossings over the canal, located at Union Street, Carroll Street, Third Street, Ninth Street, and Hamilton Avenue. The Gowanus Expressway (I-278) and the IND Culver Line of the New York City Subway, the only above-ground section of the original Independent Subway System, pass overhead.
Once a leading national industrial area, the canal's fate has mirrored the decline of traditional local shipping. A legacy of serious environmental problems has troubled the area for many decades, but in recent years there has been increasing pressure for environmental cleanup and waterfront economic development.
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History
The Gowanus neighborhood was originally a tidal inlet of small creeks in original saltwater marshland, and meadows teeming with fish and other wildlife. Henry Hudson and Giovanni da Verrazano both navigated the inlet in their explorations of New York Harbor. In 1639, the leaders of New Netherland made one of the earliest recorded real estate deals in New York City history with the purchase of the area around the Gowanus Bay for construction of a tobacco plantation. The early settlers of the area named the waterway "Gowanes Creek" after Gouwane, sachem of the local Lenape tribe called the Canarsee, who lived and farmed on the rich shorelines.
In 1700, one of the first settlers, Nicholas Vechte, built a farmhouse of brick and stone now known as the Old Stone House, which later played a critical role in the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, when American troops fought off the Redcoats long enough to allow George Washington to retreat.
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Throughout this period, many Dutch farmers settled along the banks and engaged in clamming of large, succulent oysters that became Brooklyn’s first export to Europe. The creek was close to sea level and the six-foot (2 m) tides of the bay forced salt water up into its meandering course to create a brackish mix of water that was ideal for the bivalves, which often grew much larger than today but gradually shrunk through a form of negative artificial selection. By the middle of the 19th century, the City of Brooklyn was the third most populous, and fastest growing, city in America and had incorporated the creek and farmland into a greater urban fabric with linear villages flourishing along the shore.
Along with this boom of residential expansion came the need for navigational and docking facilities. Colonel Daniel Richards, a successful local merchant, advocated the building of a canal to benefit existing inland industries and drain the surrounding marshes for land reclamation that would raise property values. In 1849, the New York State Legislature authorized the construction of the Gowanus Canal, by widening the original Gowanus Creek into a mile and a half long commercial waterway emptying into Upper New York Bay. Edwin C. Litchfield, railroad owner, founder of the Brooklyn Improvement Company, and personal owner of much the marshlands as well as what is now western Prospect Park and Park Slope, started widening the creek in the late 1840s. But the full dredging of Gowanus Creek could not begin until a further act of the legislature in 1867. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) Major David Douglas was hired to design the canal, which was essentially complete by 1869.
Despite its relatively short length, the Gowanus Canal soon became the main hub for Brooklyn's maritime and commercial activity. Factories and working-class residential communities sprang up as a result of its construction. Grain was imported from the Erie Canal. Much of the brownstone quarried in New Jersey and the upper Hudson was placed on barges with lumber and brick and shipped through the canal to build up the neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope. In addition, the industrial sector feeding off the canal grew substantially over time to include: stone yards, flour mills, cement works, tanneries, factories for paint, ink, and soap, coal and gas manufacturing plants, oil refineries, machine shops, chemical plants, and sulfur producers, all of which emitted substantial water and airborne pollutants.
With as many as 700 new buildings a year constructed, the South Brooklyn region was growing at a remarkable rate. Thriving industry had brought many people to the area but important questions about wastewater sanitation had not been addressed. What they got was a sewer connection that discharged raw sewage into the Gowanus Canal. By the turn of the century, the combination of industrial pollutants and runoff from storm water, fortified with the products of the new sewage system, rendered the waterway a repository of rank odors, known to residents of the time as the "Lavender Lake" after the ink that was dumped in it. After World War I, with six million annual tons of cargo produced and trafficked though the waterway, the Gowanus Canal became the nation's busiest commercial canal, and arguably the most polluted.
By 1955, the US ACOE gave up on the regular dredging of the Gowanus Canal, deeming it to be no longer cost effective. With the early 1960s growth of container shipping, New York's loss of industrial waterfront jobs during this period was evident on the canal and, by the late 1970s, it was estimated that over 50% of the property in Gowanus was unused and derelict. At this point, in the face of drastic economic and environmental decline, the issue of revitalizing and cleaning up the Gowanus area surfaced as a pressing issue.
Canal problems
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Unknown at the time, the Gowanus Canal was constructed with significant design flaws. The most notable is the concrete embankments of the canal’s perimeter that bar the strong tides of fresh diurnal doses of oxygenated water from New York Harbor into the 1.8 mile (3 km) channel. Water quality studies have found the concentration of oxygen in the canal to be just 1.5 parts per million, well below the minimum 4 parts per million needed to sustain life.
