August 12, 2026 - Brooklyn Downtown Star

Gunk Rock Summer

BQE Admin on August 12, 2026

Lesley Braver’s new album, “The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal,” traces the neighborhood’s history from the perspective of a 400-year-old “superorganism.”

BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com

GOWANUS — Brad Vogel discovered the Fish Queen in the most quintessentially Gowanus way possible, albeit 50 miles from the infamous canal.

In July 2024, Vogel was vacationing at Cherry Grove — an LGBTQ mecca on Fire Island, a few hours east of Brooklyn — when he spotted a familiar figure coming down the boardwalk in flip-flops. It was Joseph Alexiou, the author of a go-to local history book about the neighborhood, “Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal,” and he had an urgent message for Vogel: “Make sure you talk to the Fish Queen person!”

Not long after, a puzzled Vogel received a text from another local character, Garrett Benisch, an artist with whom he’d collaborated on Sum Waste — a project to convert sewage from the canal into biochar that they used to print designs. Benisch’s missive was the same: You need to meet the Fish Queen person.

The “Fish Queen person,” as it turns out, was the musician Lesley Braver. At the time, she and her roommates had been told by their landlord that they would need to leave their apartment by the end of the summer. Braver, who holds a master’s degree in musical theater from NYU, had written 15 songs for an in-progress musical about Gowanus, and she decided to perform them in her backyard as a parting gift to the neighborhood.

Braver and Vogel hit it off over coffee at Principles GI Coffee, and she invited him to read a few of his poems at the show. Weeks later, sitting in the backyard with roughly 100 other Brooklynites, Vogel remembers turning to Alexiou and saying, prophetically, “This is the seed of something great.”

“The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” hit the stage in October of 2024. Now after two years and hefty fundraising, the gunk-rock epic is availiable on Spotify and Bandcamp.

And it was. Braver’s next act was to stage “The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” again several weeks later on the waterway itself, marshaling Vogel’s assistance to assemble a 72-foot-long raft and a fleet of canoes.

The expanded musical centered on the eponymous Fish Queen, a 400-year-old “super-organism” of mutant marine creatures held together by an inescapable fact of Gowanus life: human refuse, which floods the canal during rainstorms — and which endows the Fish Queen with the memories of everyone who has ever lived along its banks.

That October, the duo produced another multi-night performance at Principles, replete with an actor dressed as a cormorant haranguing the crowd from the top of a ladder. “Early on, the show took on this character of, ‘Oh, this is going to be an inherently mutational undertaking,’” said Vogel. “I find it fun every time we come to a new incarnation.”

Now, almost two years after those first shows and following a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $12,000 (“The rocket fuel of your generosity propels us!”), “The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” has evolved again. As of July 30, you can stream the gunk-rock epic, recorded at BC Studio in the old canning factory on Third Street, on Spotify and Bandcamp.

A lot has happened since we last saw the Fish Queen. For one, Braver realized she was trans at the start of 2025: “Fish queen is sort of a slang term in the queer community, ‘fish’ being very feminine,” she said. “I knew that double meaning when I was writing the musical, but I thought I was poking fun at it. I didn’t really think it was about me. Then in January, it started to dawn on me — like, I was not poking fun. I was trying to reach at something deep in my psyche that I didn’t realize.”

Gowanus has transitioned, too, with glassy high-rises cropping up in the wake of a neighborhood-wide rezoning that passed in 2021. Yet the remediation of the canal remains incomplete, raising concerns that Braver tackles in tracks like “What Has to be Done” and “Night-Time in Neo-Gowanus.”

“The rezoning has happened. What does that mean? What do we make of that?” said Braver. “There’s beauty in the newness, but there’s also a sense of, ‘Gosh, did we lose something?’”

As rents rise and ramshackle warehouses give way to luxury apartment buildings, the DIY scene that was once Gowanus’ calling card has gradually become more polished. The album’s release party at Judgy Baby, a multi-purpose art space on Second Street, conjured some of that scrappy magic: Fans danced in a dusty basement ringed by life-sized nude portraits, dodging plant fronds dangling from the low ceiling as the band, ensconced in a structure reminiscent of an Erector Set, played the night away.

“I feel like why I’m still involved on this crazy journey is that the musical itself just keeps giving back,” said Vogel, who produced the album. “It’s doing work on the advocacy front, but it’s also proving that there is a real creative community alive in Gowanus.”

Braver has since decamped from Gowanus to Crown Heights. But that’s only fitting — the album, amid surf-rock love songs and ACAB anthems, places the area’s current transformation within the context of many centuries of migration and change. “I am still really interested,” she said, “in bringing up that history and keeping it present and active for everybody.”

Braver is especially proud of the second track, “Gowanustown,” which she spent months workshopping. The sole tune sung by the Fish Queen herself, it’s also the album’s most ambitious, encapsulating 400 years of lore — Lenape, Dutch, Germans, Irish, Italians, and beyond — in just over four minutes. (Bogeymen name-dropped for failing to fix the canal include Lefferts, Litchfield, Lander, and National Grid.)

For Braver, recalling the Gowanus Canal’s pre-industrial existence as a healthy creek naturally leads to recognizing that the polluted status quo is untenable. Though she moved to Gowanus in 2016, she began toying with the initial drafts of her musical in 2021 after organizing with a grassroots environmental advocacy group, Voice of Gowanus (VoG), that has continued to push for a comprehensive remediation.

