A waterfront glow-up is transforming Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal

FastCompany: For a Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal is looking surprisingly nice these days. Long an industrial dumping site, the Brooklyn waterway has undergone decades of interventions to undo that damage. Now, after years of planning and community outreach, redevelopments along the polluted Gowanus Canal waterfront are giving the area a welcoming residential gloss. Two recently opened projects exemplify the transformation underway along the Gowanus Canal .

Both designed by the landscape architecture firm Scape and in line with a master plan it helped release in 2019, the projects are a preview of what it will look like when the Gowanus completes one of the most dramatic urban turnarounds in recent times. Sackett Place [Photo: Ty Cole/Scape] The two projects are new public spaces that begin to reconnect people to the Gowanus Canal’s waterfront as it nears completion of its environmental cleanup. One is a waterfront plaza and esplanade wrapping a two-tower residential and office development. The other is a linear waterfront park with a playground, picnic area, and gardens.

Both are rebuilding the ecology along the canal while significantly increasing access to a waterway that had spent decades off limits. “The Gowanus as an ecosystem and as a neighborhood is so interesting because it is being remade at a systemic level in so many different ways over a relatively short period of time for an urban area,” says Gena Wirth, design principal and partner at Scape. 420 Carroll [Photo: Ty Cole/Scape] Much of the change along the canal has been spurred by a rezoning process launched in 2014 that enabled the former industrial land to be redeveloped into a mixed-use neighborhood.

It was an official change for an area that had been slowly evolving through the grassroots efforts of community groups focused on environmental justice, ecological restoration, and public space. One group, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, was founded in 2006 and has been working since then to clean up and restore the canal and its neighborhood, and has been a key part of the transformation now underway.

420 Carroll [Photo: Ty Cole/Scape] “We have years of experience doing a lot of hands-on stewardship on street trees, rain gardens, and guerrilla gardens throughout the neighborhood and through that we have really developed a very fine-tuned understanding of what biodiversity has existed in the neighborhood, specifically before the cleanup, and what types of landscapes can really thrive here,” says Andrea Parker, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy. In 2017, the conservancy hired Scape to create a master plan for the area, which was published in 2019.

“This Lowlands master plan was really about advocating for positive change and putting forward a vision for the future,” says Wirth. “It’s been a real estate speculative market for like 40 years. So it’s not under-considered, but it’s been kind of abandoned from a functional perspective for a while.” Sackett Place [Photo: Ty Cole/Scape] The plan set standards for how future development along the canal could contribute to its cleanup and restoration.

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The redevelopment of the Gowanus Canal waterfront is a significant urban branding initiative that highlights sustainability and community engagement, making it highly impactful and relevant for brand strategy professionals, while its focus on ecological restoration adds a level of novelty.