[CPEO-BIF] "When a Real Estate Boom Came to a Toxic Corner of Brooklyn" - Gowanus

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

When a Real Estate Boom Came to a Toxic Corner of Brooklyn
Dozens of new buildings are going up along the famously polluted Gowanus Canal. The discovery of an underground chemical plume hasn’t slowed the development.

By Winston Choi-Schagrin and Jordan Gass-Pooré
New York Times
September 5, 2024

The artists at 543 Union Street knew all about the famously toxic canal that runs next to their building, a former box factory in Gowanus. But in the decades since they converted the factory to broad, timber-beamed lofts, the artists’ most pressing concerns were typical for a century-old building in Brooklyn — broken pipes, hallways in need of a fresh coat of paint, a perpetually damp basement.

That was before a letter arrived from the New York State Department of Health just before New Year’s Day 2023. It asked an unexpected and alarming question. Could the Health Department test the artists’ lofts for a chemical called trichloroethylene?

No one in the building had ever heard of trichloroethylene, or TCE, but they began to wonder whether their health was in danger. And there was another worry. Would they have to leave the building they had worked so hard to make hospitable?

This is the paradox of Gowanus. In 2010, the Gowanus Canal was listed as a national Superfund site, a designation the Environmental Protection Agency uses to prioritize cleaning up the most toxic places in the country. Yet since then, Gowanus has emerged from its industrial past to become one of Brooklyn’s hottest real estate markets and is in the midst of a construction boom. Fifty-two new buildings are either under construction or are expected to be built over the next five years.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/nyregion/gowanus-canal-toxic-real-estate-brooklyn.html

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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