The air hung clear and crisp—albeit with a whiff of something more noxious—over the Gowanus Canal, where a flotilla of eight took to the mire for a guided paddle centered on the waterway’s Revolutionary history. Piloting his own silver vessel, Captain Gary Francis of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club led the small fleet from the group’s “bunker” on Nineteenth Street to the mouth of the canal, where it ebbs into New York Harbor. He detailed the days when the Gowanus was a wild creek among many, webbing across a salt marsh. In August 1776, thousands of British troops descended upon its paludal muck, using the wetlands as a battleground barrier while they pressed their fleeting advantage over the young Americans.
To fast-forward two and a half centuries, from the Battle of Brooklyn to a summer’s day in 2025, would be to skim past decades when these creeks were dammed into tidal mills and then dredged to form the city’s busiest industrial waterway. It would mean skipping over the grimy and lively era when paint factories, soap manufacturers, coal yards, and gas plants crow…
