On Thursday September 14, 2017, we had our first in class guest, Joseph Alexiou. Joseph is also the author of a book called Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal. He shared his vast knowledge of New York city with us especially Brooklyn based. Listening to him in class felt like we were taken on a tour of history of Brooklyn. He spoke with such passion about the Gowanus from the very beginning till today, we couldn’t even tell when the class ended. There were a lot of topics that were discussed in the class like from farming to industrialization to gentrification.
In class, Joseph depict about from the very beginning of history of Gowanus starting in 1826 Dutch were the first settlers. The Dutch preferred the area of Brooklyn and long island for farming because they witness the nutrients rich soil, so they traded for the land from the Native red Indian tribe name Lenepe that spoke Mansi. Another reason they choose to settle at the Gowanus was 8 miles stretch water canal that made the mode of transportation accessible. The Dutch also brought their technology of water mills, which they used grind grains, chickpeas etc. Joseph also mention the fact that during this time African American slaves were utilized for the labor work such as digging to have water made accessible for the boats to go to Manhattan for the trade.
During 1830’s more people from Europe started migrating to America for work and the population was 2000. By the end of 1870 the population was up to 10,000. There was big a misconception that the area around the canal was swamps but in fact they were marsh’s. By this time, they were bringing thousands of dollar worth merchandise for trade and they build factories around the Gowanus canal and everything was being dumped in this canal. By this time the canal was so polluted that the water life begin to end. The canal’s water itself changed the color to lavender as it was full of oil, human waste, toxic chemicals and bunch of other harmful substances.
By 1906 the city of New York build a water treatment plant to oxygenate the water to clean it. But, one thing i learned from the guest speaker that money was the biggest reason that why we still haven’t been able to clean the Gowanus canal. One of the reason is that throughout history is that the engineers have proposed a promising way to clean the canal but it costed much more than the city wanted to pay for. Hence, they choose the cheaper route which is till the date is unsuccessful. In today’s date, the water is polluted with the mixture of toxins from the gas plants, ink and paint factories, coal tar, various harmful chemicals. Below the sediment layer of canal, it created this toxic substance known as, “Black Mayonnaise.” The estimated time clean the canal is by 2030.
This lecture was very different than expected and it gave a lot of information about the history of Brooklyn. Although Gowanus is very upcoming urban area but its in a dire of cleaning the pollution out of the canal.
