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 crowded around its banks, using it as a dumping ground for all the odd effluents that have since agglutinated into the “black mayonnaise” that now lines the canal’s bottom. It would repress the early advocacy of the Dredgers (est. 1999) and the drama of the effort to compel the EPA to designate the Gowanus Canal as part of its Superfund program in 2010, heralding decades of ongoing cleanup. The years when the channel languished as a wasteland, a fetid and nearly forgotten symbol of the city’s grit and filth, would seem but a blip in this sped-up history.
To paddle the Gowanus of today is to encounter a body of water that is neither fully alive nor quite dead. Captain Francis led our canoes behind a sanitation barge heavy with the weight of the city’s trash. The redolence of garbage perfumed the air, but in the water, silver mummichogs flitted around a discarded plastic car mat. A heron hunched in a nearby tree, apparently stalking its lunch, and terns soared overhead. Farther toward the mouth of the channel, cormorants basked on wooden pilings. The canal is still too polluted for many fish to survive in its waters, yet at least 1,140 species call it home. Rumor has it that menhaden have started to return following changes in fishing restrictions. Much else is changing around the canal. While hearing tell of Charles Cornwallis and the Hessians on their marshy march, I looked up at the preponderance of new developments rising over the waterway and tried to ignore the pervasive basal stink.