The opaqueness of the Gowanus water obstructs sunlight to one third of the six feet needed for aquatic plant growth. Rising gas bubbles betray the decomposition of sewage sludge that pungently overwhelms the olfactories on a ripe, warm day. The murky depths of the canal conceal the remnants of its industrial past: cement, oil, mercury, lead, PCBs, and other contaminants. In 1951, with the opening of the elevated Gowanus Expressway over the waterway, easy access for trucks and cars catalyzed industry slightly. But, with 150 thousand vehicles passing overhead each day, the expressway also provides the means for depositing tons of toxic lead fumes into the air and water.
The existing method to control the pollution of the isolated Gowanus Canal was the installation of the Flushing Tunnel on June 21, 1911. The mechanism attempts to draw dirty water out of the canal through the brick-lined 1.2 mile (1.9 km) tunnel below Butler Street. Unfortunately, it never performed well. Aside from numerous operational glitches, a long series of problems and mistakes occurred throughout the 1960s, culminating when a city worker dropped a manhole cover that destroyed a complex pump system beyond repair. As a result of the unfixed damage to the Flushing Tunnel, and the long stretch of economic depression in the area, the waters of the Gowanus Canal lay stagnant and unused for years.
According to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), plans to reactivate the Flushing Tunnel pump were proposed in 1982. But, due to bureaucratic delays, the DEP did not take up the project until 1994. The Flushing Tunnel was finally reactivated and modernized in 1999. The new design employed a 600 horsepower (450 kW) motor, that pumped an average rate of 200 million gallons a day (9 m³/s) of aerated water from Buttermilk Channel of the East River into the head end of the canal. Although water was circulating through the underground tunnel, water quality only faintly improved due to major obstacles like the limited current in the canal, and the predominate low tide. Another attempt to control pollution, the construction of the US$230 million Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant in 1987, had similar unsatisfactory results. Machinery and technology have yet to keep up with the combined sewage overflows of the Gowanus Canal.
Environmental/economic developments
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More recently, legislation and fundraising has amassed to help revitalize and capitalize on Brooklyn’s most wasted real estate. In 1999, Assemblywoman Joan Millman allocated $100,000 to the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) to produce and distribute a bulkhead study and public access document. The following year, GCCDC procured $270 thousand from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to construct three street-end public open spaces along the Gowanus Canal through the city’s Green Street program. An additional $270 thousand was funded by Governor George E. Pataki to create a revitalization plan in 2001 and then allocated $100 thousand of capital funds in 2002 to implement a pilot project on the shoreline. In 2003, Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez allocated an additional $225 thousand to create a comprehensive community development plan.
In 2002, the US ACOE entered into a cost-sharing agreement with the DEP to collaborate on a $5 million Ecosystem Restoration Feasibility Study of the Gowanus Canal area to be completed in 2005, studying possible alternatives for ecosystem restoration such as dredging, and wetland and habitat restoration. The DEP has also initiated the Gowanus Canal Use and Standards Attainment project, which aims to improve water quality in accordance with the community’s goals for the canal's future use.
Today, in the ever-evolving postindustrial Brooklyn cityscape, numerous new development plans have been proposed and debated for the Gowanus Canal and adjacent neighborhoods. With slightly improved environmental conditions, and the popularity of the location, some community groups have even raised the dream of Brooklyn's own Grand Canal of Venice, with possibilities for tourism.
A 9.4 acre (38,000 m²) U.S. Postal Service site on the east side of the Ninth Street canal crossing was also available for commercial development. This site had been originally proposed as the Brooklyn Commons, an entertainment and retail complex featuring a multiplex cinema, a bowling alley, shops and restaurants. But after controversy, a legal suit, and a rival proposal for an IKEA store, a large Lowe's store was built and opened on April 30, 2004, with an adjacent public promenade overlooking the canal. The IKEA company, previously rejected from the Ninth Street location for traffic congestion, is currently seeking development on the Red Hook side of the waterway. That project still faces a lot of objection from the Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods.
See also
References
- The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, “Gowanus Canal History”, accessed 05/12/04, [1] (http://www.waterfrontmuseum.org/dredger/history.html), revised 04/02/04.
- New York City Department of Environmental Protection, City Activates Gowanus Canal Flushing Tunnel, Publication 99-28, New York: 04/30/99.
- Held, James E., “Currents of Change: Can Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal Be Cleaned Up?”, E – The Environmental Magazine, 10.3 (1999).
- New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Carroll Gardens Historic District, [2] (http://www.carrollgardens.org/report.htm), (1973).
- Wheelwright, Peter., Project III Program Statement: Gowanus Canal, [3] (http://www.pmwarchitects.com/ac_hudson.htm), River Projects Exhibition - Van Alen Institute for Public Architecture (1998).
External links
- Army Corp of Engineers Press Release (http://www.nan.usace.army.mil/news/newsrels/gowanus.pdf) (PDF)
- Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (http://www.gowanus.org/gowanus.htm)
- The Gowanus Canal (http://www.southbrooklyn.net/gowanus/) at southbrooklyn.net