Sunset at Gowanus Bay in the Bay New York (1851) by Henry Gritten

I am looking forward to going the Working Harbor Committee’s Hidden Harbor Tour of Gowanus Bay.  It will be lead by Captain Margaret Flanagan, Maritime Operations, Waterfront Alliance & Joseph Alexiou, tour guide and author of “Gowanus Brooklyn’s Curious Canal”  and will include the Erie Basin, Red Hook and Sunset Park.  It should be a great tour. Click here for tickets.

There are many interesting things to check out in Gowanus Bay, but what I am especially looking forward to is passing the Gowanus Canal.  When I first came to the New York area to work for Moore McCormack Lines, their terminal was at 23rd St, Brooklyn on the Gowanus Canal.  I recall reading somewhere in a company history that the terminal location was near where Brooklyn born Emmet J. McCormack, one of the two founders of the line, liked to swim as a child.  The story is likely to be apocryphal as Gowanus Creek had been dredged into a canal and was heavily industrialized by the 1890s, when young Emmet would have chosen to take a dip.

The Gowanus Canal is not a place where anyone sane would wish to go swimming today. The 1.8 mile canal is one of the most polluted bodies of water in America. It is now a $500 million Superfund cleanup site with a target clean up date around 2022.  Of course, being New York, that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t tried taking a swim. On Earth Day in April of 2015, Christopher Swain, an environmental activist, spent about an hour swimming through toxic sludge and sewage in the Gowanus Canal as a “call for an accelerated cleanup of the Canal.”  Later in the year, Swain returned and swam the entire length of the canal.

We only hope that Mr. Swain did not drink any of the water from the canal. in 2013, Popular Science dedicated an article to the topic: What Would Happen If You Drank Water From The Gowanus Canal?  The article was subtitled, “The Story Of How One Of The Most Polluted Waterways In America Came To Be Located In One Of The Country’s Most Expensive Neighborhoods. Also: Dysentery, Cancer, And Arsenic Poisoning. ”  In the article, Dan Nosowitz writes:

“So, right off the bat, you’d have a massive problem with dysentery,” Ludgen Balan, founder of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy, told me. Dysentery, caused by an infection from hostile bacteria or amoebas, results in severe diarrhea, likely with some blood and mucus added as a bonus. That was the very first thing Balan told me, and the more I looked into the Gowanus Canal, an absurdly, laughably polluted waterway right smack in the middle of gentrified Brooklyn, the more I realized that dysentery is one of the least repulsive things about the Gowanus.

…The Gowanus is one of the most creatively and massively pathogenetic waterways on the planet. We know some things; we know that the quantity of fecal matter, usually measured in parts per million, can be measured in parts per hundred in the Gowanus. But the Gowanus isn’t any one thing; water taken from different parts of the canal, from different depths, will have totally different levels of contaminants, microbes, radioactive materials, or carcinogenic materials.

Of course there is a lot to see in Gowanus Bay besides the canal, including the new waterfront recycling facility with its wind-turbine, the slag ship MV Loujaine and the Big Grain Elevator among other landmarks of manufacturing, shipping, and commerce. That being said, I am looking forward to revisiting the Gowanus Canal with all its noxious charms.