Gowanus Canal: To Superfund or Not To Superfund?

Tuesday, I spent five sweaty hours by the Gowanus Canal getting feedback from the locals on how they feel about the whole Superfund thing. It was interesting, but feeling the sweat trickle down my calf while interviewing someone in Carroll Gardens isn't my ideal image of journalism. But I did it! And my colleague wrote it up.

Story teaser:

A proposal for a federally overseen clean-up of the Gowanus Canal sounds like something that everyone can get behind, but it’s actually pitting neighbor against neighbor over facts and hearsay that are as murky as the waterway itself.

Posters clamoring for the Environmental Protection Agency to list the infamous canal as a federal Superfund site have materialized on storefront windows in Carroll Gardens and outside nearby brownstone homes almost overnight — even as anonymously written fliers have started showing up in area mailboxes claiming that such a designation would depress home values and not actually speed the clean-up of the fetid corpse of water.

While the activists fight it out, residents are caught wondering who — and what — to believe.

Read the rest of my story for The Brooklyn Paper here . . .

Above: The poster, designed by Anna Martin, that some residents and businesses are hanging in windows.

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Lou Reed – Perfect Day