“He’s the keeper of the dream,” says an off-camera voice, introducing the man with the plan to reinvent Gowanus. “He’s the visionary who, for 30 years, has been leading the community efforts to make beneficial change in this place.” Some two decades before politician Brad Lander set out to reinvent the noxious Brooklyn neighborhood, a vocal resident named Buddy Scotto campaigned for the very same, his efforts chronicled in Allison Prete’s prescient 1999 documentary Lavender Lake (the title replicating the waterway’s nickname, for its oil-slicked surface.) Long ripe for redevelopment, the low-lying industrial area was still a sparsely populated artist enclave back then, when Lander was cutting his teeth with the Fifth Avenue Committee. Years later, as a city councilmember, the recent mayoral hopeful would spearhead the successful albeit controversial rezoning that is now briskly reshaping the neighborhood. The construction of new housing is outpacing the long-overdue effort to dredge the superlatively toxic waterway—“one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies,” per the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s 2010 superfund designation—and mitigate district-scale sewage issues for posterity.
Where Prete’s elegiac film tells how one of the most important waterways in 19th century America became one of the most compromised bodies of water in the 20th, Jamie Courville and Chris Reynolds take a more abstract tack in their new documentary, Gowanus Current (2024). Their vérité approach is poetry to Prete’s prose, a chronological series of long takes that capture the forlorn beauty of urban decay alongside countervailing community activism over the course of a decade.
At a screening in April, Reynolds noted that the directors “weren’t trying to make an advocacy film [but rather] a portrait of advocacy and its limits.” The other side of the coin—the one it landed on—is Lander’s proudest achievement as a councilmember, as he put it at a campaign stop this spring: “More housing is going up right now [in Gowanus] than anywhere else in the city.” Construction has forged ahead at a mind-boggling pace, with building cores and skeletal floorplates shooting skyward like a superbloom of concrete and steel. By one recent count, there are 141 residential projects in development in Gowanus; all told, the 82-acre rezoning is slated to bring upward of 9,000 units—or 20,000 new residents—by 2035. With housing near the top of the list of just about every mayoral candidate’s talking points, the comptroller is among the few who can point to new residents enjoying a public esplanade while pile drivers peek over plywood fencing across the way.
Whether or not it’s a replicable model remains to be seen; with Zohran Mamdani’s nomination, Lander has positioned himself for a key role in the next administration. Yet the rezoning didn’t happen overnight: The carcinogenic canal has inspired flights of postindustrial renaissance since its decline in the 1960s, from Scotto’s Venetian vision to the delayed but finally underway remediation efforts and infrastructure upgrades. Courville and Reynolds started filming in 2013, the same year that the EPA’s Record of Decision finally kicked off the cleanup. That year also saw Lander launch the Bridging Gowanus community planning initiative, a prelude to a Department of City Planning official study in 2016, which culminated in the passage of the Gowanus Neighborhood Plan in the final months of the de Blasio administration.
The films invariably fail to capture the bouquet of l’eau de Gowanus, the fetid odor that is partly attributable to combined sewer overflow (CSO) events, when heavy rain flushes sewage into the canal. Indeed, the cleanup effort has been a slog, with costs ballooning to triple the EPA’s original high estimate of $500 million as nearly every step has taken longer than anticipated. Completion of the two new CSO storage tanks, originally slated for 2022 completion, has been pushed back to 2028 and 2029; Department of Environmental Protection—putatively working in tandem with the feds but often at odds with them— completed excavation of the larger site, near the northern terminus of the waterway, in March 2025. Perversely, delays in constructing the tanks mean that contamination from CSOs may require the redredging of sections of the canal.
Environmental concerns and sordid history notwithstanding, a handful of the new residential blocks have recently been completed, the first one being the FXCollaborative-designed towers at 420 Carroll Street, where move-ins—to studios starting at $3,430 per month and 3-bedrooms going for around $9,000—started in February. It sits across the canal from the first movers in the neighborhood, at 363 and 365 Bond Street, who arrived in 2017, predating the rezoning. At 12 stories each, the Hill West–designed, Lightstone-developed rental towers seemed out of scale at the time but have since been dwarfed by the 21- and 16-story towers of 420 Carroll and its fast-rising neighbors.
