When filmmakers Jamie Courville and her husband, Chris Reynolds, first moved to Gowanus in 2009, they were drawn to the gritty, postindustrial romance of the neighborhood. Located just a year before the Gowanus Canal was officially designated a federal Superfund site, the area offered a rare kind of raw inspiration. As Courville recalls, you simply could not take a bad photograph of the landscape. Beyond the visual appeal, the neighborhood’s abandoned warehouses and defunct factories provided affordable studio spaces. While housing options were sparse outside of the nearby NYCHA public housing developments, apartments were relatively spacious and inexpensive. For roughly $2,000 a month, Courville and Reynolds secured a generous 1,100-square-foot loft that doubled as their workspace. At a time when neighboring industrial hubs like Williamsburg and Long Island City were rapidly glossing over into homogenized versions of their former selves, Gowanus retained an aura of mystery, potential, and untamed freedom.
That unique atmosphere persisted largely because of the formidable physical obstacle cutting through the neighborhood: the Gowanus Canal. Filled with decades of sewage, toxic sludge, and a staggering array of pathogens, the waterway was a notorious cesspool. Longtime residents like artist Karen Gibbons, who arrived in the early 1980s, openly joked about the impossibility of raising children near such environmental hazards, even as she and her husband ultimately put down roots to take advantage of expansive, loft-law-protected spaces. Yet, while the noxious canal might have deterred development elsewhere in New York City, the 2010 federal Superfund designation signaled an open invitation to real estate investors. It confirmed that the federal government would eventually clean up the century-old pollution, paving the way for long-stabled development schemes.
The transformation gathered momentum quickly. Whole Foods opened a massive flagship store complete with a rooftop greenhouse on a bleak corner of Third Avenue and Third Street, followed closely by trendy neighborhood staples like the Lavender Lake bar, Dinosaur Bar-B-Q, and the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club. Speculative developers, who had been quietly acquiring parcels of land for decades, sensed the shifting tides and began positioning themselves for residential rezonings.
Recognizing that change was inevitable, local leaders argued that the community needed to actively steer the development rather than watch it happen to them. Former city councilmember Brad Lander, drawing on his background as an urban planner and community organizer, championed a vision to turn Gowanus into a vibrant, economically diverse neighborhood. His ambitious blueprint promised thousands of new affordable apartments, stabilized spaces for artists, revitalized public housing, and an accessible public esplanade along the remediated canal. Rather than following the trajectories of Williamsburg or Hudson Yards, Lander pushed for a comprehensive rezoning initiative that officially kicked off in 2016. The resulting framework granted developers the authority to build residential towers in exchange for an unprecedented package of community benefits and infrastructure commitments.
Documenting the massive pivot, Courville and Reynolds began filming the neighborhood in 2013, capturing the demolition of old brick structures, the removal of toxic sludge on barges, and the spirited community meetings leading up to the historic 2021 City Council vote. Their footage ultimately expanded into a massive archive, culminating in a documentary film titled Gowanus Current. As Courville notes, what transpired went far beyond traditional gentrification; the old neighborhood was essentially demolished and entirely rebuilt from the ground up. Today, the 82-block rezoning zone features active construction sites, newly completed developments, and transformed lots on nearly every corner, with estimates projecting the addition of some 9,000 new housing units by the end of the decade.
Despite the grand vision of a clean, progressive urban oasis—sometimes romantically compared by executives to a Nordic waterfront city—skepticism remains deeply rooted. Unlike smoothly executed urban planning projects in Northern Europe, New York City infrastructure upgrades are forged through complex, often contentious bureaucratic negotiations. Furthermore, the neighborhood remains a patchwork of brownfields laden with subterranean coal tar and chemical solvents. Digging up and capping toxic muck while tens of thousands of new residents move in presents a daunting environmental balancing act.
Among the early residential arrivals following the 2021 rezoning was a luxury rental tower at 544 Carroll Street, developed by Avery Hall. Situated directly on the border of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, founding partner Brian Ezra noted that development was an inevitability given the neighborhood’s prime geographic position. Aiming squarely at the upper tier of the luxury market, the building features high-end finishes, premium appliances, and commanding rental prices, including a duplex penthouse that briefly hit the market for $25,000 a month.
