Celebrating Community
The Gowanus Landmarking Coalition wants to thwart the planned demolition of the S.W. Bowne Grain Storehouse, a circa-1886 brick industrial structure at 595 Smith Street. On the morning of March 13, the preservationists held a rally on the Hamilton Avenue Bridge over the Gowanus Canal. Last year, a fire damaged the Storehouse, which the Chetrit Group, a real estate development […]
Last Thursday I sat through almost three hours of a city process that will force permanent, sudden transformation on a neighborhood that has undergone only incremental change since the Dutch first showed up in Brooklyn. The very next night I sat through two hours of something quite similar, albeit on a smaller scale. The one constant in both cases was […]
The first Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group (CAG) meeting for the new calendar year was held on Jan. 22 without Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s presence due to the partial federal government shut-down – the longest shutdown in U.S. history, which had reached Day 32 by the meeting’s date. CAG member Brad Vogel facilitated the night’s agenda that featured the NYC Department […]
Gowanus by Design, a local non-profit urban design advocacy, made a presentation at Community Board 6’s Landmarks & Land Use committee meeting held on Jan. 24. Team leader David Briggs talked about some of the goals and impacts of NYC Department of City Planning (DCP)’s Gowanus Rezoning Framework. “What we’re trying to do is give the community a tool and […]
Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group (CAG) members received updates from government and city agencies at the general monthly meeting, held November 27. The biggest surprise involved a last minute request by the NYC DEP to substitute a giant tunnel, instead of the planned sewage retention tanks ordered by the EPA, to capture raw sewage that now is dumped into the […]
Gowanus residents and nearby neighbors were satisfied, overall, with the new schematic designs for the incoming CSO tank facility, which were unveiled at the Community Board 6 Parks/Recreation/Environmental Protection Committee meeting on October 17. This follows community suggestions made at the first North Gowanus Visioning session, hosted by Council Member Stephen Levin’s office, on July 25. The Department of Environmental […]
Are there treasures untold lying beneath the oily surface of the Gowanus canal? An organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of historical artifacts, Archeology and Historic Resource Services (AHRS), have attempted to answer this question. In a recent report they explored the identity and history of a number of large mystery items found in a 2010 sonar scan of […]
Debris removal from the Gowanus Canal will begin at the end of October the EPA announced at the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group meeting this past Tuesday. Initially, the removal of urban waste items – such as tires, shopping carts and potentially a few mystery items – was expected to begin this past August. However, at Tuesday’s meeting, Natalie Loney, […]
Of all of the mystery items scheduled for extraction from the Gowanus canal at the end October, perhaps the most interesting piece comes in the form of a sunken ship at the fourth street turning basin, beside the Gowanus Whole Foods. Locals may recognize the boat, which pokes out from the canal’s dark waters when water levels are low, along […]
Brad Lander’s office recently sent out via email an announcement reopening his Bridging Gowanus initiative – the “next step” in the reshaping of our neighborhood. It asks to complete a survey. The Bridging Gowanus website has a little button on top labeled, ‘WEIGH IN”—this is not an accident since your opportunity to weigh in can hardly be called a survey […]
