Paedegat Basin area

Nina and I went out to check out two brownfield sites near Paedegat Basin today. The first is in a strip mall. Called Bon Ton Cleaners in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it is now actually called Rebecca Cleaners. Remediation is complete as of last September and it supposedly reduced the effects of soil vapor levels of TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE).

Then we walked over to a site called Harbor Estates Property. It is a housing development built on the Ralph Avenue Truck Fill. The remediation measures included digging up two feet of soil and replacing with clean soil. The deed restrictions forbid digging deeper than 2 feet.

Across the street, Nina noticed this mobile synagogue on Avenue M. Several young woman came over to talk to us as we were photographing it. they wanted to know if we were Jewish, if we were lost souls that could be saved. It was sad to disappoint them.

Below is the 69th Street side:

On Bergen Avenue, we followed a dirt biker into the area along Paedegat Basin itself.

At the top of the basin is the Bureau of Sewers.

Gowanus

Nina and I walked up to the Double D pool this am. The Fulton Works Manufactured Gas Plant was on this site. It then became a park in the 1930s.

I know that there is a significant amount of contamination under the cement and the plastic of the pool liner. I don’t know if that means it is dangerous to use the park. How does one manufactured gas plant site become a public park without any remediation whatsoever while another like Public Place can have such a different fate? And yet that site hasn’t been remediated either. It is fenced off, without progess year after year.

The area underneath the handball courts is also toxic.

After checking out the pool, we walked one block over to the canal.

In the water, we saw a crab moving along this tire. There also appeared to be an air conditioner and an old bird cage in the water next to the tire.

Turning to go back up Degraw Street, it already felt really hot.

On the Union Street Bridge, I think I saw a Black-Capped Heron. Quiet a morning for nature watching.

Sunset Park

I went to Sunset Park this am to photograph the Empire Electric site at 5100 1st Avenue.

This building, now abandoned, originally housed an electrical power system for the city’s trolleys.

Then in the 1950s it was purchased by Empire Electric and used for reconditioning electrical apparatus.

The building itself including the floors, walls, and ground beneath the building is all thought to be contaminated with PCBs.

Peter explained to me that PCBs were chosen to insulate around electricity because they are so stable. This is also what make them so difficult to get rid of. They do not easily degrade so they hang around in the environment.

Right next to this site between 52nd and 54th is an oil installation over what was Kings County Works Manufactured Gas Plant.

Bush Terminal, Sunset Park

Nina and I photographed at the Bush Terminal in Sunset Park on Saturday. Manufactured goods used to move around the yards by rail to the piers and then out across the world.

Now things are pretty quiet. Quiet enough for raccoons.

As you come out to the waterfront, there is a monument to four firefighters that died on 9/11. In front of this statue is Upper New York Bay.

The old piers, rotting and contaminated, are now fenced off. In the 70s, hazardous waste was dumped there and now these old piers are in the State Superfund Program. This area is also in the Environmental Restoration Program and so appears twice on the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation Environmental Site Remediation Database.

Boats docked here in what must be relatively deep water.

A rail went all the way out to the end of the piers inside the now brownfield area. Another rail still operates on the 51st street side.

This area is now going to be developed as a park. At least so it was announced on July 22nd in the Sunset Park Waterfront Vision Plan as mentioned in Brownstoner.com. There were bulldozers there and it looked like work had started. Theoretically, there is $37 million is slated to build the Bush Terminal Piers Park, which will add 22 acres of open space for recreation. however, what happened to earlier money dedicated to remediating this brownfield? Whatever part of this plan that can improve the old rail system and reduce truck traffic is good. It is unclear to me what kind of remediation is planned. Digging up the soil a few feet and trucking it to Pennsylvania?

Greenpoint

Last Wednesday, July 22, I met Nina at the Nassau Avenue G train station. We started off down Nassau and were lured by the bright shine of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant to turn down Monitor Street. Looking an amazing aerial photo from 1954 of the area I found on the Newtown Creek Alliance website, Monitor Street would have run right through Mobil’s Oil Refinery. So why isn’t this defined as brownfield?

We walked down Greenpoint Avenue and saw the Water Pollution Control Plant construction and some of the recycling activity. Paper. Metal. Then we walked back and over the JJ Byrne Bridge. The images can’t convey how deafening the truck traffic is.

