NEW YORK – A dozen campers look suspiciously at the winding Brooklyn canal they are about to canoe.
“OK, what’s the most important thing about this waterway?” Owen Foote, their expedition leader, asks.
“It stinks!” the preteens squeal in chorus.
Indeed it does.
But never mind that. The Gowanus Canal is the latest, hottest, coolest spot in a city that won’t sleep until it’s completely gentrified.
Never mind that the federal government designated the Gowanus a Superfund site last year and “one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the nation.” Never mind that the waterway is so rank the feds had difficulty catching enough fish to determine if they’re safe to eat. (They’re not.)
The sediment, once described as looking like black mayonnaise, is thick with metals, coal tar and PCBs, and there’s the 300 million gallons of storm water tainted with sewage that flows into the canal every year, changing the water color from gray to greenish from the algae feeding on human waste.
But in this part of the city, the Gowanus is what passes for the great outdoors.
Which explains why aspiring professionals, poor artists and eager real estate agents – who once flocked to cozy Carroll Gardens and tree-lined Park Slope – are now drawn to the fetid canal that runs between those neighborhoods. It also explains why Foote, an architect, volunteers on a day off to show hesitant day campers the secrets of a hidden urban waterway with weedy, earthen – not concrete – banks and little oil slicks that shimmer here and there.
Though the canal is mostly lined with industrial and commercial sites and a smattering of housing, people dance, paint and perform operas on its banks; they hike, bike and get engaged there.
A few summers ago, an enterprising neighbor pumped fresh water into a giant Dumpster parked adjacent to the canal and invited swimmers for a dip. Though not even New Yorkers are eccentric enough to jump in the canal, it’s hard to imagine another Superfund site so lived in.
On a recent morning, before Foote takes out the campers, he gives a private tour like a breathless guide plying the Colorado River.
“Many people think we shouldn’t be out here,” he explains. “They think a drop of this water will eat through your hand.” Then he shows a tanned hand. “Still there.”
Foote is a founding member of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, started about a decade ago to inspire the neighborhood to dream of cleaning the canal. The club offers free canoe rides twice a week from a small launch at the end of Second Street. Tall and athletic, the 43-year-old Foote looks better suited for tony Greenwich than toxic Gowanus.
Like Ebbets Field, the Gowanus both repels and attracts the locals; it’s part of the folk history here. Named by the Dutch for Gouwanue, a Canarse Indian chief who fished the waters here, the 100-foot wide canal was carved out of a swamp off New York Harbor in the late 1860s and comes to a dead end 1.8 miles from shore.
It was used by unloading ships coming down from the Erie Canal and soon became one of the busiest waterways in the country with factories, foundries, warehouses, tanneries, and paint, ink and coal-burning plants.
By the 1960s its commercial purpose had faded from history, and the Gowanus became little more than a dumping ground – sometimes for dead bodies.
Though it smells faintly like petroleum, the canal is improbably peaceful on this summer morning. A man practices the trumpet on a bench in the parking lot of a Lowe’s. A plastic bottle floats by, then a crab. As Foote vigorously paddles closer to the busy end of the canal, the noise level picks up and the scenery is akin to a John French Sloan painting – urban, vibrant and gritty.
A pipe hisses from a gas plant; a giant claw separates scrap metal on a barge; a subway train screeches as it crosses above on the highest elevated tracks in the city that arc over the Gowanus. Suddenly, a whiff of fresh baked bread from a factory bravely breaks through the stench and a duck appears miraculously, perched above the water on a pipe. There’s a breeze.
Beauty is in the eyes of people who can adapt to anything, even if it’s not tempting to run a finger atop the water.
Foote spots David Lefkowitz, another Gowanus devotee, up on the bank and edges closer to shore to greet him.
“Good to see you out, man,” Lefkowitz says.
For the last 15 years, Lefkowitz has owned a scruffy plot of land adjacent to the canal that he has turned into a party space. On summer weekends, 20-somethings, often a few hundred on a Sunday evening, flock there to hear techno bands and shake and sway on a small concrete dance floor. The property would have been swallowed up by a 450-unit condo development if the owner had not pulled out after the EPA stepped in. “How,” the owner complained, “do you market a Superfund site?”
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