On the Banks of the Gowanus
I became obsessed with Gowanus when I graduated from college several years back. I've been saying that if I ever leave New York I'd get a tattoo of the canal, and I'm serious. At least, I think I'm serious.
I have this half-baked hypothesis that my obsession with Gowanus grew out of my sort of embarrassing fetishization of Southern California, so I'll try to unpack that a little. As a lifelong Brooklynite, I've been itching to get out for a long time. It's hard to reach escape velocity and ditch your hometown, and it's especially hard if your hometown is New York. I made it out of the city (but not the state) for college, but then I was back in Brooklyn for law school. Back in the neighborhood where I grew up. Feeling stuck, feeling like I hadn't made it. Nothing, it seems, could shake that feeling. Running a successful business and developing a client base and falling in love and moving out of my childhood neighborhood should've helped. But I know the city too well. Many college friends from elsewhere in the country wound up in Brooklyn after school, and I bored them to tears with tales of how their various neighborhoods used to look when I was a kid. It's hard for me to find a street I haven't explored, a subway station that's not connected with some long-ago memory. It gets old. I'm getting old.
So, this is where Los Angeles fits in. I first touched LA during a post-college, pre-law-school road trip in the summer of 2007. I was traveling with a close college friend and his high school buddy. In LA, we stayed at a pal's mom's place in the Hollywood Hills. One night we piled into his car and he drove us up some bizarre, suburban, mountainous Hollywood roads and at the top, he showed us this:
I mean, seriously. An entire city — an entire gigantic city — that I knew nothing of. A whole new array of rules and societal mores and street meats and dive bars. Dizzying.
I should stop here and say that I've been to many cities, both before that point and after. But none of them felt quite like New York. None of them felt like they could beat me up in that unique, amazing, terrible way that New York so often does.
LA felt different. It felt huge and frightening and like a force to be reckoned with. It felt real and cloying and violent and on an unreal scale, very much like New York, yet nothing like New York.
I visit friends in the area frequently, but I still haven't escaped New York's gravitational pull. It always feels like it's just around the bend — somebody's graduating, somebody's leaving a job, some lease is ending. But it never quite happens. New York is foxy that way. Just ask Joan Didion, or all the folks who contributed to Goodbye To All That, the collection of musings on finally building up the courage to walk away from New York. It's hard.
So — with deep apologies for the diversion — this brings me back to Gowanus.
Growing up in Brooklyn, I spent a lot of time in the Slope. I spent a lot of time in the Heights. I spent a lot of time in Carroll Gardens. But somewhere between 5th Avenue and Smith Street was a no-man's land. A barren, scarred universe stretching from the gas stations under the BQE all the way up almost to Atlantic Avenue. There were no logical reasons to wind up there, as a high schooler. Why would you ever go anywhere within whiffing-distance of that putrefying canal? I biked through it, occasionally, on my way up through Brooklyn. And I held my breath.
So, after college, there was something uniquely appealing about it, of course. Plus, around that time the neighborhood started heating up in interesting ways. I had a theater professor who told us of a site-specific performance she once held in the Old American Can Factory, across the street from what is now the Whole Foods. It involved filling a gigantic room with water and performing a one-woman show on a floating boat docked in the middle. It caught my attention. Rooftop Films started programming at the Can Factory shortly thereafter. Proteus Gowanus appeared, hosting art, lectures and the library that would later become the Morbid Anatomy Museum. Littlefield opened in 2008, as did the Bell House.
It felt magical, and utterly surreal. People were doing amazing things in old warehouses far away from the prying eyes of the Park Slope stroller mafia or the Williamsburg scene. It looked nothing like the Brooklyn of my youth.
So I rented a desk at the Brooklyn Creative League, and I stuck around. I came to love the Gowanus Canal, as a symbol of a Brooklyn lost in time. I'd take walks over the quaint, narrow Carroll Street Bridge, with its cobblestone and wooden deck rumbling violently whenever a car flew by. I'd even join the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club for leisurely floats down the canal.
These days are a little hard to remember now, with so many old buildings being razed and replaced with condos. With Dinosaur BBQ and Whole Foods both opening up on the canal's banks. Gowanus is starting to look a whole lot like the rest of New York. It doesn't even smell that bad anymore, now that they've declared it a Superfund site and started dredging it.
All this is to say that it's important to hold on to what we have, to fight to preserve the spaces that are important to us, and to show up to community events and make our voices heard.
I think each generation of New Yorkers feels a certain amount of possessiveness and nostalgia about the spaces they inhabited back in the day. Gowanus, as a community, existed long before I showed up and it'll exist for generations more. But this is the piece of it that I know — that place that, like many parts of LA, appeals to me as a slightly seedy, slightly shabby space to set up shop and make art and make noise and build something that's yours. And it's the piece that I'd like to remember, and continue fighting to preserve.