by Josh Payne
NARRATION: Walking along the Gowanus Canal in south Brooklyn, you'll see a plethora of industrial business. The streets are lined with heavy equipment repair shops, cooling system specialists, and empty lots surrounded by chain-link fences topped by coiled ribbons of razor wire. Bulldozers scoop gravel into 15-foot piles at a concrete manufacturer near the 9th Street bridge.
TAPE: Bulldozer sound. [Bring up bulldozer sound at the beginning of the last sentence and fade slowly during the next sentence].
NARRATION: Drawbridges span the mile and a half long canal at four locations, allowing cars to cross from Red Hook and Carroll Gardens into Gowanus and Park Slope.
TAPE: Sound of cars. [Bring up sound as the bulldozer sound fades in the last sentence. Fade after the last car crosses the bridge].
NARRATION: The canal is as wide as a six-lane highway in southwest Brooklyn where it empties into the Gowanus Bay and the Atlantic beyond. It's as narrow as a street in Greenwich Village at its head, seven blocks south of Atlantic Avenue in the heart of the borough. Owen Foote paddles up and down the canal in his canoe about 25 times a year. Foote is the treasurer of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club and knows firsthand what's in the water.
TAPE: FOOTE: After a large rainstorm with the combined sewer overflows you'll basically have a mix of anything that happens to be on the street. So a lot of candy wrappers and even what we call Coney Island whitefish - condoms - floating in the canal to actual sewage and oil that may be discharged from the sewage system.
NARRATION: Though difficult to believe, it used to be a lot worse. As recently as 15 years ago, raw sewage was flushed directly from toilets into the canal and left to fester in the stagnant water. Once the largest manmade shipping channel in the United States, the canal became obsolete with the rise of the trucking industry after World War II. The waterway went largely ignored for decades until the smell caused politicians to act. Things began to improve when the pumping station came to life in 1999. That's when Foote first noticed activity while he was canoeing.
TAPE: FOOTE: We've seen horseshoe crabs mating in the spring. We've seen a tremendous amount of wildlife. Birds and fish and crabs are in abundancy on the canal. It's just a fantastic waterway.
NARRATION: Community activists are also excited by signs of life in the canal. They envision public walking paths, outdoor cafes, and parks along the waterway. Buddy Scotto, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood and founder of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation, thinks the time is right to decide the canal's future.
TAPE: SCOTTO: We're sitting on the brink here of an incredible economic development possibility with the Gowanus Canal. I believe the city, and the state at this point, appreciates that and I wanna believe that they are talking about an overall plan for the entire Gowanus Canal.
NARRATION: He may be right. Over the past two years the government funded a $5 million joint study between the Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Environmental Protection. The study assessed water quality and early plans for development. Andrew Kranis, a graduate student at Columbia University's School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, designed his own vision for the canal. Kranis, who didn't have to work within a budget, designed a 12-story vertical farm and community promenade. The farm looks like a giant, rigid Slinkie, composed of plots in which plants would be grown hydroponically as they clean the canal water. From his classroom, he talks about his goal for the vertical farm.
TAPE: KRANIS: Fundamentally the idea is sustainability. To generate the source of nutrients for the planting that goes on in the farm by using an extremely nutrient rich stew which just happens to be what we used to think about as waste.
NARRATION: While Kranis looks at waste in a new way, retail businesses are taking a new look at the Gowanus community. A Loews department store recently sprouted up, and furniture giant IKEA has been sniffing around possible locations. Over the last five years, real estate prices in the area have increased by five to eight percent annually. As the water gets cleaner and the neighborhood gets trendier, a new Gowanus Canal may be poised to rise from the sludge.
OUT CUE: For Columbia Radio News, this is Josh Payne.