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.
Gowanus-July 4th
On July 4th, I got up and went out at sunrise to the Douglass-Degraw pool. It was built right over the spot where the Fulton Works manufactured gas plant operated. The light was lovely. When I got to the pool, the light wasn’t over the trees yet. I began to shoot.
Suddenly, I hear a very loud yawning sound like someone waking up in a cartoon and I see two arms and the top of someone’s head inside the locked compound. A young man bound over one of the internal fences and proceeded to wash his face in the pool. I am no longer feeling comfortable. It is a holiday about 6am and there is no one around anywhere. I decide to leave. I just am not interested in confrontation. I think if I circle around the block maybe he will have left for breakfast and the sun will have come up over the trees. I stop on the Carroll Street bridge and see this cormorant.
As I walk around on 3rd Avenue, I remember, its the 4th of July!
When I turned the corner of Degraw Street, there were three young men sitting/standing around one of the benches at the top of the park. I could think of only one reason that they would be there so early. With no one else around, I left. I will come back on a week day when people are at work.
Having had two days in a row situations where the conditions of urban poverty made me feel too uncomfortable to shoot, I have started to think very seriously about how much the brownfield issue is an environmental issue and how much a class issue.
East Williamsburg/Bushwick
This morning I started on Maspeth Avenue. Despite its contamination, it too was part of the real estate boom. It has its share of empty condos.
The former Equity works site, now the site of a recycling facility, was already busy at 6:30 am. Trucks were lined up on Maspeth Avenue waiting to dump their loads inside. This site has not yet been tested but it has the potential to be truly toxic.
As I walked by Rewe Street, I shot this. It is one of the most inhospitable parts of the area.
The next site that I visited became toxic because it was a dry cleaning facility, Popular Hand Laundry, 88 Ingraham Street. While the area is industrial with a cement factory on the block to the west, the presence of the art community is also visible. The current building occupant is Astor Row, an art consulting business.
I had also planned to go to 121 Ingraham Street, which had been an illegal dry cleaning facility. I knew that there was a men’s shelter on Johnson street because one day when I was shooting in the neighborhood, a man came up to me and asked for directions. I had a map and was able to help him. When I looked down the block, there were 20 or 30 men in red and blue jump suits and quite a number of vans. My guess was that they were participating in some sort of program where they were being taken from the shelter to parks to clean for the day. Due to the crowd and all the activity, I wasn’t able to find the site.
The McKibben Street site, a former chemical works, is right up the street. It has gotten considerably overgrown since I was last here in March. As far as I can tell from looking at those photos, this is some new stuff that has been dumped.
A bunch of stumps had also been dumped on the street. It was hard to tell where they were from.
It is just sad here.
