Gowanus Canal Conservancy

“Well, the Gowanus Canal has always been the source of community agitation and concern,” says Hans Hesselein, Executive Director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC). “People always loved it, but from day one it was always a fetid, smelly open sewer, and the repository for vast amounts of industrial pollution. It’s always been a significant landmark between two very vibrant and healthy communities, and it’s been something that people wanted to address.”

Known semi-affectionately as “Lavender Lake” due to its unnatural coloration, the 1.8 mile Gowanus Canal has indeed long been a source of community conversation and consternation. Originally a navigable creek in a system of wetlands, during the second half of the 19th century the Gowanus was deepened into a vital commercial waterway conveying goods from South Brooklyn factories to Upper New York Bay. Local industry and population grew along with the canal, and by the 20th century its...

“Well, the Gowanus Canal has always been the source of community agitation and concern,” says Hans Hesselein, Executive Director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC). “People always loved it, but from day one it was always a fetid, smelly open sewer, and the repository for vast amounts of industrial pollution. It’s always been a significant landmark between two very vibrant and healthy communities, and it’s been something that people wanted to address.”

Known semi-affectionately as “Lavender Lake” due to its unnatural coloration, the 1.8 mile Gowanus Canal has indeed long been a source of community conversation and consternation. Originally a navigable creek in a system of wetlands, during the second half of the 19th century the Gowanus was deepened into a vital commercial waterway conveying goods from South Brooklyn factories to Upper New York Bay. Local industry and population grew along with the canal, and by the 20th century its banks were crammed with manufactured gas plants, tanneries, coal yards, paint factories and a variety of other toxic enterprises. Humorous nicknames aside, decades worth of sewage and garbage from surrounding industrial and residential neighborhoods turned the canal into one of the most polluted waterways in the world.

In the mid-1960s, local activist and funeral director Buddy Scotto galvanized his neighbors to establish the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC), which contracted a study of the canal in the name of public health. The results, although not surprising, were not good. The study reported the presence of typhoid, typhus and cholera, and contaminants including oil, lead, PCBS and mercury. The GCCDC successfully lobbied for the construction of a sewage treatment plant to process waste from the Bond Street sewer (1987), and to reactivate the defunct Flushing Tunnel pump to circulate fresh, aerated water from the East River’s Buttermilk Channel, and siphon out the hazardous canal water and notoriously rotten smells (1999). However, waste from the sewer system’s 14 combined sewer overflow (CSO) points continued to pollute the Gowanus when rainstorms overwhelmed the system and spilled sewage into the canal.

21st century politicians allocated funds to the GCCDC to study and undertake environmental mitigation projects like street-end garden construction, and to create a revitalization plan for the canal watershed. But pressing CSO issues were thrust into high relief in 2006 with the proposed construction of the Brooklyn Nets’ arena and surrounding residential development in Central Brooklyn -- all of which threatened to increase the volume of waste carried by the already overburdened sewer system.

The GCC evolved out of a GCCDC working group charged with developing a long-range vision for stewardship of the Gowanus Canal Watershed, including advocacy around CSOs. In 2006, the group hosted an environmental priorities summit, and soon afterward the GCCDC agreed that the group’s mission and workload had grown sufficiently to warrant breaking off and forming an independent non-profit organization. Two years later, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy received tax-exempt status an independent entity.

Hans started volunteering with the GCC during the first year. “I showed up at a volunteer day, and found it to be a really fun and rewarding process. I was just pruning public street trees and weeding gardens, and this was something I’d lacked in my life since I’d moved to New York a few years prior.” Hans was raised on New Jersey nursery and studied landscape architecture at NC State, so he came armed with a lifetime’s supply of horticultural experience. “Working in horticulture has always been very important to me, and I hadn’t accessed to those types of opportunities in New York until I got involved with the Conservancy. The whole volunteer day thing was empowering, and just a fun and engaging experience.” Over the next few months he invited several other Brooklyn-based designers to join him. They, too, felt that the GCC provided creative opportunities for environmental work. The skilled newcomers were soon invited to join the recently founded volunteer committee in planning modest tree clean ups and a community-oriented birdhouse fabrication and installation project. Within months they began to develop other projects, formalized the volunteer committee, and recruited additional members with different skill sets. Originally 6 members, the committee has grown into a body of approximately 50 dedicated individuals who oversee a variety of programs, from street tree stewardship, native plant propagation in GCC’s nursery, garden plantings and installations, composting and more.

