Celebrating Community
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, […]
After the revelation last month about a provocative letter sent by some Gowanus Superfund Community Advisory Group (CAG) to EPA heads, some thought that the next monthly meeting would be filled with fireworks (see our last issue). However, Chief Engineer Christos Tsiamis, who has been providing updates to the project almost every month for the past dozen years, diffused all […]
Christos Tsiamis, Chief Engineer of Gowanus Superfund project. Despite the strong opposition of New York City, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and local Councilman Bill deBlasio, the Gowanus Canal, called one of the most polluted waterways in the world, was finally declared an EPA Federal Superfund site in 2010. This meant that the canal would be subject to federal jurisdiction when […]
After more than 160 years as a repository of human and industrial waste, the Gowanus Canal is leaving its toxic legacy behind—or under. Last month marked a milestone in the Superfund cleanup of the waterway, as the bottom of the canal north of the 3rd Street Bridge was successfully injected with a five-foot layer of cement in a process known […]
At the end of March, the EPA filed an Administrative Order making specific demands of the City of New York regarding their unkept promises at the Gowanus Canal cleanup. Christos Tsiamis, Chief Engineer of the project, has said many times in the past that the Federal government, of which the EPA is part of, has sovereignty over city government, which […]
Members of the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group were smiling in their Zoom squares when Christos Tsiamis, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) engineer leading the Gowanus Canal Superfund cleanup, reappeared on their screens on March 23. Tsiamis had not attended the group’s monthly virtual meetings since December, when he expressed concerns over changes utility company National Grid made last summer […]
When the city unleashes a rezoning and its accompanying host of contentious public review meetings on a neighborhood, seldom does anything stop it. A coalition of local grassroots organizations led by Voice of Gowanus managed to do so temporarily by suing the city and preventing it from triggering the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), a seven-month path leading to […]
The sun was out, but the slanted light of fall did little to warm the small crowd gathered at the Carroll Street Bridge in Gowanus the morning of Nov. 16. But despite winds that whipped bare hands and quickly chilled the hot cider they held in paper cups, members of Gowanus Dredgers, an organization that promotes waterfront stewardship at its […]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will begin dredging the Gowanus Canal in mid-November, scraping out the thick layer of tar and feces that sits at the bottom of the waterway. But Christos Tsiamis, the EPA engineer who heads the cleanup, warned that a new layer of gunk could start accumulating after dredging is done in 2023, as the completion date […]
The world knew Buddy Scotto for almost 92 years, I was his friend for the past seven. I first heard about him when I worked for the Brooklyn Phoenix newspaper in the early 1980’s. He was known in the office for getting rid of the ‘stench’ that permeated Carroll Gardens when the wind blew in from the Gowanus Canal. […]