Gowanus Canal Memories

When I was little, maybe 6-10 years old, I can remember going into Manhattan a lot to go shopping for my dad. He needed suits for teaching so we would go to SYMS which was way down at the tip of Manhattan by the Brooklyn Bridge. When we would get on the BQE I would look left to find the Statue of Liberty, way off in the distance, shining kind of light or sea mist green; always very small on the horizon. My brother would try to point out the Twin Towers to me. For the longest time I thought they were these twin smoke stacks at a processing plant. When he would point across the water to the buildings in Manhattan then I knew where they were and I would look for them each time we went into the city. Up ahead was the bridge and I would look across the water to the Manhattan skyline. I used to wonder what all those other buildings were for, who worked there, what did they do for a living? How they got to the top of their buildings. Then, when I would look to my right, as the BQE wound around toward the bridge, we would drive over a small over pass. There was a small canal (I now think this is the Gowanus Canal) that ran under another over pass for trains that was further off in the distance. I looked down at that canal and my little 6-10 year old sensibilities were appalled, even then. That canal was brown. How could anything live in that? Were there fish or anything else in there? There couldn’t have been…then, realizing that we caused that water to be brown. By running our trains over it everyday, by driving our cars across the highway all the time and by not being clean about the industrial things we did, we caused that water to be a murky, muddy mess. That couldn’t be right…it wasn’t right. And I still think it’s wrong.

That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I focus on the issues I do. That’s the reason.