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The Gowanus Canal, also known as the Gowanus Creek Canal, is located in the Brooklyn, New York neighborhoods of Red Hook and South Brooklyn. There are five east-west bridge crossings over the Canal, located at Union Street, Carroll Street, Third Street, Ninth Street, and Hamilton Avenue. An expressway, and the IND line of the New York City Subway, pass overhead.
History
The Gowanus neighborhood was originally a tidal inlet of small creeks in original saltwater marshland, and meadows teeming with fish and other wildlife. The early settlers of the area named it "Gowanes Creek" after chief Gowanes, the leader of a local Native American tribe called the Canarsees. He was an Algonquin-speaking Delaware Native American who lived and farmed on the rich shorelines. Henry Hudson and Giovanni da Verrazano both navigated the inlet, while later in history a critical portion of the Battle of Brooklyn would unfold nearby, when American troops fought off the Redcoats long enough to allow George Washington to retreat.
In 1639, the Dutch 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. In 1700, one of the first settlers, Nicholas Vechte, built a farmhouse of brick and stone now known as the Old Stone House. Throughout this period, many Dutch farmers settled along the banks and fished for large, succulent oysters that became Brooklyns first export to Europe. The creek was close to sea level and the six-foot 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. By the middle of the 19th century, the City of Brooklyn was the 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 residential expansion, came the need for navigational and docking facilities as well. 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 the Upper New York Bay. Railroad owner Edwin C. Litchfield is notable for helping dig out the Gowanus Canal (His mansion is now preserved as part of Prospect Park). It was completed in the 1860s.
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. 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 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 the neighborhoods of South Brooklyn growing at a remarkable rate, as much as 700 new buildings a year, sanitation needs were inadequately addressed. What they got was a sewer connection that ended up discharging 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 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 Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) gave up on the regular dredging of the Canal, deeming it to be no longer cost effective. New York's loss of industrial 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
Unknown at the time, the Gowanus Canal was constructed with significant design flaws. The most notable is the concrete embankments of the canals perimeter that bar the strong tides of fresh diurnal doses of oxygenated water from New York Harbor into the 1.8-mile channel. Water quality studies has found the concentration of Oxygen in the canal a measly 1.5 parts per million, well below the minimal 5 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 overwhelm the olfactories on a ripe, warm summers day. The murky depths of the canal conceal much more than the remains of vanished mobsters, but also Mercury, Lead, PCBs, as well as other contaminants. In 1951, with the opening of the elevated Gowanus Expressway over the waterway, easy access for trucks and cars catalyzed industry slightly. 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 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 tunnel below Butler Street, but it never performed well. Aside from numerous operational glitches, a long series of snafus occurred throughout the 1960s culminating when a city worker dropped a manhole cover destroying a complex pump system beyond repair. For the long stretch of economic depression, the waters of the Gowanus Canal lay stagnant.
Although The Flushing Pump today is circulating water through the underground tunnel, the limited current in the Canal, and the predominate low tide, still remain major obstacles. Another attempt to control pollution, the construction of the $230 million Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant in 1987, had similar unsatisfactory results. Machinery and technology has yet to keep up with the combined sewage overflows of the Gowanus Canal.
Environmental/Economic Developments
According to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), plans to reactivate The Flushing 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 in 1999, but only faintly improved the water quality by allowing aerated water from Buttermilk Channel of the East River to be pumped into the head end of the Gowanus Canal. A new pump system, powered by a 600 horsepower motor, was installed to bring harbor water to the canal at an average rate of 200 million gallons a day.
More recently, legislation and fundraising has amassed to help revitalize and capitalize on Brooklyns 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 citys Green Street program. An additional $270,000 was funded by Governor George E. Pataki to create a revitalization plan in 2001 and then allocated $100,000 of capital funds in 2002 to implement a pilot project on the shoreline. In 2003, Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez allocated an additional $225,000 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 communitys goals for the canal's future use. In the end, the economic and environmental restoration of the Gowanus area is clearly a necessity for an ever-evolving Brooklyn postindustrial cityscape.
As of December, 2004, a new wave of economic boom might be in store for the Gowanus area: Large stores like Lowes have established business at the Ninth Street intersection of the canal, and Ikea is currently seeking development on the Red Hook side of the water way.
Sources
- 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 Brooklyns Gowanus Canal Be Cleaned Up?, E The Environmental Magazine, 10.3 (1999).
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