Column: The Gowanus Shitshow, by George Fiala

This is a Red Hook-based paper, but since its founding in 2010 I’ve written about the goings-on in Gowanus. It’s an area I have a long history with. But it’s also showing Red Hook a vision of its possible future.

Back in the 1980s, a friend bought a building on Fifth Avenue near the Old Stone House. At the time, I was living in Boerum Hill without a car. One night, I decided to walk over to pay a visit. My biggest memory is the tremendous fear I felt crossing Fourth Avenue. It wasn’t the traffic. I had a distinct sense that muggers (or worse) lurked in the darkness.

Getting there meant passing through Gowanus. I don’t remember knowing much about it. In my mind, you went from Boerum Hill to Park Slope. The in-between place was where blue-collar people worked during the day.

I used to talk with Buddy Scotto, the great Carroll Gardens community leader, about Gowanus. It’s an area he knew well. Buddy’s greatest claim to fame is likely getting rid of the stench from the Gowanus Canal that would permeate Carroll Gardens whenever the wind shifted.

The smell — which we’ll come back to again shortly — came from still canal waters that collected raw sewage whenever it rained. The reason was the pump that cycled water through the 12-foot-wide Gowanus Flushing Tunnel, which dates back to 1911, broke down in the ‘60s.

Buddy got those waters moving again by traveling to Washington D.C. and securing $453 million from then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to rebuild the Gowanus Flushing Tunnel. The sewage (whatever didn’t sink to the bottom of the canal) flowed out to sea once more, preventing putrid odors and worse.

Gowanus was never far from Buddy’s mind. He was active in the community into his 90s, and a lot of people though he had lost his faculties since all he talked about was the bright future of Gowanus. As long as the right things were done.

It’s almost 50 years since Buddy got the flushing tunnel fixed, and others have caught up with his vision. Or, at least, a version of it. After extracting as much profit as possible from downtown Brooklyn, real estate interests are now feasting on Gowanus.

Developers think far into the future — which is why I’m scared to lose Red Hook to skyscrapers someday — and Gowanus has been in their sights for at least 25 years. They were ready to go in 2008, but the Superfund designation, which the Bloomberg administration fought hard against, delayed things.

Brad Lander, watching all of this from his perches at the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Institute while considering his political future, became Gowanus’ councilman in 2008, spending the next 12 years as its representative in city government. It gave him the most important role in determining the future of Gowanus. Zoned as an industrial area with small pockets of residential blocks meant it couldn’t become a wealthy high-rise area to compete with the bordering, increasingly ritzy communities of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope.

This situation couldn’t last. The Superfund set things back a bit, but developers never gave up. They knew their time was coming.

There had been failed attempts at rezoning Gowanus in the past, but by 2012 wheels were in motion — and wild real estate speculation began. Developers paid millions for complete blocks, ensuring they could pull the trigger on erecting huge skyscrapers as soon as a rezoning became law.

Remember, rezoning mostly benefits landowners. With the stroke of a pen, land worth one price is magically worth 10 times as much because of massive increases in allowable building sizes. At the beginning of the Gowanus rezoning discussions, developers were looking for 12-story building. By the end, it became 30 stories.

Thanks to a tradition known as “member deference,” a district’s council representative has a kind of final say — yay or nay — over something like rezoning. The complete council votes for it, but custom is to follow the will of the local member. That gave Lander a kind of final say over the future of Gowanus. What he said would go.

And yet in 2013, together with former employer Pratt, Lander created a community process called Bridging Gowanus. I went to the first meeting at PS 32. Over and over Lander said that since a rezoning was inevitable, this was a way to ensure the “community got something.”

It was only inevitable because he called the shots.

The beneficiaries of the rezoning and of Bridging Gowanus were developers who are as we speak rapidly transforming the community, which you can see plainly as the skyline changes — and Brad Lander, who has gone on to become New York City Comptroller, which he hopes is a stepping stone to higher office.

Money and power won, and Gowanus is now a giant construction project.

The losers, of course, are long-term Gowanus residents, who are watching the charm that brought them there in the first place vanish. Future residents, too, are likely to suffer. There are many who warn of building so much and so densely in an environmentally-compromised area located in a flood zone with compromised sewers.

Which brings things back to the canal.

The smell is back!
Last month brought lots of hot weather and some rainstorms, and suddenly neighborhood blogs were full of complaints about thousands of tiny dead fish in the Canal along with a stench that was reminiscent of the old days.

At a recent meeting of Gowanus CAG, the community group associated with the Superfund project, it was stated that this stinky situation was due to very low oxygen levels in the water.

Christos Tsiamis, the one person at the EPA who really cared about all this, was recently (and suddenly) retired. His replacements had no solutions. But Marlene Donnelly, a longtime activist and CAG member, told us with some credibility that concrete runoff from the construction by the canal has compromised all the hard work Tsiamis had done to bring us a clean canal, supportive of birds and fish.

It might be boom times in Gowanus for developers and their political allies. But for residents — in the community and surrounding neighborhoods — I’m sure worse is yet to come.