A couple of blocks up Bond Street, Society Brooklyn started welcoming new residents in May; both its waterfront Privately Owned Public Spaces and that of 420 Carroll were designed by SCAPE and are now open to the public. Developed by Property Markets Group and designed by SLCE Architects, Society Brooklyn is punctuated by two glazed 21-story high-rises and is one of several new buildings that boast an outdoor pool among their many amenities. Unsurprisingly, the new buildings’ marketing either glosses over or romanticizes the canal’s history: 499 President Street, another pool-bedecked recent completion, markets itself as an example of “how Gowanus is transforming into a mini-Copenhagen,” citing Danish bricks and ignoring the more compelling parallel of the Scandinavian city’s comprehensive “Sponge City” approach to managing stormwater.
Nearby, Charney Companies and Tavros Capital have strung together a series of parcels on the east side of the canal in a portfolio that they’ve dubbed Gowanus Wharf, totaling over 2,000 units across four buildings. All but one were designed by Fogarty Finger, with Union Channel being the first to complete and Nevins Landing to follow. And on the west side of the waterway, Tankhouse’s 450 Warren, its fourth project designed by SO – IL, is now under construction.
A couple blocks downstream, past 420 Carroll and Powerhouse Arts—Herzog & de Meuron and PBDW Architects’ impeccable adaptive reuse of a former power station known as the Batcave—175 Third Street is a recent acquisition for the Charney/Tavros joint venture, with a newly updated design by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). More staid than BIG’s previous design for seller RFR, the massive property will occupy a full block between the art hub and the Whole Foods that opened in 2013, a bellwether of changes to come. With their esplanade frontage, both Nevins Landing and 175 Third also feature landscape design by Field Operations.
At one million square feet and “around 1,000” units, 175 Third will be the largest single development in the area, matched only by the long-planned Gowanus Green development, where 950 units, all affordable, will rise at the former Citizens Manufactured Gas Plant site on Smith Street. The project has been in the works for nearly two decades, with new renderings of the Marvel Architects–designed buildings revealed last April but still no start or end date as of press time. (Neither HPD nor the developers—the Hudson Companies, Jonathan Rose, and Fifth Avenue Committee—responded to inquiries.) It can’t come soon enough: At a March Gowanus Oversight Task Force meeting, Christian Schilhab of Domain, the developer of 420 Carroll, reported that it had received 94,000 housing-lottery applications for 90 affordable units.
On a more positive note, the neighborhood plan’s $200 million for modernization and renovation of the Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens, two New York City Housing Authority campuses in the vicinity, is beginning to bring tangible benefits to some 3,700 residents. With any luck, those much-needed improvements will be completed within the projected 3.5-year timeline, coinciding with the completion of the CSO tanks.
In the meantime, sidewalk sheds and construction fences will continue to go up as fast as they come down. Given the pace of development, Gowanus Current is now as much a time capsule as Lavender Lake is. “Although [the rezoning] was pitched as growing the neighborhood, what actually happened was that the old Gowanus was taken away and a new neighborhood was put into its place,” reflected Reynolds after the screening. “[One with] the same name but nothing else in common. That’s not a value judgment; that’s just the reality of what this process was all about. That might be what’s best for New York City; it might be what’s best for Brooklyn. But really, there’s nothing left [from before].”
Indeed, the newcomers moving into the new homes probably don’t know or care that the Gowanus Creek—precanalization—was the site of the Battle of Brooklyn, a key moment in the Revolutionary War, or that the Gowanus Dredgers regularly conduct surveys of Atlantic ribbed mussels in the canal. They may not even know who Brad Lander is—they’re just looking for somewhere nice to live.
Ray Hu is a Brooklyn-based design writer and researcher.
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