Hans and the GCC take on capital projects, too. In 2014 they are working on the 6th Street Green Corridor, an open space green infrastructure project. In collaboration with Drexel University and engineering firm eDesign Dynamics, the GCC proposed to build bioswales (street side rain gardens) in a heavily industrialized corridor along 6th Street between 2nd and 4th Avenue. “So first of all, the Gowanus Canal is an open sewer. It receives almost 400 million gallons of sewage and storm water every year during rain events. It is critical that we focus on managing storm water responsibly in ways that will reduce combined sewer overflows into the canal, because that’s definitely, without a doubt, the most significant source of ongoing pollution in the canal. Less is the historical pollution, which is fairly stable, locked up in the bottom of the canal. But these sewer overflows continue to happen on a frequent basis. So there’s this technology that’s being embraced by design and engineering community called Green Infrastructure, and the idea is to manage storm water by building green roofs, rain gardens, installing rain barrels, permeable pavements. Things that begin to somewhat mitigate natural processes, trap storm water, often returning it to the ground water table. Using it as a resource rather than a waste product, and essentially keeping it out of the sewer system so it reduces the likelihood of an overflow event.”

Hans hopes to begin 6th Street garden construction in the spring of 2014. The project, funded by New York City and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will include well over a dozen bioswales to collect storm water and sediment. Native plantings of herbs, shrubs and trees will be maintained by the Conservancy’s volunteer program, who will also install environmental monitoring instruments to evaluate the amount of water going in and out, effects on ground water table toxicity, and nutrient loading. With all of the data collected by the rain gardens, the GCC will be able to prove the efficacy of treating storm water with green infrastructure, and they will advocate for the expansion of the city’s green infrastructure program to improve not only the Gowanus Canal Watershed, but the entire New York harbor.

There is certainly plenty of room to improve the Gowanus Canal, which was given Superfund status in 2010. The GCC has remained undaunted by challenge, even when Superstorm Sandy caused a 13-foot storm surge and massive flooding of the canal. The EPA, which sampled the waterway after the storm, stated that the Superfund contamination had not been disturbed and churned up in the floodwaters. But the study did indicate substantial quantities of diesel fuel oil, likely released by overturned fuel drums from local automotive shops.

The hurricane also wrought havoc on the GCC’s canal-side facilites at the Department of Sanitation’s 2nd Avenue Salt Lot. “A lot of bizarre debris got shuffled around from one property to another, so a lot of strange things showed up on the Salt Lot. We had to decontaminate all of our tools, and a lot of our compost was contaminated by the flooding, which introduced not only diesel fuel, but of more concern to the compost was the salt and the pathogens from all the sewage overflows. That’s part of the reason why we wanted to disinfect everything.” The water on the Salt Lot was nearly four feet deep, roughly 13 feet above mean high tide. “It was a mess. It was a total mess,” Hans recalls.

Happily, the GCC were able to assemble between 15 and 20 volunteers for two days of clean up. They bought hazmat suits and disinfectant, and spent hours raking and shoveling muck and junk. Thanks to their co-location with the Department of Sanitation, dumpsters were quickly made available to haul away the debris. The initial clean up took about a week, and now the GCCs facilities are fully recovered. But the interim was replete with unglamorous tasks like replacing the broken tools, slowly rebuilding compost stockpiles, and propagating materials.

"The Salt Lot" may sound a bit biblical, but the history of the GCC’s tenancy on the site is literally pedestrian. Much of the GCC’s work has involved simply walking around and picking up trash off of the public streets. By helping the Sanitation Department keep NYC streets safe and sanitary, the Conservancy developed a good rapport with local department officers. Now the GCC shares an oddly-shaped corner of the Salt Lot, where they’ve built a nursery and a tool shed. The GCC also helped to raise nearly $400,000 to construct a compost facility at the Salt Lot, which should theoretically become a permanent recycling center. The GCC expects to be one of the operators of that facility, which will help generate compost for their regular weekend volunteer Clean and Green program. “It’s a mutually-beneficial situation,” Hans says. “It’s great for the Conservancy, and our synergies have only grown over the years, so I think our long-term future at the Salt Lot has only been made stronger by these projects.”

But the GCC’s visions aren’t limited to the Salt Lot, and indeed the organization’s expansive long-view has attracted and maintained many of its talented, committed volunteers. Bob Lesko, Citizen Pruner extraordinaire, took a class through Trees New York (the non-profit licensed by the city to train anyone who wants to be a Citizen Pruner) in 2009. Since then he has spent approximately 780 hours stewarding 2600 trees around the city. Now he tends to the trees in the Gowanus Canal Watershed on behalf of the GCC.

Bob was first exposed to the Conservancy at a 2010 Parks Department-sponsored panel on community-based environmental stewardship. He was hardly a novice at the time, but the GCC’s presentation knocked his socks off. “I would get emails saying, ‘oh, come to the Parks Department to learn about this and that. And one of them was how to start and run your own community environmental group. It was at the Parks Dept headquarters, and they had a bunch of great groups from every borough. And here I’ve done work with pretty much all of those groups -- you get to change it up, meet new people, and have different tools that community associations don’t have access to. When I heard the GCC talk, it was mind blowing. Most of the other groups were older and just doing maintenance and advocacy, which makes sense because back in the 70s the Parks Department couldn’t do all the maintenance. And the Police Department said, ‘oh, no. No trees! We’re going to get more crime because people are going to jump out from behind them!’”

