Francis Morrone takes a look at Gowanus in today’s Sun and offers up a taste local history and some thoughts about its past, present and future. He notes the neighborhood’s industrial history, quoting Lewis Mumford’s description from the 1950s of “grimy factories and warehouses and gas tanks” and “empty lots and industrial rubble” — evoking “a segment of a bombed city.” He also covers the long history of the filth in the canal itself and of the flushing tunnel intended to keep it somewhat bearable:

The canal re-putrefied until 1999, when the pump was fixed — and, we believed, a new day had dawned for Gowanus. By then, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens were scorchingly hot real estate markets. Visions emerged of splendors that might rise along the waterway’s banks — some invoked Venice, others San Antonio — infilling this once seemingly impenetrable divider between the two neighborhoods.

It’s been slow to happen. Toxic residues left from the halcyon industrial days have proved a greater problem than developers expected. Cleanup costs are sky-high — and perhaps can’t be justified in the recent economic downturn. Some environmental scientists even say that much of Gowanus’s ground is so contaminated it simply cannot be adequately cleaned up, at any cost.

Worth a read.