Gowanus Lost and Found: New Exhibit Documents a Changing Neighborhood by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Progress sounds like a lot of things. The chugging of bulldozers excavating the earth. A ladle scraping new brownstone onto a rebuilt stoop. Construction guys a hundred feet up shouting commands to guide a steel girder into place. A crew of laborers laughing as they haul old dirt and timber from a gut renovation.

In Gowanus, it’s EPA boats puttering along the polluted canal, surveying the superfund site. Piles for avant-garde living driven into the fetid mud on the banks of the polluted waterway. The metal machine music of the Citizens Gas Works cleanup, preparation for even more ambitious redevelopment. Developers and politicians shouting about progress. Gowanus long-haulers shouting to be heard.

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Change is rarely clean, especially in a city where nothing can stand in the way of building — not neighborhood pushback, not a pandemic. In Gowanus the process has been particularly messy, with a controversial rezoning certification anticipated for January 2021 amplifying years of acrimony, allegations, and recriminations between elected representatives and residents.

Against that cacophony of clean up and construction, politics and community, husband-and-wife filmmakers Jamie Courville and Chris Reynolds have created oases to consider what has changed, what has been lost and gained, and where Gowanus is headed. “Gowanus Reflection,” a series of stills on view through November 11 and installed on utility poles and lampposts, contrasts how 10 Gowanus locations look today with how they existed in the recent past. At the end of Bond Street on 4th Street, a foreground image of the same dead end, from 2014, shows the Kentile Floors sign, now gone, looming over the elevated subway tracks. At the corner of Union and Nevins, a shot from 2013 of an open garage full of tools and equipment is posted across the street from the space’s current occupant: Ample Hills Creamery.

The images can seem mundane at first glance, sitting alongside the in-your-face street art and posters that pepper the area around the canal. But they’re far more provocative than some marker drawing on a Priority Mail sticker. This is evidence — of a neighborhood losing its memory along with familiar buildings — and the filmmakers have lots of it. The stills are pulled from the hundreds of hours of footage Courville and Reynolds have shot for their in-progress documentary, Gowanus Current. It’s a film they’ve worked on for seven years, which grew out of their desire to “remember what things look like,” Courville said.

“When we first moved here, it looked like a lot of empty warehouses,” Reynolds says. “Working on this film I’ve learned that these are all functional businesses employing people and making stuff, and that when these manufacturing areas go away we’re not creating new ones. Once we lose this, it’s gone. I did not have an appreciation for what a big deal that was.”

Courville and Reynolds met on a film set in Dallas in 2000, and a year later decamped for Brooklyn. In 2009, they moved from Sunset Park to Douglass Street in Gowanus and quickly noticed blips of gentrification. (Four years ago, they were priced out and moved to Clinton Street.) But they picked up cameras as they watched the Fairfield Inn on 3rd Avenue rise on the site of… what? They couldn’t recall what was there before. They started taking pictures of their community and originally thought to combine their skills — Courville makes audio portraits, Reynolds is a cinematographer — to create a multimedia tapestry documenting aspects of Gowanus. “And that just turned into so much more,” Courville said.

That “more” is a film they describe as a “hybrid observational documentary/tone poem,” which has evolved with the forces impacting Gowanus, from the EPA clean up to the battles over redevelopment to the coronavirus. Part of the reason the film hasn’t been completed is Courville and Reynolds’s plans for an ending kept changing. First it would conclude when the dredging of the canal stopped. Then it was when 365 Bond was completed. Eventually they settled on the results of the current rezoning process, which is scheduled to last seven months. “And if it’s not settled, then we just have to stop because we can’t do this forever,” Courville said.

“Whatever the final rezoning decision is, that’s going to be the end of the chapter that we’re here to tell,” Reynolds added. “If the rezoning somehow fails, which seems unlikely right now, but if it does then that’s a great ending. If it goes through, then the era that we’ve been here for comes to an end and a new era starts.”

The filmmakers always planned to excavate stills from their footage and exhibit them. They would have been installed in a gallery, but the pandemic upended those plans. “I think they’re much better out here,” Reynolds said. “It sort of lends itself to this setting,” Courville added. “It’s a happy accident.”

Affixing an image to a pole on 5th Street — looking down the street, a view strikingly unchanged but for the fossils of heavy industry torn down for housing and Whole Foods — Courville and Reynolds had to raise their voices to talk over the beeps, blares, and booms coming from the Citizens Gas Works site. After struggling with a piece of the frame popping off and reorienting zip ties, they get the still in place and stand back to ensure it stays put and is on a good sight line.

A couple minutes later, as they discuss the work, two women walk by and stop at the installation. One of the viewers, Lisa, said she had been in the neighborhood three years. But it took little prompting for her to speak with Courville and Reynolds about the street, what’s gone and what remains, and the broader redevelopment reshaping Gowanus. She brought up Jane Jacobs and the fight to save the West Village. She mentioned the rezoning plan and how it will push out artists and manufacturing for even more luxury high rises. She expressed how the changes have impacted her, despite being a relative newcomer. “My car mechanic is getting pushed out of 3rd Avenue,” Lisa exclaimed. “Where am I going to get my car fixed?”

When these first viewers walk away, Courville and Reynolds are energized. “It’s better than indifference,” Reynolds said. (Another pedestrian walked by the image a few minutes later, without stopping. Everyone’s a critic.) But more than experiencing first-hand someone engaging with their work, Lisa’s response to it is the kind of interaction — with the neighborhood, with neighbors, with the past, present, and future — that Courville and Reynolds hope their installation encourages across Gowanus.

“The images we’ve chosen, we tried to make them more about the place,” Reynolds said. “There’s not a lot of people in the shots. It’s about the landscape and how it’s changing.”

“I don’t think people see downstream from where they come from, especially financially,” Courville added. “So I’m hoping that people will look at these and maybe think about their place in place on a wider scale than maybe they did before.”

“It’s kind of a fun game, looking at the picture and the place to see what’s different between them,” Reynolds said. “But it does, hopefully, lead to discussions.”

Gowanus Reflection will be on view throughout Gowanus through November 11. A map of the photos can be found online at gowanuscurrent.com/gowanus-reflection.