“But the GCC were totally 21st century. And they were dreamers. They talked about what they had in mind 5, 10, 20 years down the road. And they showed pictures of all the volunteers coming in on the Clean and Greens. And not to be flip, but it was the coolest one. I go to their meetings and super lecture series now, and I don’t understand a word they’re talking about – they all have degrees in ecology, horticulture. They speak in the Latin plants names -- which is cool! I mean, I’m only doing maintenance for them, and I’m doing for them what I’m doing for every other group. But it’s the institutional culture that’s staggering.”

Modest about his knowledge, Bob is a virtual urban tree encyclopedia. After Sandy, he was one of a small group of expert pruners selected by the city to become Advanced Citizen Pruners -- experienced stewards who are now authorized to administer structural pruning to young trees, an important step toward strengthening them to withstand future storms. While Bob won’t toot his own horn, he will boast unabashedly about the GCC. He first attended volunteer Clean and Green days in mid-2010, and was instantly hooked by the organization’s killer combination of resources and empowerment capacity. “I saw this hose cart and I said, ‘wow! Can we open up the hydrant and get to trees?’ And Hans said, ‘Bob! Would you do that for us?’ I’d been around for a couple of months, a quiet guy, and Hans just saw the energy. They gave me a key to the staging facility! I took advantage of their watering cart – and all of their resources – and now there’s a vehicle. So I can drive out and take care of trees across the neighborhood!”

Bobs enthusiasm is infectious, and he regularly takes Clean and Green volunteers on expeditions around the streets of Gowanus. He demonstrates proper pruning technique and explains the nuances of street tree care in the Watershed. In so doing he is strengthening the trees and helping the tree pits to behave a bit more like storm water gardens. His exbuerance also strenghens the GCCs volunteer base and audience. The GCC is happy to have him, and the feeling is mutual.

But Bob isnt the only fan. Volunteer coordinator and landscape architect Julia Price was invited to a GCC Clean and Green by a coworker. “I was drawn to it because there were so many designers involved who were passionately involved, and it felt like a place where you could really come in and be driven by other people’s imaginations, and also actually take direct action by building things or through education, or just through general stewardship activities. So it offered this amazing opportunity to have some sort of effect very quickly. And it was with a likeminded group of people who wanted to make change, who were not kind of limited in how they saw that change happening.”

The GCC’s high volunteer retention rate may be related to their clear and expansive vision for change. As Hans explains, “one day we want to see an esplanade around the entire canal. And we see ourselves as the entity most well positioned to manage and maintain it, and I think we can do it inexpensively. But we also have a vision for public open space to be volunteer activated. You know, lots of traditional parks are modeled on Central Park, which is designed as this beautiful, picturesque thing. But once its designed and installed and grows to a more or less climax state, you do everything you can to preserve it and leave it in that mature state. So it becomes kind of static in some ways. We hope that the Gowanus Canal Park will be an ever changing and evolving piece of open space that community members can treat in a structured way, as their community garden. It’ll provide opportunities for work as recreation, working with green spaces on horticultural activities and composting, and there will be great education opportunities. We want it to be a continually evolving work-play space.”

The Conservancy has their work cut out for them. CSO remediation still has a long way to go, and there are always more trees to tend. As Julia Price notes, “the thing about Gowanus, especially the more industrial parts of the Gowanus, is that it’s a really tough place for trees to grow. Not only are the environmental conditions difficult, but they’re also getting hit by trucks all the time. There are so many stresses on these trees. There’s also a ton of wind.” Waste facilities still dump into the sewers, and between the garbage truck and the sewer is often a street tree. While non-licensed citizens are wont to care for their street trees by watering them or even planting them guerilla-style, trees on non-residential industrial streets have fewer advocates. The GCC is doing what they can to bring care to the neediest trees, and to raise awareness about watershed issues. Between public art projects, booth tending at markets and events, and the Urban Ecology lecture series, the GCC is engaged in a full-court press. Their model is effective, at least according to Bob. “Seriously. I’ve learned more from this organization than I have from any other over the last three years. In formal discussion, at the lectures, or casual conversation while I’m waiting for volunteers to show up. All of it. This group has a dynamic that I haven’t experienced with any other volunteer environmental group that I’ve come across. I’m a life-long New Yorker. I’ve never lived anywhere else, and I’ve been here going on 54 years. So I’ve been looking a long time!”