In the middle of the nineteenth century, the City of Brooklyn commissioned a canal to facilitate commerce between New York Harbor and the farms and mills operating in the interior of the future borough. The Gowanus Canal, which was completed in 1869, was a fast success, and helped to make the neighborhood that grew up around it into a hub for manufacturing and shipping in Brooklyn. But a century and a half of industrial waste and untreated drainage took its toll, and in 2010 the E.P.A. designated the highly polluted canal a Superfund site. Four years later, encouraged, perhaps, by the prospect of a half-billion-dollar cleanup plan, condominium developments have been popping up in the neighborhood (also called Gowanus), and in December Whole Foods opened its first Brooklyn location a block from the canal.
Miska Draskoczy, a thirty-eight-year-old designer and director, has lived in Gowanus since 2008. He began taking photographs for his series “Gowanus Wild” while walking around his neighborhood in the middle of the night. “The same alley could alternately contain an abandoned boat, exploded suitcases, huge piles of logs, or a sea of frozen mud on any given night,” he told me. “I like this idea of urban eddies, how the nooks and crannies of a city collect the residue of daily activity and trap it for a while, until it gets flushed onward.” Draskoczy said that, so far, the wildest thing he has seen near the Gowanus was a snow-white egret perched in a tree overlooking the canal: “It still amazes me this beautiful creature could survive in such a damaged environment. It’s these sorts of contradictions that encourage me to keep looking.”
Photographs courtesy of Tepper Takayama Fine Arts.