{"id":7408,"date":"2016-04-20T00:19:14","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T07:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7408"},"modified":"2016-04-14T10:25:11","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T17:25:11","slug":"black-mayo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/04\/20\/black-mayo\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Mayo"},"content":{"rendered":"

from NAUTILUS<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In the \u201cBlack Mayonnaise\u201d of Brooklyn\u2019s Gowanus Canal, Alien Life Is Being Born<\/h1>\n

POSTED BY TYLER J. KELLEY<\/p>\n

\"\"Illustration by Simon Fraser\/Eugene Lehnert<\/em><\/p>\n

On a late fall morning, Joseph Alexiou fastened his life jacket and stepped into an eight-foot fiberglass boat floating on the Gowanus Canal. A licensed New York City tour guide, and an amateur historian, Alexiou was preparing to take a passenger on an unsanctioned tour of the waterway he\u2019d spent three years researching for his book,\u00a0Gowanus: Brooklyn\u2019s Curious Canal<\/i>. Alexiou, 32, confessed that when boating on the canal, he felt slightly afraid for his life.<\/p>\n

The rowboat pulled away from the rubble at the foot of Second Avenue, beside the new Brooklyn parole check-in office and across from Whole Foods Market. The water was milky green, with an almost oily thickness, and gangs of loose lumber blew crosswise in the wind. Alexiou took a picture of graffiti that said \u201cKeep Gowanus dirty.\u201d Then he began to rattle off, with apparent encyclopedic accuracy, the history of every building in sight.<\/p>\n

In the 1800s, Brooklyn\u2019s manufactured gas industry, which turned coal into gas (illuminating the city before electricity), had facilities along the Gowanus and became a major culprit in the colossal pollution of the 1.8-mile long canal. What\u2019s more, the canal has always been a wetland, alternately draining and flooding the surrounding area. During heavy rain, untreated sewage pours into it from several points, the result of New York\u2019s combined sewer and storm drain system and the canal\u2019s low elevation. \u201cOnly the monumental, astronomically expensive effort of engineering could change this fact of geography, and so during the greatest rainstorms, swelling tidewaters fill the main and lateral sewer pipes,\u201d Alexiou wrote in\u00a0Gowanus<\/i>. \u201cOnce these are full, the waters fill area basements\u2014a fact of nineteenth-century life that continues today.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2010, the canal was declared a Superfund site, authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies, to clean it up. More than $500 million has been requested to combat 150 years of pollution. If you fell in, Alexiou said, you\u2019d be treading in human feces and shower water. If you touched bottom, he added, you\u2019d be stepping in \u201ccoal tar, PAH, PCBs, and heavy metals like cadmium, lead, and mercury\u2014they call it black mayonnaise.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NAUTILUS<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from NAUTILUS In the \u201cBlack Mayonnaise\u201d of Brooklyn\u2019s Gowanus Canal, Alien Life Is Being Born POSTED BY TYLER J. KELLEY Illustration by Simon Fraser\/Eugene Lehnert On a late fall morning, Joseph Alexiou fastened his life jacket and stepped into an eight-foot fiberglass boat floating on the Gowanus Canal. A licensed New York City tour guide, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}