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Gowanus Canal

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: North American Geography

   An aerial view of the canal and the crossings of it.
   Enlarge
   An aerial view of the canal and the crossings of it.

   The Gowanus Canal, also known as the Gowanus Creek Canal, is a canal in
   the northwestern portion of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, New
   York, USA. Connected to Gowanus Bay in Upper New York Bay, 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
   ( Interstate 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.

History

   The Gowanus neighbourhood was originally a tidal inlet of navigable
   creeks in original saltwater marshland, and meadows teeming with fish
   and other wildlife. Henry Hudson and Giovanni da Verrazzano both
   navigated the inlet in their explorations of New York Harbour. The
   first land patents within Breukelen (Brooklyn), including the land of
   the Gowanus, were issued by the Dutch Government from 1630 to 1664. 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.

   Adam Brouwer, who had been a soldier in the service of the Dutch West
   India Company, built and operated the first gristmill patented in NY
   and located at Gowanus (on land patented July 8, 1645, to Jan Evertse
   Bout). The tide-water gristmill on the Gowanus was the first in the
   town of Breukelen and was the first mill ever operated in New
   Netherlands (located north of Union, west of Nevin, and next to Bond
   street). This mill would later be known as Brower's Mill (also known as
   Freeks Mill) and drawings of it can be seen in depictions of the Battle
   of Brooklyn. A second mill (Denton's Mill) was built on Denton's mill
   pond, after being granted permission to dredge from the creek to the
   mill pond once located between Fifth Ave and the present day canal at
   Carroll and Third Street. On May 26, 1664, several Breuckelen
   residents, headed by Brouwer, petitioned director general Peter
   Stuyvesant and his Council for permission to dredge a canal at their
   own expense through the land of Frederick Lubbertsen in order to supply
   water to run the mill. The petition was presented to the council on May
   29, 1664, and the motion was granted.

   In 1700, a settler, 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 Long Island, when American troops fought off
   the Redcoats long enough to allow George Washington to retreat. This
   house sat at the south eastern edge of the Denton's Mill pond.
   Sunset at Gowanus Bay in the Bay New York (1851) by Henry Gritten
   Enlarge
   Sunset at Gowanus Bay in the Bay New York (1851) by Henry Gritten

   Throughout this period, many Dutch farmers settled along the banks and
   engaged in clamming of large, succulent oysters that became one of
   Brooklyn’s first exports 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
   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 filling in the title
   ponds and marsh while widening the creek for larger boats in the late
   1840s. But the full dredging of Gowanus Creek could not begin until a
   further act of the legislature in 1867. After exploring numerous
   alternative (and some more environmentally sound) designs, the final
   was chosen for its low price tag. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE)
   Major David Douglas was hired to design the canal, which was
   essentially complete by 1869. The cost of the construction came from
   assessments on the local residents of Brooklyn and State money.

   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 odours, 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.

   With much fanfare the US ACOE completed their last dredging of the
   canal in 1955. But soon after 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. Remaining barge
   traffic mostly carried sand, gravel and scrap metal. 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. In 1975 the City of New York established a Gowanus Industrial
   Renewal Plan for the area, which will remain in effect until the year
   2011.

Canal problems

   Oil tanks and a scrap metal yard line the Gowanus Canal.
   Enlarge
   Oil tanks and a scrap metal yard line the Gowanus Canal.

   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 Harbour 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.

   There is an urban legend that the canal served as a dumping ground for
   the Mafia. In Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a character refers
   to it as "the only body of water in the world that is 90 percent guns."
   In Lavender Lake, a documentary film about the Gowanus Canal by Alison
   Prete, cops are shown fishing a suitcase out of the waterway that is
   full of body parts.

   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 New York City 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
   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.

   Most recently, the particular problem of wastewater management has been
   brought up during the controversy of a planned Brooklyn Nets Arena in
   nearby central Brooklyn. According to the March 4, 2006 edition of The
   Brooklyn Paper, the sewage created from the development (which includes
   a basketball arena and 17 " skyscrapers") will flow into antiquated
   city-run sewer and waste treatment systems — which overload when it
   rains. The result, is that allegedly 27 billion gallons of untreated
   wastewater will drain into waterways around the city each year,
   including 13 spigots on the Gowanus Canal.

Environmental/economic developments

   The Gowanus Canal, near Smith and 9th Street, with the Gowanus
   Expressway in the distance.
   Enlarge
   The Gowanus Canal, near Smith and 9th Street, with the Gowanus
   Expressway in the distance.

   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 Velázquez 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,
   led by a funeral director in the area, have even raised the dream of
   Brooklyn's own Grand Canal of Venice, with possibilities for tourism.
   Paving the way for recreational use of the canal has been the Gowanus
   Dredgers Canoe Club (founded in 1999), and The Urban Divers Estuary
   Conservancy (founded in 1998), two volunteer organizations that are
   dedicated to providing waterfront access and education related to the
   estuary and bordering shoreline of the canal. During the 2003 season,
   over 1,000 individuals, including more than 200 youths, participated in
   Dredger Canoe Club programs: logging over 2,000 trips on the Gowanus
   Canal.

   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.

   With intense gentrification and commercialization looming, an alliance
   of artists have managed to carve out their own niche in the Gowanus
   area. The Gowanus Artists is a group of over 100 local visual artists
   that hang out and paint in the Canal's parks, on its bridges, and in
   their nearby studios. On the last weekend of every October, Gowanus
   Artists open up their studios for the Gowanus Open Studio Tour,
   expanding also into Park Slope's Brooklyn Lyceum (227 Fourth Avenue)
   and Southpaw (125 Fifth Avenue) venues.

   On November 9-12, 2006, HABITATS, a festival dedicated to "local action
   as global wisdom" celebrated the Gowanus Canal through environmental
   conferences, collaborative art, educational programs and interactive
   walks around the area.

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