Petroleum still has a visible presence.

As does just the old waterfront.

Then we walked back down Kingsland past the ExxonMobil “Greenpoint Remediation Project.” This I guess is the center of the huge spill in Greenpoint. From the bridge, the site looks completely innocuous.

315 Kingsland Avenue is the address of the former Spic and Span Cleaners and Dryers which is in the State Superfund program. TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE). The site is part of the Meeker Avenue plume.

East New York

On Sunday, I went to 5 brownfield sites in East New York. I asked Maurice Freeman, a former City Tech student and East New York resident to come with me. We started at the Belmont Holder site, 290 Belmont which is still an active Con Ed site. This site is not on the state remediation list which makes it just like the Plymouth Street Holder site in Dumbo. The building is well maintained and relatively new and on this beautiful Sunday, it was sealed up as tight as a drum. For some unknown reason, there is a school crossing sign painted in the street.

I don’t know why coal gas would have been stored here.

There were no nearby manufactured gas plants of which I am aware. There is a railroad a few blocks away however. Maybe that made it easy to transport the gas. It is possible that the the gas was used by industries in the area. We walked over toward the railroad. We saw mounds of metal and unsorted recycling on the other side. Must be Gershow Recycling at 1885 Pitkin. Just like the metal recycling places along the Gowanus, the metal is piled high these days. A sign of the recession.

Next, we took the 20 bus to Loring Avenue and Eldert Lane. When we got off, we were both surprised by how nice the new developments there were. The Spring Creek site at Emerald is a remediated site with housing that was theoretically built in 1990. The paint looked very fresh and the townhouses were in really good shape. From the info on the NYSDEC web site, the area had been used as a dump. It was cleaned up before the housing was built. On this particular block, drums of more noxious stuff were observed so this block made it onto the state’s superfund list. This seems so arbitrary. Kids were playing on a paved parking lot between the houses. I thought maybe that’s best. Some of these kids did ask us what we were doing. I really didn’t know what to say. Who wants to hear,”I am photographing your home because it was built on a toxic dump.” Maurice had a great answer: the catch-all “school project.”

The next site was the former Majestic Garment Cleaners at 740 Pine, now an empty lot with plywood around the perimeter.

The google map shows a building at this site so it was probably razed fairly recently, meaning in the last few years. The site is contaminated with TETRACHLOROETHYLENE (PCE) from the dry cleaning business. This sounds fairly nasty and hard to clean up. On the outside, there is a sign that says Danrich Family Homes.

Then we walked down Fountain.

We turned on Flatlands. The side towards Jamaica Bay seems to be undeveloped land, the other side various kinds of industrial yards. Further up, there is a sports facility in which there was an ongoing soccer game. We walked towards the site which is called S & S X-Ray Products but is actually a Stop & Stor. There was a rabbit on the lawn.

I asked him to move so I could photograph him with the logo.

This was another example of how because the brownfield sites are often not well populated, nature moves right in. We had just walked by two long blocks of unused land, here was a rabbit.

Around the corner, it was back to warehouses. A woman in a short yellow dress was unceremoniously let out of a car. Unlike rabbit, this was the of kind of thing, I suppose I expect on deserted streets.

This site was used by Art-Lloyd Metal Products and was polluted during the manufacture of various metal goods. It has been remediated but you still can’t dig in the ground here or use the groudwater. Self-storage seems like a pretty decent solution for the site.

Back on the 20 Bus to the last site on Atlantic Avenue, the Union Station Holder, between Ashford Street and Liberty.

This site has been used as a parking lot by Con Ed since 1965 according to NYSDEC. There is a lovely old building on the corner of Cleveland that at least corresponds to where a building stood in the 1921 map.

The shape of the back of the building was slightly different though. On Cleveland on the sidewalk, we saw this pile of crab shells. A block or two away is a store live crabs are sold. I imagined someone eating the crabs on this block in their car.

Anyway the holders were on this side of the block where the parking lot is now on the other side of this wall. No real testing has been done yet of this site. Across the street is a schoolyard.

388 Bridge Street

On Wednesday, July 15th, I went by 388 Bridge Street in downtown Brooklyn. This site is in the Brownfield Cleanup Program and its application is under review. No information is available. It is basically a site ready for construction. This photo looks from Lawrence Street through to Bridge Street.

