A More Complete Photo Tour- Gowanus

I wrote a bit about my adventures in Gowanus last week but wanted to do something a bit more narrative. Gowanus is an industrial area that surround the Gowanus Canal. It's got a long and storied history but at this point more businesses and residential concerns are moving into the area. We had some friends look to buy a house in the flood plain and were told their basement would regualrily flood with raw sewage from the City's storm runoff. I'm not sure why you would want to live there, especially if you wanted to have kids, but it is a huge chunk of Brooklyn surrounded by very valuable land. For those of you from NJ, think of it as the Brooklyn version of the Meadowlands.

I took the F train two stops to the Smith and 9th stop. I had shot before from the other side but had noticed a hold in the fence that was just large enough to get my camera through. I was shooting with a rediculously long 200mm lens. This lens seems to have no real purpose other than making you feel like a professional photographer.

It was really windy, a bit rainy, and cold but I went out around 10 am just for kicks.



The first thing that happened was I lost my beloved Cyclones hat. It almost immediately blew off my head and landed on the tracks. I loved that hat, despite the fact that everyone always thought it was a Boston hat. But it was gross and I guess time to go. RIP little buddy.



This is a view from the Manhattan-bound side of the Subway stop. You can see the Manhattan skyline on the left and downtown Brooklyn to the right.







I left the subway platform and walked east on 9th street. This is sort of a no man's land. It is the main thoroughfair between the BQE, Red Hook, and Park Slope. A Lowes opened up down there and there is a shopping center. It was a big shock to me when I first moved in that there was a place in the city where there was a parking lot. In Brooklyn there are a lot of them. There are almost always lots of people walking down here and it is how you walk between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. There are only a few places to walk or drive across the Canal.




I turned north onto 3rd Ave. This is where the dogs tried their hardest to scare me, but given that they were 15 feet in the air, they were just pretty adorable. Every day I look for the dogs and have spotted three of them, their dog houses, and often see them patrolling or just basking in the sun. They seem to cover about a square block of connected roof space. There also appears to be less graffiti up there so they are probably pretty good at their job.



As you walk down 3rd you get a sense of how desolate, grey, and depressed this area is. Many of the buildings have "For Rent" signs on them but some of them have things like music and artist's studios in them with a mix of old school manufacturing. I can upon some pigeons happily munching away and then they (and I) got scared by a big dog. The pigeons took off, circled around and then banked right at me. It was like "The Birds" and luckily I escaped without any bird poop.



I got out of there pretty quickly. The smell was pretty bad, I had just been chased by a dog, and blitzed by pigeons. There are also a lot of buses down there and many of them were running, filling the air with exhaust. I came across a bizarre set of buildings, one school, one storage building, and one set of artists studios.



Across the street is another inlet of the Canal and what is supposed to be the site of the Brooklyn Whole Foods. From what I understand this is quite a saga and looking at the marshy, industrial wasteland that is meant to be a bright new store, I can see why. You get a good sense of the land from this vantage point and can see that its polluted, in a desolate location with little parking, and well, marshland. Its neighbors would be a bus depot, junk yard, and abandoned industrial sites.


Apparently, a lot of demolition has already happened on the site but this building remains. I heard that it was on a historic landmark list somewhere because it was an example of the use of cement in buildings. I really have no clue. It is currently rotting under the care of Whole Foods. It ironically has an advertisement for a demolition company on its side.



I, and I alone, thought that this was a cool shot. I took it through a roll-down fence into an industrial area on 3rd Street.



This shot may give you a good lay of the land. This is looking south towards the Kentile Floor sign and the subway stop, I am basically directly north from where I started. If I went west I would be at Smith Street, east, Park Slope. From here, I headed east to 4th Ave and took a bunch of pictures as I walked home. Those are for another post.



This is me, taking a self-portrait in the security mirror of the "No Corporate Bullshit" aka Verizon truck storage building on 3rd. The guy at the booth asked me to keep on moving.