Curiouser and Curiouser: Gowanus, Brooklyn’s Curious Canal

Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal
by Joseph Alexiou
(New York University Press)Have you heard a waterway hiss? Have you seen solid poo break asunder and dissolve? No? Well, then: Walk down Brooklyn’s Bond Street, turn onto Douglass, and stop—please—at the water’s edge. That stench that stanks, that fizzling miasma, is the Gowanus Canal, the notoriously toxic channel of chemicals, sludge, rotting mammals and, reportedly, even some actual H2O. It is also, despite all