Can Gowanus Survive Its Renaissance?
Brooklyn’s famously filthy canal is getting cleaned up. A building boom is coming. And not everyone is happy.
By ANDY NEWMAN
Stroller traffic on Carroll Street. Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
“Welcome to Venice Jerko.” The greeting is painted in three-foot-high letters on a brick wall along Brooklyn’s legendarily polluted Gowanus Canal, right across from the canal’s first luxury high-rise and its new waterfront promenade.
One recent sunny Sunday, a party of German seminary students and a pair of hotel publicists gathered for a canoe tour. The seminarians had read about the canal in a German travel guide that promised “a romantic sunset on the water.” The publicists were scouting to see if the boutique hotel, opening a few blocks away, might want to include guided canoe trips.
But as much as the canal zone has been remade already, the next few years promise, or threaten, a different magnitude of change altogether.