[CPEO-BIF] Developers See Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal as an Alluring New Waterfront.

[Lenny Siegel <Lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Developers See Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal as an Alluring New Waterfront. But for Years, It Stunk
The EPA has been working for 12 years on two huge underground tanks to keep sewage overflows from polluting the canal. The city’s DEP, which for years has done little to speed the process, announced late last month that it’s now ahead of schedule.


By Jordan Gass-Pooré
Inside Climate News
April 6, 2025

NEW YORK—I stared at my computer on another dreary December night as a tic-tac-toe board of residents from Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood appeared on my screen alongside various environmental officials. I’ve been attending these community meetings, either on Zoom or in person, for nearly three years and most of the squares were filled by someone I knew, someone I’ve interviewed before. 

There’s Peter Reich, who moved to Gowanus in 1983 after reading a listing in The Village Voice that promised a large air-conditioned artist’s loft. In those early years, Reich remembered the terrible odor from the nearby Gowanus Canal. 

Tonight’s meeting was all about odors in the neighborhood that have plagued residents for more than a year. The cause? A long-awaited project to build two underground tanks to help prevent sewage from overflowing into the Gowanus Canal when it rains. This will eventually help reduce the stench from the canal, but in order for that to happen, excavators at one tank site had to dig 200 feet into soil contaminated with coal tar, a hazardous byproduct of gas manufacturing, which happened in the neighborhood for nearly 100 years. 

For more than a century, the Gowanus Canal has been a symbol of industrial pollution. 

…

For the entire article, see
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06042025/brooklyn-gowanus-canal-sewage-pollution-waterfront-development/

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)




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