The site disrupts the pedestrian traffic with concrete barriers on the Bridge Street side.

Inside the site all is quiet for now. I assume as they resolve the toxicity issue. or maybe the developer is just broke. The signs around the site were not informative.

Bridge Street has a a small town feel. I could imagine the old Brooklyn as I stood there.

The historical use of this site might provide some insight. but still it was a bit puzzling as to why this site and not others that have historic uses that made them so polluted.

Williamsburg/Greenpoint

I started this morning under the BQE. Between Metropolitan and Union Avenues along Meeker is a State Superfund site. The NYSDEC website states that debris from the Ansbacher Color & Dye Factory, which was at North 7th and Union, was used as fill under the roadway. I haven’t been able yet to find the footprint of this factory though I looked last week at the old maps at the Brooklyn Historical Society but I did learn that Paris Green, copper(II)-acetoarsenite, was made there on the Brooklyn page of Colorantshistory.org.
Looking out from under the BQE towards where I guess the factory would have been.

Under the BQE between Metropolitan and Union.

The next site, 291, 285 Metropolitan is under review for the Brownfield Cleanup Program. It appears to be an ordinary auto repair. This brings up the very important issue of what sites become designated brownfield sites. There are manufactured gas plants in Brooklyn that are not on the list. So why this auto repair?

Next, I walked over to the Williamsburg Works site. The remedial investigation is visible. On the north portion of the block, something was set up to take a deep underground sample. Men were working a hose down into the machine when I was there. There were new small piles of dirt in spots around the lot since I visited the site last month.

There is also a great view of Bayside Oil from 13th Street.

There was a gas holder on 13th street as well. There is now a pallet company there now.

Then I went up to West Street to try to find a site that theoretically has been remediated. I could not find the site right away. 101-105 West Street is supposed to be between Kent and Java on the West side of the street. According to the NYSDEC database, it is a construction material storage yard but from what I observed today there are two buildings on this block. It actually must be between Kent and Greenpoint Avenue. it is now boarded off with plywood.

Spring Creek

On Friday, I went out to view what I could of the Pennsylvania Avenue and Fountain Avenue landfill sites. All I an say is how I totally underestimated the scale of the sites. They are huge and quite high. The Pennsylvania Avenue site rises to 80 feet. The Fountain Avenue site higher.

The whole site is fenced. I was discouraged about getting a good view as I walked along. This is from the other side of Fresh Creek.There is one spot where one can get down to the water and get a clear shot with no fences.

I saw this guy down there.

I walked along the bike/pedestrian path that runs between the landfill and the belt parkway.

On the other side of Hendrix Creek is the Fountain Avenue Landfill which is even larger than the Pennsylvania Avenue one. And harder to get a clear view of least at this end. I was running out of time and tried to see what I could through the fence.

There are cement barriers along the fence here. Supposedly dirt bike riders kept breaking in.

This is shot from the Pennsylvania Avenue Side of Hendrix Creek.

Gowanus-July 5th

My friend Nina was back from Sweden and came with me to take pictures on this beautiful evening. We started on the Hamilton Avenue Bridge.

My real goal was the PathMark below that can be seen from the bridge. The Metropolitan Works manufactured gas plant site was here long before the grocery store. But being on the bridge was too distant to get a good shot other than maybe this one with the razor wire. At some point, I need to get right down in the parking lot.

I love this shot and I can’t say why. Maybe just an attraction to bright shiny objects.

Turning the corner, I realized that one can see the Williamsburg Savings Bank building between Bayside Oil and the 9th Street Bridge.

I love the way the light hits the BQE in the evening. Nina at work really accentuates the enormity of the roadway structure.

We walked up to the Citizens mgp site.

Looking through the fence, the light was lovely hitting the cement factory and the buildings on the other side of the Gowanus.

I loved how the light was hitting both the razor wire and the window detail on the Gowanus Village building. I shot this from a number of angles including from in the middle of the street and none of them capture how lovely this looked in person.

Lastly, we went into the whole foods site. I wanted to retake a shot with the snake graffiti on one side and the building impression on the Brooklyn Improvement headquarters in the background. What a disappointment that the plant had grown so much as to block the view!

Then I discovered the other side which I like too maybe even like better.