The Roebling Oil Field Building at Roebling and N. 11th Streets in Williamsburg may be one of the only condos in New York City to come with a pump that will have an oil separator. GL has learned that the building, which is on a site on which significant quantities of oil were found during […]

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For months, the big blue trailer type thing from which exuded a strong smell of oil, has been parked on N. 11th Street next to the Roebling Oil Field site where McCarren Park Mews is (quickly) rising. It was part of the site clean up effort and, now it’s gone, so we can only assume […]

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One of the truisms of life in Brooklyn is that every few months, one can look forward to another long and detailed story about the large and nasty Exxon/Mobil Oil Spill in Greenpoint. So it is with the new New York Magazine, which contains a long, detailed and engaging story about North Brooklyn’s 17-30 million […]

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The author of Poop Culture, whose publication we noted last month, emailed us to note that his current blog entry might be of interest in terms of our Gowanus coverage. After all, he writes, “I’m a Gowanus-based writer and we all know the Gowanus’ sewage issues.” The Gowanus’ sewage issues, in case you haven’t been […]

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We have reported a couple of times about the potentially toxic threat under the Thomas Greene Playground in Gowanus. Located at Third Avenue and Douglass Streets, the park sits atop the former site of a Manufactured Gas Plant (MGPs) of the Fulton Municipal Gas Company. The plant operated from 1879 to 1943. MGPs are notorious […]

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One of our readers who is thinking of buying a condo on the near the Roebling Oil field site at N. 11th Street and Roebling in Williamsburg wrote in with some information he had obtained from state Department of Environmental Conservation officials. He wrote in part: I am considering the purchase of one of the […]

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Call us weird, but we look for signs of oil in development sites in Williamsburg and train our noses too. Yesterday, someone left a comment about a smell of oil so strong on N. 5th Street near Bedford Avenue this weekend that the Fire Department was called. It’s worth noting, as it’s not the first […]

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One of the things that has astounded us about the Roebling Oil Field, the development site with oil at N. 11th and Roebling Streets in Williamsburg, is the difficulty of getting public information and of the curious role that the Department of Environmental Conservation has–or hasn’t–played in responding to community concerns. As we have noted, […]

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Does living within incineration distance of an Liquid Natural Gas storage facility get you ten percent of the asking price of a new condo? Yesterday, when we were looking up documents about Radiac in Williamsburg, we came across the Liquid Natural Gas issue in East Williamsburg and started wondering. Here’s a sense of the issue […]

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The story of Williamsburg’s Radiac Research Corporation is not a new one. The firm, which is on Kent Avenue, operates as a transfer station for low-level radioactive waste and hazardous chemicals, and has had its share of publicity, including a campaign to shut it down. Yet, it is still there, and the threat it presents […]

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The city may be considering the deeply contaminated Public Place site between Smith Street and the Gowanus Canal as a site for housing and the community may have other ideas about using the space as a park. The Brooklyn Brewery, however, may be eyeing the land as a new site for its operation. The brewery […]

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[Photo courtesy of poopreport/flickr] Being the Gowanus Lounge and having the Big G as one of the many Brooklyn locales that claims our attention, we’d be remiss if we didn’t not that last night was the release party at Galapagos for the new book, Poop Culture. We’d noticed the crapper above–which was created for the […]

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Sorry, readers, we really thought we were done with Roebling Oil Field photos–for the uninitiated, it’s our favorite development site, at N. 11th Street and Roebling in Williamsburg–given that the entire site is nearly covered in concrete. That was before a neighborhood source called us over the weekend and directed our attention to the space […]

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[Photo courtesy of Bad Advice] The Department of Environmental Conservation’s Spill Team was spotted in front of the Roebling Oil Field yesterday, but it’s unclear whether they were checking out test wells, cruising the hood, stopping to siphon some fuel from underground or just socializing (or whatever) with the two gentlemen in the photo. The […]

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The time is drawing closer for the oily past at the Roebling Oil Field site to be out of sight, if not entirely out of mind. The western end of the site is now under concrete. Soon, all that will be left to remind us are those little wells on N. 11th Street and on […]

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We suspend any attitudes momentarily and give it up for the kids at PS 321 in Park Slope who did this little earth day walkathon for three green-oriented nonprofits, including Transportation Alternatives. This is a Street Films production and we found it on Streets Blog, of course.

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There was another meeting last week about the future of the so-called Public Place site in Gowanus, the highly toxic parcel between Smith Street and the Gowanus Canal. It was once the site of a former Manufactured Gas Plant and is one of the more toxic parcels in Brooklyn, with contamination reaching as deep as […]

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The excellent vbs.tv series called “Toxic Brooklyn” on the environmental issues in Greenpoint and Williamsburg continues with a focus on the horrendous Exxon-Mobil Greenpoint Oil Spill, the impact on the health of residents and the virtual acceptance of the situation by local, state and federal government over many decades. Episode 6 is below. You can […]

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