The Citizens MGP brownfield site off Smith Street in Gowanus, as seen from the F train. (Photos: Jack Delaney)
BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
Last week, the state announced its plan to remediate a polluted lot in Gowanus that’s earmarked for affordable housing. But residents think the cleanup doesn’t go far enough — and argue that taxpayers shouldn’t be helping to foot the bill.
The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Department of Health held a public meeting on Tuesday, July 29, to present their proposed remedy for 459 Smith St, one of four parcels on the site of a former gas plant.
Yet in a neighborhood that boasts more than 130 brownfields, the forum doubled as a referendum on the wider cleanup of Gowanus.
The verdict wasn’t positive: “I’m not an engineer,” said local Joan Salome-Rodriguez. “But I am saying there is something morally wrong with the way this program is working.”
Gowanus Green’s Blues
The problems at the site run deep, quite literally. Over a century and a half ago, around the time the neighborhood’s infamous canal was built, the Citizen’s Manufactured Gas Company opened its first operation on its banks. The plant changed hands in the 1890s, but it would continue to provide locals with heat — and pump the ground with toxic byproducts like coal tar — until the 1960s.
Regulators have known for decades that the lot is profoundly polluted, and a recent study confirmed that the toxins extend 153 feet below the surface. Worryingly, those chemicals are now migrating outward from the site, threatening to scuttle the EPA’s clean-up of the Gowanus Canal and expose dozens of homes to carcinogens.
But for as long as there’s been talk of remediation, there have also been plans to use the site for sweeping developments — and pressure to expedite the process, even if that meant risking further exposure or leaving residents in the dark.
Some brief history: In the 60s, Community Board 6 voted to set aside the land for “badly needed recreational space.” A year later, the city took over two parcels of the site in foreclosure proceedings. However, it would take until 2008 for it to settle on a developer: a joint venture that offered to build affordable housing, dubbing the project Gowanus Green.
That vision seemed shaky when in 2010 the adjacent canal was designated a federal Superfund site, requiring a $1.5 billion clean-up that could last decades. Yet developers soon pinned their hopes on a potential rezoning — at 82 blocks, one of the largest ever in NYC — for which Gowanus Green, reimagined with a school, a park, and a new total of 900 affordable units, would serve as the crown jewel.
For supporters of the rezoning, which passed in 2021, Gowanus Green was the showpiece of what the neighborhood could become, a reclaimed space for residents of all income levels amid a citywide housing shortage. (One of the rezoning’s fruits, a two-tower complex at 420 Carroll, had already received 94,000 housing-lottery applications for 90 affordable units as of this March.)
Martin Bisi, a member of Voice of Gowanus, poses with a sign outside the DEC’s recent presentation at P.S. 372.
Yet for skeptics, including the advocacy group Voice of Gowanus, the idea of moving ahead with housing above a vat of coal tar, albeit one the state promised to remediate, was the rezoning’s original sin.
Last week’s meeting underscored Gowanusians’ deep disillusionment with the project. Locals criticized the DEC’s choice to place Parcel 3 in the Brownfield program, blasted the approach itself as piecemeal, and described the overall process as a “black box.”
And as a plume of chemicals leaks into the broader neighborhood, the failure thus far to contain it — a tale involving lawsuits, scientists locked out of a parking lot, and a developer that drilled into toxic soil to get a tax break — holds lessons as to why New York writ large has struggled to clean up its most unlivable land.
Four Parcels, Three Headaches
If you peer out the window as the F or G train leaves Carroll St, you’ll see it: a wide, fenced-off expanse of weeds and rubble that dominates the foreground before the gaze is drawn up and away, past a thirty-foot graffiti dragon and over red-tinged buildings, towards Prospect Park.
From above, the Gowanus Green site looks like a unified, if mostly empty, lot. But it’s actually four different parcels, managed by three unrelated companies (see graphic). National Grid oversees the central chunk, Parcels 1 and 2, where it has carried out concrete mixing in the past. Across 5th St, a small parking lot for commercial buses and trucks makes up Parcel 4.
That leaves Parcel 3 to the southwest, which was National Grid’s responsibility — its predecessor, Brooklyn Union Gas Company, is liable as the Potentially Responsible Party (PRP), a legal byword for “polluter” — until the developer of Gowanus Green petitioned the state to carry out the remediation, in exchange for financial incentives.
Each parcel has presented regulators with unique, and increasingly maddening, roadblocks to remediation.
On Parcels 1 and 2, the would-be location of a park called Public Place, National Grid began the cleanup in 2019 and by 2024 was reporting that the work was “largely finished.” Almost 1000 feet of bulkheads were installed, 80,0000 tons of soil were treated, and 18 underground wells were placed. But as early as 2020, the EPA’s Christos Tsiamis sounded the alarm that the company’s remedy was “insufficient,” because it only dug down 22 feet and didn’t address deeper coal tar deposits that could leach into the canal or evaporate into nearby buildings.
The Citizens MGP lot is split into four parcels, each with their own arrangements, as state officials attempt to deal with lingering coal tar.
Tensions came to a head in February 2024, when the DEC told National Grid that it would have to follow new EPA guidelines mandating additional measures to prevent the contamination of groundwater. The energy giant was not pleased — it triggered a dispute resolution process that is ongoing, and which has paused all remediation while the two parties duke it out in court.
