Gowanus as a National Historic Landmark?
Grand Central Terminal. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Woolworth Building. The Gowanus Canal. Which of these does not belong? Yep, that’s right, it’s the Brooklyn Bridge. No, just kidding, it’s actually the Gowanus Canal, the only one that hasn’t been named a National Historic Landmark…yet. The Gowanus Canal Conservancy is currently spearheading a drive to get…
Grand Central Terminal. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Woolworth Building. The Gowanus Canal. Which of these does not belong? Yep, that’s right, it’s the Brooklyn Bridge. No, just kidding, it’s actually the Gowanus Canal, the only one that hasn’t been named a National Historic Landmark…yet. The Gowanus Canal Conservancy is currently spearheading a drive to get the canal named a national historic landmark district, a designation that could be a “useful tool” in terms of getting funding for the canal’s cleanup, according to Bob Zuckerman, the GCC’s executive director. “Right smack in the middle of brownstone Brooklyn, the canal has a history all its own,” says Zuckerman, noting that the transformation of the Gowanus from a series of creeks to its role in aiding industry make the waterway historically significant. Zuckerman says there’s precedent for a canal being designated a national historic landmark district: The Erie and Ohio Canal is one, for example. The proposed district will include the canal, the Gowanus pumping station and flushing tunnel, the Carroll Street Bridge (which is already a city landmark), as well as five buildings along the Gowanus. A Pratt student and former GCC intern is now preparing a report about the hoped-for landmark status, and Zuckerman says the conservancy will begin making moves to get the district recognized in the coming months.
The City is not good at these sorts of public projects. There never seems to be any money in the budget except to pay all the bureaucrats who are supposed to be doing something if there was any money to do it.
Whether this remains a man-made creek or is converted into some kind of park, it will need a lot of abatement and decontamination. I’m not optimistic that the government will, or even could, do anything here. They always get caught up in their own restrictions and procedures like a kitten in yarn. The government will do nothing. Developers need to come up with a plan and back the next mayor so that he/she will back the private initiative.
yuk how am suppose to buy fish from whole foods?
Was Love Canal landmarked?
Any body of water that has STDs floating in it is not going to generate a healthy environment for any type of life.
There is nothing natural about the Gowanus Canal, at least not in the last 175 years.
Turning it into parkland with water features will be very expensive and preserving it as a canal will be what? cheap?
if you fill it in where will all the turd from the stadium go?
I can see your point – to a point. This land is a natural tidal wetland. Ground water exists just a couple of feet below the surface. However, reclaiming it for parkland will be very expensive and will require cleanup (which needs to be paid for). To my earlier point about reality, New York City, State, and the Federal government are not going to spend the money to buy this privately owned land, fill in the canal, and build parks. We have a housing deficit of hundreds of thousands of units. Redevelopable land will be built on.
In a city so replete with waterfronts, much of which is wasted or ignored (example the huge windowless IKEA being built at water’s edge)it seems wrong-headed to obsess over the man-made industrial canal which has been ill-maintained and polluted for generations and which requires an electric underwater fan to prevent it from turning into a fetid
cesspool. A fan that unfortunately was not working for about fifty years, and now is not working again. Preservationists do not care about aesthetics any more than say, archaelogists. They care about ideology. The historic preservation movement practiced by the most elite today has lost touch with the grass roots and has become almost exclusively a Caucasian-academic clicque.
Preserving the Goawanus is absurd. Planners whould be figuring out ways to reclaim that land for parkland, which is much needed.
We no longer need an industrial canal, as a result the funds necessary to maintain it will always be scarce. We need a progressive thinker to take on this sacred cow and make something better for the betterment of the people of Brooklyn and not just for the archaeologists or preservationists.
Polemicist: Any measure that brings funds for cleanup of the canal and surrounding area is a good thing. It doesn’t matter if you think the canal is a blight on the Brooklyn landscape – it exists and needs to cleaned, not saved. There is a TON of historical value to the canal, from the development of America’s industrial infrastructure to, as you say, lessons on how NOT to build on tidal wetlands. Your “rearview mirror” look at the development of New York industry does not reflect well on your knowledge of history or today’s realities.
Tempest in a teapot, part 1,000 of 34,567