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.
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.
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.
April 26th-Gowanus and Red Hook
Early on Sunday morning, I found a parking lot on 6th Street open from which one gets a good view of the Whole Foods site.
Then I walked around to 2nd ave. This view is looking towards Ferrarra Brothers on the other side of the canal.
This sumac is starting to grow at the end of of Huntington Street at the edge of the canal.
The site called Gowanus Village is in the background. Its primary contaminant is PCBs as it was the Nassau Electric Railroad Powerhouse.
In the afternoon, I went with Nina to Red Hook. It was midday and hot. I was doubtful I would get anything shooting in the direct light but we went into the undeveloped lot right next to Ikea, accessible from Columbia Street, which I assume was also part of the U. S. Dredging Shipyards. In the far corner of the lot was a makeshift shelter surrounded by shopping carts. My guess is that someone lives there. This would be his or her view.
The site has some small indications of its former use.
April 18th-Gowanus
I got up early and went down to the 3rd Street Bridge in time to see the first sun light.
I had wanted to go into the Whole Foods site as well. As I was walking down the block, I saw someone slip into the site. I felt too nervous to follow him in. I have seen a number of people go into the site but I have no idea where they go in the site as I have never seen anyone on the site either from the 3rd Street Bridge or from the bridge on 3rd Avenue. I assume but don’t know that these are homeless people using the site for shelter. I shot this from the street.
April 17th-Gowanus
I went to my favorite spot on the Gowanus behind the Lowe’s parking lot, looking out at Benson Scrap Metal. In the shallow inlet there, an egret was fishing. According to the New York Sate Department of Environmental Conservation Remediation Database,this spot is right next to where the Metropolitan Gas works operated from the late 1800s until the 1930s. While NYSDEC also claims that no tar is escaping from this site into the canal, I felt very queasy watching this bird feed. Yet maybe it is a good sign that some fish must be able to live in the water.
The Callery Pear trees were in bloom. Originally from China, these trees were bred to be planted in cities. I assume that these were planted by Lowe’s. Behind them work went on at Benson Scrap Metal as it does 7 days a week.
As I was leaving,the Hamilton Avenue Bridge was raised for an incoming boat.It was the first time I had seen any of the drawbridges on the Gowanus in operation.
Brownfield-Fulton Gas Works site-October 10th
I walked by the corner of Degraw and Nevins on which is now a public park. These two men were playing handball. I wondered if they knew that the site was a brownfield.
Brownfield-October 10th
This site, 430 Carroll Street, is a quandary. Supposedly there is a brownfield on this actively used site. There is a parking lot and some kind of business. I asked a postal worker what she knew. Nothing was the answer. She was feeling some sympathy for me because as I took this shot this a dog jumped out at me. There was a fence between me and the dog but I was visibly startled. the postal worker told me that this happened to her all the time.
