#201 GOWANUS! Brooklyn's Troubled Waters

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2016

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the dirtiest Bowery Boys podcast ever. Literally. Brooklyn's Gowanus -- both the creek and the canal -- is one of the most mysterious and historically important waterways in New York City. By coincidence, it also happens to be among its most polluted, shrouded in frightening tales of dead animals (and a few unfortunate humans) floating along its canal shores. Its toxic mix is the stuff of urban legends (most of which are actually true). But this was once the land of delicious oysters. This was the site of an important Revolutionary War battle. This was part of the property of the man who later developed Park Slope. But, in current times, it ALSO happens to be one of New York City's hottest neighborhoods for real estate development. How does a neighborhood go from a canal of deadly constitution to a Whole Foods, condos and shuffleboard courts? With so many personalities (and with Tom gone this week) I needed a special guide for this fraught and twisted journey -- writer and historian Joseph Alexiou, author of 'Gowanus: Brooklyn's Curious Canal', bringing his expertise to help me wade through the most toxic portion of the show. www.boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 201.
0:03.2	Goannis, Brooklyn's troubled waters.
0:05.8	Hey, it's The Bowry Boys.
0:07.7	Hey!
0:08.7	Support for The Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:12.3	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:18.9	Hi there, welcome to The Bowry Boys.
0:23.5	This is Greg Young with a tale of an old waterway rich in history and urban legend.
0:28.9	The Goannis Creek, well actually, we'll be calling it a creek for only a small portion
0:34.0	of the story.
0:35.0	Today they would be like calling Times Square a meadow.
0:37.6	The Goannis Canal is a narrow body of water and the western section of Brooklyn seeping
0:43.1	next to the modern neighborhoods of Red Hook, Carol Gardens, and Park Slope.
0:47.5	Or rather, that's how you might have described it 30 or 40 years ago because Goannis,
0:52.8	or at least the blocks lining the canal, well that's actually a neighborhood as well.
0:56.9	In fact, it's one of the most hotly contested real estate areas in town with developers
1:01.5	lustfully eyeing Goannis' former industrial architecture.
1:05.7	In 2015, the New York Real Estate blog curbed bestowed Goannis its annual curved cup,
1:12.7	awarded to the best neighborhood in New York.
1:15.6	Now all of this, despite the fact that the Goannis has been renowned for almost a century
1:21.4	and a half as one of America's great polluted waterways, infamously aromatic bubbling
1:28.1	with decades of toxins, its surface perpetually shiny with the chemical film.
	...

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