"Cul-de-sacs, like the one on Douglass Street, serve as observation posts. At one, Alberto Lasso keeps his collection of empty bottles, gathered from the surrounding streets in carts he built with help from a local welder. Mr. Lasso comes to the same spot every night, sorting bottles of imported beer into cardboard boxes to return for their 5-cent deposits. Once, he saw a car plow through the metal barrier at the end of the street and land in the canal. But otherwise, it's quiet. 'That's why I'm here,' Mr. Lasso said."
-Kareem Fahim's ode to the Gowanus Canal in today's Times is nice to read. And the accompanying collection of readers' paintings and photos is nice to look at. But my favorite thing about the canal will always be the recurring joke in Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn about it being "the only body of water in the world that was 90 percent guns."
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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My friend's dad says that, in the 50's, if you needed to make a car disappear in a hurry, you drove it into the Gowanus.
Damnit. I was going to make that Lethem ref...
I'm really, really glad to hear that the Gowanus finally got Superfund status.
My first year in New York I walked the mile and a half or so from my apartment in Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope three or four times a week. The canal looked substantially different every time I went by, depending largely on the weather and time of day. Like, I'd go by at midmorning and the water would look relatively normal (though suspiciously fauna-free), and then come back two hours later to find I was actually crossing a miles-long oil slick. As if the Cobble Hill/Park Slope borderlands were being haunted by the displaced ghost of the Exxon-Valdez.