Andrea Parker, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, argues that maintaining the industrial status quo was never a viable option. Without a comprehensive rezoning, the neighborhood would have likely devolved into a haphazard collection of self-storage facilities, axe-throwing venues, and isolated luxury enclaves lacking meaningful public infrastructure.
The resulting rezoning agreement was groundbreaking on several fronts. It incorporated a mandatory inclusionary housing requirement stipulating that 25 percent of units in new developments remain affordable to households earning between 40 and 80 percent of the area median income. It also secured $200 million for critical repairs at local NYCHA complexes and included the city’s first racial-impact study on a rezoning initiative. Under the plan, individual developers are held responsible for remediation at their specific building sites, while the broader canal cleanup costs are targeted at original corporate polluters.
However, the timeline of the environmental remediation has lagged significantly behind the breakneck pace of private construction. Dredging and capping have proceeded slowly across the 1.8-mile canal, with cost estimates ballooning from an initial $500 million to approximately $1.5 billion. Combined sewage-overflow retention tanks slated to mitigate future runoff are not scheduled for completion until 2029, raising concerns that portions of the waterway may require secondary dredging to clear newly accumulated contaminants. Meanwhile, projects like Gowanus Green—a planned 100 percent affordable housing complex slated for a former manufactured gas plant site—faced years of administrative delays tied to cleanup standards before the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently approved a phased remediation plan.
Even before the canal is fully swimmable, developers have aggressively marketed their waterfront locations. Properties like the Domain Companies’ 420 Carroll boast multiple water exposures, leveraging the basin views to attract renters rapidly. Other firms, such as Tavros Capital and Charney Companies, have embraced nautical branding across massive multi-building complexes like Gowanus Wharf, demonstrating how deeply local perceptions have shifted over the past decade.
Living through the neighborhood’s industrial rebirth has not been without immediate physical tolls. Residents have endured sulfurous odors, headaches, and nausea linked to coal tar remediation and canal dredging. Federal environmental officials have noted that volatile compounds like naphthalene can produce noticeable odors even at safe, low concentrations, prompting authorities in past summers to deploy deodorizing misters, tarps, and odor-suppressing foam to appease distressed neighbors.
More alarming discoveries emerged in late 2023, when public records requests revealed that toxic trichloroethylene (TCE) vapors—a carcinogenic industrial solvent linked to birth defects and Parkinson’s disease—were migrating upward through the soil and into the basements of several local buildings. State testing at the popular Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club detected chemical vapor levels significantly exceeding allowable guidelines, while nearby commercial spaces and even a local public school faced similar scrutiny. Because state environmental agencies cannot legally compel private property owners to test existing buildings without consent, the true extent of the underground vapor plumes remains difficult to quantify, leaving local advocacy groups and residents locked in ongoing battles over transparency and health safeguards.
Despite these environmental headwinds, the Brooklyn real estate market has absorbed the new inventory with astonishing speed. Prospective tenants, particularly families priced out of traditional brownstone enclaves like Park Slope, have flocked to newly constructed rental towers to secure modern amenities, central air conditioning, and proximity to high-performing public schools. For many renters, the presence of historical subterranean contamination feels distant when living on the upper floors of heavily engineered, heavily monitored new towers featuring integrated vapor barriers and sophisticated air filtration systems.
Longtime neighborhood fixtures and local institutions are also attempting to navigate the cultural upheaval. Arts Gowanus successfully negotiated for more than 100 affordable art studios embedded within new developments, securing below-market rents and strict annual caps to prevent the displacement of local creatives. While critics mourn the loss of the raw, unpredictable spaces that defined the old Gowanus, and filmmakers like Courville ultimately chose to depart as the cultural shift took hold, others acknowledge that the structured compromise was the only viable mechanism to retain a shred of the neighborhood’s artistic soul.
Ultimately, the new Gowanus represents a paradox of modern urban development—a gleaming landscape of luxury towers, public esplanades, and protected arts spaces rising directly out of a deeply troubled industrial past. Whether the complex engineering feats designed to seal away a century of environmental neglect will provide lasting safety for the tens of thousands of new residents remains a defining question. For now, high above the churning construction sites and the gray-green waters of the canal, renters continue to unpack their boxes, looking out over a transformed Brooklyn skyline.
