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| Looking at multiple new developments underway along Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal |
You can’t help noticing all the development in Brooklyn’s Gowanus or everything that is being built that lines the once notoriously infamous Gowanus Canal. But before there was that development there had to be a rezoning to permit it, and, for that, there had to be a vision to boost that rezoning into reality.
And when that vision was offered, one thing that was touted was that the Gowanus Canal could become Brooklyn’s “Riverwalk,” the bustling area that helps identify San Antonio, Texas as a beckoning city with a distinctive destination that serves as a draw for tourists and everyone else.
Well, as they say, if your gonna “talk the talk” you gotta “walk the walk.” Which means if you're gonna do your Texas, San Antonio River-talk, you gotta do your Riverwalk too, for real, or sort of for real, or, at least as real as its gonna get in New York.
The scale of the San Antonio River along which you find Riverwalk’s 2 ½ mile 30 foot wide, boat-accommodating developed stretch is reasonably comparable to the Gowanus Canal’s similarly 100 foot wide, boat accommodating 1.8-mile length now being developed. That’s probably why comparisons were generated.
But some things are different; not just the climate.
Riverwalk is promoted as having some of San Antonio's most spectacular hotels, night clubs, bars, shopping centers and businesses . . . and—
San Antonio’s Riverwalk is lined with more than a score of restaurants, two baker’s dozens is the higher number that approaches accuracy.
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| Riverwalk Restaurants promoted |
So to “Riverwalk” the Gowanus you would think that the Gowanus would need a few restaurants, in fact to be similarly lined with restaurants– Wouldn’t you?
Well here’s the plan to bring the canal's "Riverwalk" up to snuff with San Antonio given the caveats that apply.
Gowanus Canal Restaurants: A Practical Plan
The caveats relate to the fact that Gowanus is a superfund site. That phrase uses the word “super” in not a good or complimentary way. For many memorable years the Gowanus waterway was famous for its noxious stench. Maybe it immediately made people about the legends of the canal being used as a dumping ground for dead bodies by the likes of the mob. But the putrid stink probably had more to do with the build up of healthy organism-slaying toxins from the years of industrial use and garbage dumping.
The original idea when the Gowanus Creek was transformed into a man-made canal was that a continual flow of water would cleanse and keep the whiff of rot from building up. A ship’s propeller was installed at the head of the canal to pump water through a tunneled pipe from Buttermilk Channel, the tidal strait that is the span of water between Brooklyn and Governor’s Island.
The water became stagnant when that propeller soon broke and went unfixed for years.
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| A better flow of canal water? |
With development of the canal in the offing, there have been fixes. In 1999 it was fixed and the direction of the tunnel's flow was reversed so that its water flows in from Buttermilk Channel, rather than the other way. In 2014 the configuration was changed to three pumps in the Flushing Tunnel Pumping System replacing the propeller and increasing the flow.
But that’s not all that’s needed for relief from the effects of the canal’s toxic history. The toxins are settled in the canal bed way down deep. They are settled so deep that the thinking is that no amount of dredging to remove them all is economically possible. You can’t go deep enough. The plan is to dredge and dredge somewhat deeply, and then cap the still toxic floor of the canal remaining with sand.
Of course there is some worry that with a huge hurricane, like the hurricane that Superstorm Sandy started out to be, the tumult would rip up and down below all the nice clean sand, stirring up and distributing what was laid down. Sandy, which was reported to have had the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded for a North Atlantic storm brought in a storm surge wall of water from the harbor fourteen feet above what is normally ever the very highest. Luckily, in some ways, it was all relatively serene as when Sandy actually arrived, its winds, a mere 17 miles an hour, weren’t anything comparable to a hurricane’s.
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| From Gothamist |
No doubt, the dredging does good, but there is more than an economic price to be paid. Last fall, the spirited Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club Boathouse Jam crew was gathered to play its Blue Grass music sessions on the waterside promenade by the new, already built buildings alongside the canal. (They gather Wednesday evenings April through October.) At the same time, several hundred feet away a barge was there to do dredge work. Not only was there conversation amongst the gathered musicians about how powerfully awful the smell being pulled up from under the shallow bottom was, there were expressions of sincere concern about how healthy it was to breathe and for how long.
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| Blue Grass jam: Gowanus Dredgers filling the air with spirited music where sometimes the air is filled with evil aromas. |
Restaurants along the canal? It’s not yet been zoned for restaurant. And apparently the NYC Health Department has some objections and is not going to change its mind.
The answer?: A practical one. . .
Big television screens are going to be the answer. Even if you are just a general consumer, really big television screens are now readily available- Even in 2019 you could get an LED screen 292 inches wide measured diagonally– In other words 24 feet.
Right now the biggest TV screen in the world is on the edge of the Las Vegas strip, in the Venetian Resort entertainment complex. It’s 515 feet by 367 feet.
What’s called for to serve the Gowanus is simpler. The walk will be lined with screens that show you, full scale, the fronts of attractive restaurants. A range of cuisines will be represented.
Motion detectors will detect when a passerby comes close to the projected door of any imaged restaurant. At that point, a change in the computer-generated image will activate and a beckoning figure will come to the door of the restaurant. It may be a sultry young woman with curves if you are a man (or we are mindfully told by city officials, if you “identify as one”), or an invitingly mysterious young man in a dark suit may appear if you are a woman. That figure will hold out their hand to you with a scannable QR code in its palm . . .
. . . scan the QR code with your phone and you will be supplied with a map and walking directions to go up the hill to a restaurant as depicted that will serve you a delicious meal on nearby Smith Street (two blocks away) or Court Street (three blocks away).
A demonstration (to be held for city officials, restaurant chain executives, and members of New York’s key real estate families) of the prototype TV screens that will be used to accomplish the replication of San Antonio’s Riverwalk on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal is scheduled for today, April 1st, at one of the Gowanus Canal construction sites.
