Brooklyn is building thousands of new apartments around the Gowanus Canal, one of America’s most polluted waterways and a federal Superfund site. For more than a century, the canal functioned as an industrial sewer, collecting coal tar, sewage, heavy metals, chemical waste, and toxic sludge known as “black mayonnaise.” Now, New York is trying to reverse that damage with a multi-billion-dollar cleanup involving dredging, capping, contaminated soil management, and two massive underground sewer overflow tanks. But at the same time, the surrounding industrial district is being transformed into one of Brooklyn’s next major residential neighborhoods, with thousands of new homes, public waterfront space, and major private development. The central question is whether Gowanus is a smart model for reusing damaged urban land, or whether Brooklyn is building a denser, more expensive neighborhood around pollution that has been contained, but not truly solved.
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