"Paddling in the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, has inspired one recovering lawyer to write poetry about toxic sludge, floating condoms, and gentrification."
"Brad Vogel was in his late twenties, working as an associate at a corporate law firm in Manhattan, when he first heard the siren call of the Gowanus Canal. The Brooklyn Paper had published an article about the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, a bunch of water-sport enthusiasts who, against hygienic common sense, spent their leisure time in the canal, a two-mile industrial channel that cuts through the heart of brownstone Brooklyn. It was full of heavy metals, liquid tar, chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, and, according to one scientific analysis, “every kind of imaginable pathogen.” The Dredgers organized canoe races up and down its length. They’d built a renegade dock, which members of the public could use to get on the water. “These people sound completely crazy,” Vogel remembered thinking to himself. “But this also sounds amazing.”
Brad Vogel was in his late twenties, working as an associate at a corporate law firm in Manhattan, when he first heard the siren call of the Gowanus Canal. The Brooklyn Paper had published an article about the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, a bunch of water-sport enthusiasts who, against hygienic common sense, spent their leisure time in the canal, a two-mile industrial channel that cuts through the heart of brownstone Brooklyn. It was full of heavy metals, liquid tar, chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, and, according to one scientific analysis, “every kind of imaginable pathogen.” The Dredgers organized canoe races up and down its length. They’d built a renegade dock, which members of the public could use to get on the water. “These people sound completely crazy,” Vogel remembered thinking to himself. “But this also sounds amazing.”
The Gowanus Canal was completed in 1869. The neighborhood surrounding it, which shares its name (and its smell), developed a reputation for griminess. It was home to oil refineries, gas plants, factories, dives, and working-class families. But, since the turn of the century, Gowanus has been changing, along with the rest of Brooklyn, if a bit more slowly. In 2016, a twelve-story luxury apartment building called 365 Bond opened along the banks of the canal. One-bedroom units were available for more than three thousand dollars a month. Vogel moved in not long after the building opened. Since then, he has watched the neighborhood attract more and more residents who move there despite the canal, not because of it.
“I moved to Gowanus so I could get on the water,” Vogel explained one morning while sitting in the back of a two-person canoe. After living in the neighborhood for less than three years, he had given up his law career and become the captain of the Dredgers, a position he’d held until 2022. That morning, he shoved off from a dock known as the Bunker Launch Site, at a bend in the Brooklyn waterfront between Red Hook and Sunset Park, where the canal empties out into the upper harbor. He bobbed for a moment, then dipped a paddle in the water and pushed ahead."
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