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.