It gets more absurd from there. On Parcel 4, which was bought for about $8 million in 2008, the owner has simply refused to allow DEC and National Grid onto the property to conduct remediation. A “Community Update” from the DEC in 2022 noted that “access negotiations” were in progress; three years later, the environmental scientists present at last week’s meeting said they are still trying to enter, with no new updates.
At Parcel 3, in theory the least embattled of the bunch, the issue wasn’t inertia, but overactivity. Back in 2022, the group behind Gowanus Green— a consortium composed of Hudson Companies, Jonathan Rose Companies, Bluestone Organization, and the nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee — was racing to meet the deadline for the city’s 421-a program, which encourages developers to build housing by exempting them from property taxes.
One Friday that May, kids passing by 459 Smith St felt earth-shaking vibrations and smelled coal tar. After their parents called local Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon, who had not been notified of any plans, the truth came out: with the DEC’s blessing, the developers had begun driving piles into the ground for foundations, despite the risks of kicking up soil-bound toxins.
Residents are starting to ask why the lot is divided into four parts to begin with, given that in local Brad Vogel’s words, “the coal tar migrates and doesn’t care who owns the parcels.” Faced with a fractured cleanup, dozens of attendees voiced frustration with the financial considerations that seemed to underpin the current setup.
Consider the classification of Parcel 3. If there’s no obvious PRP, the state is required to place a toxic property in the Brownfield Cleanup program (BCP) rather than the state Superfund program. According to Heide-Marie Dudek, the DEC project manager who led the presentation, the two tracks have essentially the same health standards. The main difference is the financial mechanism: the former offers private entities tax incentives to remediate, while the latter is funded by polluters.
But in this case, there is a clear PRP — National Grid. As such, residents wanted to know why Parcel 3, unlike the rest of the site, is being remediated with public money.
“Nobody is addressing why this site is in the Brownfield program that we all pay for, because the developers get tax breaks,” said Salome-Rodriguez. “This site should be in the state Superfund program, and National Grid should be paying for the clean-up.”
Dudek responded that regulators had decided to pursue the BCP because it offered the best chance of a timely, thorough remediation.
Yet other residents such as Steve Marcus backed Salome-Rodriguez, characterizing the choice as arbitrary. “If you look at your own DEC website, there is absolutely no mention of any of these sites — there’s 260 manufactured gas plants in the state of New York — being in the Brownfield program,” he said. “That is a fact, and that’s the reason why you’re getting a lot of pushback.”
For Vogel, the issue isn’t just the financing. “We need this entire site to be handled as one coherent State Superfund,” he echoed, “that addresses this in a comprehensive way and accounts for the reality of toxins migrating off-site.”
The latest DEC proposal includes an underground “wing wall” along Huntington Street to intercept them, for example, but it doesn’t extend all the way to Smith Street, and many at the meeting were eager to see the EPA take over the operation instead.
“A Black Box”
The community’s fractious relationship with the DEC — on Tuesday night, one man told the scientists they were “signing off on poisoning people” — can be traced in part to the agency’s reticence to share information with residents.
The most infamous flashpoint was the case of the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club, located at 543 Union Street. In 2021, state officials found that the air inside the building contained amounts of TCE, an industrial byproduct linked to cancer, birth defects, and Parkinson’s disease, that were 22 times greater than the safety threshold.
At that point, the DEC suspected that the toxins might be part of a larger, subterranean plume. It installed equipment at the shuffleboard club — the process of removing TCE is “relatively straightforward,” the NYT noted — but waited until the end of 2022 to reach out to nearby buildings, asking whether they wanted to be tested. Most said no; even after it expanded the probe, to date only about 100 of 626 properties have opted into the voluntary testing.
Most damningly, the DEC did not notify the public until 2023, two years after it first discovered the shockingly high levels of TCE. That the information came to light at all was partly thanks to Toxics Targeting, an environmental testing firm hired by Voice of Gowanus, which found the readings buried on the agency’s website. (The company’s CEO, Walter Hang, told the Post that the DEC “never mentioned the actual contaminant levels in multiple meetings, [and] never posted a single warning sign.”)
Heide-Marie Dudek of the DEC explains the agency’s approach at the Citizens MGP site to attendees.
In the context of that debacle, last week’s meeting was also an opportunity for residents to call for more transparency around the extent of pollution in the area, and the decisions being made regarding remediation.
Some locals observed how difficult it was to find basic details. “With the pile-driving from [2022], I had no idea about the petroleum tank that was perforated,” said musician Andy Cichon. “How does the community get updates on this information easily, without going through a myriad of different websites?” A spokesperson offered to add him to the agency’s listserv, and suggested using the online resource DEC InfoLocator.
But others, many of whom have lived on toxic land for much of their lives, wanted to know whether information was flowing the other way — from residents to the regulators. “Can you point to one Gowanus brownfield application that you have actually altered due to public comment?” asked Jack Riccobono, a member of Voice of Gowanus who heckled the presenters from the back of the gym. “Because there have been dozens of these applications where the community is putting comments, and we’ve not seen one altered a single time.”
“We do listen to the comments on every one of these sites,” replied Dudek. But aside from a conversation with the EPA, the DEC official did not cite examples.
