Gravesend
There are two sites on Shore Parkway on the state’s remediation list. One is considered remediated. It now appears to be Mercedes Benz dealership. The other is a petroleum bulk storage owned by Bayside Oil, 1776 Shore Parkway. A fortuitous number.
I like how the traffic arrow works here suggesting that things are flowing out of the site. In fact there is a petroleum plume on the southwest side of the storage tank.The tank is under the man-made hill to the right of the area in this second photo.
Then I walked over to Calvert Vaux Park. It was hot and although the map promised Gravesend Bay, it was not to be seen when I entered the park.
In one direction, you can see the tip of Coney island, in the other the Verranzano.
Sunset Park
I set out to Sunset Park today in hopes of getting something of the piers behind the Bush Terminal. There is a pool store that has an entrance at 50th and 1st. I had the vague plan that on Saturday afternoon it would look like I was going to the Pool store but I could walk around behind the building to Marginal Street and photograph the brownfield area. No such luck. Lots of security personnel as well as fences.
I was getting ready to leave, feeling discouraged, when I looked down 51st street and a very clear view of the water drew me down the street. At the actual waterfront I turned the corner and there through a chain link fence were the piers I was hoping to photograph. As I walked up to the fence to my left was a large pier that belongs to the Sanitation Department. There was a man on it. I asked him if he would mind if I took a few photos. He said ok, and I walked through the fence and now had a clear view o the brownfield area. We chatted and he walked me down the pier. The view of New York harbor was awesome and I could see the brownfield area. He told me there had been a seal in the area recently.
The end of the pier itself is collapsing.
Dumbo
I went to find the site of the Front Street Station, a brownfield site, and another site, the Plymouth Street Holder that despite being an historic gas holder site is not designated as a brownfield.
There appears to be a warehouse directly on the spot where the gas holder stood on Front street.
A second holder was on the other side of the block that now fronts on the Farragut Houses. On the corner of Front Street and Gold is a Tibetan Buddhist Temple. I talked to the monk there. He told me he had been there for 20 years.
Across the street is a brand new condo apparently with people now living in it.
Down Gold Street is the site of another historic gas holder site, Plymouth Street Station. This block is partially occupied by Con Ed and partly residential. The foot print more or less matches exactly the footprint in 1898.
Across the street is the Hudson Avenue Generating Station.
June 17th-Williamsburg
I started this am at the former Nassau Works site which is now a sanitation department facility. I had taken a shot of this sand pile the last time I was there that I liked but the focus was off. This time the light wasn’t on the sand. I also hadn’t noticed the Municipal Building in the background before.
A lot of the facility is used for parking.
Next I went to the Fyn Paint and Lacquer Co site at 230 Kent. I think this is the building. the site has high levels of both VOCs and NAPL. The ground water is contaminated and flows towards the East River.
Then I went to the site of the former Williamsburg Works. The last time I walked by this site over a year ago, it was being used as a parking lot for Sanitation Department vehicles. Today it was empty. Two women were inside the fence working at the back of a car. When I talked to them they gave me a fact sheet from the NYSDEC about the ongoing Remedial Investigation. This site was a MGP from 1850 until the 1930s. There is a large amount of tar in the soil.
Immediately adjacent is Bayside Oil, another site targeted for remediation.
June 10th-Kings Plaza and Marine Park
According to the NYSDEC, on the plot to the east of Kings Plaza, Presto Plastics and a Standard Motor Oil Terminal both had facilities. Plus the entire site is covered with “historic landfill” contaminated with PAHs or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The NYSDEC remediation database states that the tanks and other equipment associated with the petroleum bulk storage have been excavated and those areas filled with clean soil. Now a Lowe’s is being built on that site.
A “soil vapor barrier and a sub slab soil vapor depressurization system” are required for the site by the NYSDEC. Looking at the site from Avenue U, I wondered if this was the soil vapor barrier.
To take a break from toxicity, Nina and I then headed to the salt marsh in Marine Park. About 10 blocks from Kings Plaza, it is beautiful and full of life.
We saw these Black-Crowned Night Herons as well as an egret.
There were hundreds of crabs as well has horseshoe crabs. It gave me some idea of what the rest of Brooklyn’s waterfront might have looked like esp the Gowanus area before industrialization.
June 7th-East Williamsburg
Nina and I met on Grand Street as in grand piano. Not Graham Avenue. I had wanted to go to the McKibben Street site. I had been there once in the winter and wanted to shoot it again before it got too overgrown. But it seemed too early. I wanted the lovely evening light. So we walked down Grand Street to the Metropolitan Bridge. Before we got there, right in front of Pumps Exotic Dancing, we saw a man lying half on the sidewalk, half in the street. As we got closer, it was apparent that he was breathing. It didn’t seem quite right just to keep walking. Nina called 911. We were asked to wait at the site until the police arrived. I felt very uncomfortable. I was sure that the last thing this man would want would be for the police to come and wake him up but what if he rolled more fully into Grand Street and got run over by a car? The cops came relatively quickly. They woke him up. He jumped up surprisingly alert. He accused Nina and myself of stepping back when he moved. He accused us of being afraid of him and therefore racist. We left the scene to go shoot. Neither of us really had the heart for it. I had not taken this man’s photo as he was lying abjectly in the street. While I am depressed by the degradation of much of Brooklyn’s land, I can still photograph it. Human misery leaves me paralyzed. Yet there is a clear relationship between the toxic areas of Brooklyn and poverty. Homeless people live on a number of the brownfield sites. There are always men with carts of bottles up by the end of Douglass Street at the Gownanus. Information in this case does not provide liberation as it doesn’t increase these people’s ability to make choices.