“I want the Fish Queen to be an amplification of what they’re fighting for,” she said of VoG, “which is a proper cleanup and science-backed measures to make sure that people are safe.”

The album is an undeniable romp. But until the waters of the canal run blue, it’s also a reminder — a stirring, danceable, often punny one, at that — of the work still to be done.

If you’re interested in learning more, visit @gowanusfishqueen on Instagram.

COBB: The Tragic Story of Roger Kennedy

BQE Admin on August 12, 2026

GEOFFREY COBB

Author, “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past”

gcobb91839@Aol.com

McGinn’s looked like a hundred other working-class taverns scattered across Brooklyn, but to the men who gathered there every evening it was much more than a bar. It was where neighbors traded news, argued about baseball and politics, found jobs on the waterfront, celebrated births, mourned deaths, and forgot the hardships of another day’s work. In old Greenpoint, a neighborhood tavern served as a second living room.

If McGinn’s itself was unremarkable, its new bartender was anything but. Thirty-two-year-old Roger Kennedy possessed the rare gift of making customers feel as though they had come not merely for a drink but for his company. Men who intended to stop for one beer often found themselves lingering for three.

Kennedy had arrived in New York only a short time earlier, and McGinn’s was his first American bartending job. His Irish brogue was so thick that customers often asked him to repeat himself, something that only made him laugh. He quickly learned every regular’s name and favorite drink. He listened far more than he spoke, but when he did speak, it was usually with warmth, wit, or quiet wisdom.

Good-natured and endlessly patient, Kennedy reminded many customers of their Irish fathers and grandfathers. He possessed an instinctive feel for tending bar. He knew when a man wanted nothing more than a beer and a few moments of silence, and when another needed someone to listen. His Irish jokes and stories about life back home regularly filled the tavern with laughter.

The regulars delighted in teaching Kennedy about America. They explained baseball, the hiring “shape-up” on the docks, banking, tipping, and a hundred other customs that were second nature to them but completely foreign to the newcomer from Ireland.

Nothing amused them more than Kennedy’s introduction to American tipping. After one of his first customers left a one-dollar tip, the bewildered bartender ran after him, insisting he had forgotten his money. The regulars laughed heartily before explaining that the extra dollar was his to keep. They also introduced him to the tradition of the complimentary “buy-back” beer that generous bartenders often offered loyal customers, a custom that usually resulted in even larger tips. Kennedy’s warmth, humor, and Irish charm soon ensured that he walked home most nights with a healthy pocketful of tip money.

Night after night Kennedy heard the same conversations. The men complained that Greenpoint no longer felt like the neighborhood where they had grown up. They spoke about rising crime, changing streets, and arguments with wives who wanted to leave Brooklyn for the quieter suburbs of Long Island.

Even McGinn’s was changing. Years earlier the regulars had never thought twice about walking home after midnight. Lately there were stories of muggings, robberies, and strangers drifting into neighborhood bars. Most dismissed them as isolated incidents. They were wrong.

Then, in early April, Greenpointers opened the Daily News and were horrified to discover that Roger Kennedy had been shot and killed in their neighborhood tavern. Just after last call, Kennedy was counting the night’s receipts and preparing to lock them in the safe when a young man entered carrying a .45-caliber pistol and announced a holdup. Kennedy reacted instinctively. Rather than surrender the evening’s modest receipts, he vaulted over the bar and grabbed the gunman.

It was a courageous decision—and a fatal one. The robber, later identified as twenty-three-year-old John Coonan of Manhattan, broke free and fired four shots. Two struck Kennedy in the chest, killing him instantly. Sixty-three-year-old Vincent Kessner, a longtime Greenpoint resident, was so enraged by the murder that he forgot his own safety and chased the gunman into the street, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Get him! Get him!”

Two young men who had left the tavern only moments earlier, twenty-two-year-old Robert Ceruto and twenty-three-year-old Thomas Solecki, heard the shots and turned to see Coonan running down the street with the pistol still in his hand. They immediately gave chase.

Realizing the two men were gaining on him, Coonan suddenly wheeled around and attempted to aim the pistol at them. Whether he lost his nerve or simply panicked, he turned and ran again instead of firing, allowing his pursuers to close within a few feet.

Near Calyer Street, Ceruto finally tackled the fleeing gunman. As the pistol discharged harmlessly, Solecki threw himself onto Coonan. The two enraged men held him down and pummeled him until police officers arrived seconds later and pulled them away.

Most of McGinn’s regulars attended Kennedy’s funeral at St. Anthony’s Church. They were still struggling to comprehend that such a senseless act of violence had happened in the place where they had gathered night after night. They remembered his warmth, his humor, and the way he made everyone feel welcome. As the priest spoke of Kennedy’s kindness and generosity, many in the congregation quietly wiped away tears.

To them, Kennedy’s murder was more than a terrible crime. It symbolized the passing of the Greenpoint they had loved—a neighborhood where people once left their doors unlocked, children played safely in the streets, and everyone knew the bartender by name.

32-year-old Roger Kennedy, bartender at McGinn’s. Photo via Vintage American Bars, Lounges, Clubs, Taverns & Saloons on Facebook.

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