The weather had clouded over. We then walked to the Grand Street Bridge. The smell was nauseating. We saw quite a few birds including a cormorant and barn swallows yet it wasn’t heartening. We turned and went back up Metropolitan.
The rest of the evening was a bust. The streets were deserted and felt monotonous. We never got to the McKibben Street site. The sky got darker and darker. It was time to go home. The moral of the story is to go to the site you want to photograph first as a bird in the hand is worth more that the promise of evening light.
June 2nd-Coney Island
There are two former Manufactured Gas Plant sites in Coney Island. On the first one we visited, Dangman Park MGP, a drive-in shopping mall and parking lot was built in 1966. It has a DII, a RadioShack, a medical supply business, a Chinese restaurant, a dry cleaner, a tanning salon and a post office among other things. I was discouraged and Nina pushed me to keep trying. I was trying to get some dead shrubbery with the perspective of the parking lines when I realized there was a liquor store in front of me. There is something poignant about this that I like.
Next, we went off to see what we could see of the Coney Island MGP site. This site in the process of remediation. I was surprised by how manicured it is. Someone must mow the grass. This is not an interesting photo but it gives a sense of the site. The creek is in front and the Belt Parkway behind.
It was low tide and the creek looked pretty foul but there were a variety of birds. We saw ducks and killdeer as well as egrets.
Trying to walk the perimeter of the former MGP site we went through the open gates under the Belt Parkway and we were able to walk right up to the fence of the what is marked as the former Brooklyn Borough Gas Works. On the left as you walk under the Belt parkway, there is a huge train yard. On the right is a barren portion of the former MGP site. I shot these photos under the fence there before a security guard started yelling at us. We picked up our stuff and started walking towards Shell Road. He followed us at a distance carrying a stick until we got to the subway station. I would have liked to talk to him. What a job to sit in a trailer protecting a highly toxic site. The stick was probably for his own protection but I worried he might try to hit our cameras.
May 23rd-Gowanus
I met Nina at the Smith and 9th Street stop and then we walked over to the Lowe’s parking lot. The water in the canal was as bad as I have seen it.
Raw sewage was everywhere. We noticed a jellyfish trying to swim through this muck.
We then walked around the Public Place site. It is really quite close to the houses on 4th Street. It is hard to believe that the toxicity is confined to inside the fence. Though maybe it does just roll downhill towards the canal.
I took this shot of the whole foods site from the end of Bond Street. I love the building imprint from what that must have stood next to the former headquarters of the Brooklyn Improvement Company.
These were taken inside the site.
May 20th-Gowanus
On this beautiful evening, I walked around the Gowanus area. First, down 6th street where they were still working at the scrap metal yard on 6th Street.
Then I went to the Gowanus Canal landing off the end of 2nd Street. I wanted to take the same photo I had taken in the winter of looking through the razor wire on this side of the canal to the old Nassau Railroad Powerhouse on the other side. Now the view is filled with trees. It is more bucolic and the building behind is just a patch of red. There was an older man sitting on the dock smoking there when I shot this. We chatted. He was knowledgeable about the surrounding brownfields. He recounted falling into the canal once.
As I was leaving 2nd Street, the light as it hit this tree and fence was lovely.
View from the 3rd Street Bridge.
I was standing out side of the hole in the whole foods site fence trying to take some kind of a photo. I had seen someone go in earlier and I was nervous about being alone on the site with an unknown man. A young kid maybe 20 or so came by on his bike and said, “Why don’t you go in?” And leaving his bike outside, he went through the fence. I followed him. His interest was all the graffiti. The best light was leaving but I felt liberated and wondered what had made me so nervous.
May 10th-Maspeth Avenue and the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge
This whole project is about the ground.
There are three brownfield sites around the corner of Maspeth and Vandervort, 2 former MGP sites and an oil refinery. During the week, there is very heavy truck traffic. It is hard to believe that the toxic stuff Is all inside the fence.
People work here. On the ground. This is TNT Scrap Metal which is right between the former Equity Works site and BCF Oil Refining. TNT was formerly on the Frito Lay site on Morgan Avenue before moving here. Nina and I talked to a man outside this site who claimed to be security for the auto salvage up the block. He said he wasn’t worried about the contamination. The really bad site was the Greenpoint MGP across the street, safely fenced off.
According to the man we met, this is where the really bad stuff is. The clouds relented and the evening light fell across the site.
On the fence I noticed this snail. If I had seen it elsewhere, I would have been fascinated. Here I was repulsed, largely I think due to the power of suggestion about the extreme toxicity of the site and what this snail might have absorbed.
We then walked over to the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge which crosses the English Kills. This blooming Royal Paulownia grows right on the edge of the Creek.
