Patinas of Decay (Spring Comes to Brooklyn)

Rhythm is the basis of life, not steady forward progress. The forces of creation, destruction, and preservation have a whirling, dynamic interaction.

—Kabbalah



Writing on the wall . . . ?


A late April stroll through Red Hook confirms that spring is nearing full bloom. The streets are alive with revelations . . . Sun-dappled and shadow-drenched, patinas of decay adorn the landscape in varied patterns. The decay seems less a manifestation of rot within than a veneer signaling the growth below; not a state of ruination, but a state of becoming—the surface giving way to sprouting vitality.

The roots of a small tree, like convoluted tentacles, burrow under a factory gate . . . The grit from a crumbling window ledge melds with buds from tree branches lodged in the grating above . . . Shrubbery grows along warehouse fences, interwoven with chain link openings . . . And ivy, supple, wondrous ivy—the way it snakes all over and throughout and between everything natural and man-made . . . Vegetation growing among the built world’s detritus heightens the sense of nature’s rebirth—a fresh, underlying force come to light, engulfing the sullied environment (when given a chance).


Home is where the heart is



A sunbeam shines through the latticework of a crane boom draped over the highway—a glittering symbol of the horizon/the future/growth. Jackhammers ring in the distance; destroying in order to create, pummeling the old to make way for the new.

In architecture and landscape design, it is now de rigueur to incorporate vestiges of the past into brand new projects. Often these elements are inoperative or “distressed," decayed if you will; used for adornment (a nod to history, a wink to the cognoscenti).

In the scrap business/recycling in general, old, nonfunctioning objects are transformed and reintegrated into the new landscape. In the existence of every such object, though, between its demise and rebirth, there is a singular moment. It occurs at the scrap yard, in a state of transition. In that moment the object, once a uniform piece off an assembly line, is like nothing else—the way it rusts, the gouges and the dents. It is unique, like a snowflake, a metallic snowflake.


Vegetation growing among the built world’s detritus heightens the sense of nature’s rebirth.



Majestic Decay


Unique to Brooklyn, especially Red Hook, the decay is up front—not behind a sunny façade (a la suburbia). This rawness induces a more probing truth—authentic, inviting, a spur to wonderment.  That’s the allure of Red Hook, in essence.

Ode to the Humble Footbridge

Over traffic stream
the car-less trudge
the highway stops for no one


Bridging the gash (Hicks St. nr. Summit St.)


Above it all


The footbridge across the highway is a pedestrian refuge in the midst of the autosphere. The Summit Street Pedestrian Bridge in Red Hook spans the sunken BQE down below (the “Ditch”). When you’re on the bridge, you’re above the traffic, above the noise from the ditch below—that surf-like roar, with the blaring horns and screeching brakes. It drifts up to where you are, filtered by distance and tamed into a calming drone . . . Rush hour seen through the chain link fence is a panoramic glimpse of the city full on. Sunbeams reflect off glass and chrome, darting across windshields and spinning hubcaps—that mad kinetic frenzy! Looking over the Ditch, you feel like you’re commanding a perch all your own, above it all—ruthless velocity, concrete and steel.


Over and under (Hamilton Ave. nr. Henry St.)

Date with a highway (feel the vibrations)


Tunnel to purgatory


Another footbridge in Red Hook cuts across a 10- or 12-lane stretch where the Gowanus Expressway, the Battery Tunnel, and the BQE converge. It’s a jerry-built structure that goes over multiple roadbeds and under two others. Usually it’s bereft of pedestrians, except during certain parts of the day. When it’s empty, it’s bleak, a slab of concrete strewn with empty beer cans and who knows what—maybe a filthy pile of clothes or the odd used condom, everything coated with a dusting of exhaust fumes. It’s a blighted place, like a tunnel to purgatory. At one point, though, you pass under a road just a few feet above. You can feel the swarming traffic, the mechanical flow. The vibrations engulf you, allowing you to become intimate with the highway, perhaps more than a (living) pedestrian ever could be.


Walking on traffic


Any feelings of intimacy or omnipotence that may strike on the footbridge are usually fleeting, a result of lightheadedness perhaps. Back on the ground, one can see clearly that the footbridges of Red Hook symbolize the dominant place of highways in the neighborhood. They’re enduring reminders of the violence done by Robert Moses to expand his auto-centric vision into Red Hook and all over Brooklyn.

Moses was the Stalin of concrete, the “Master Builder” who built the BQE, the Gowanus Expressway, and so much more. The Ditch, like many of his projects, involved massive displacement—about 500 houses were demolished in the early 1950s. More significantly, it cut Red Hook off from the rest of south Brooklyn. It left a Mosaic landscape—a legacy of truncated avenues and bisected streets, more foe than friend to the walker trying gamely to navigate the broken topography.

SLIDESHOW – Footbridges & Pedestrian Tunnels (Flickr)

Industrial Memory

Derelict factory: Testament to ruin


Etched in the skyline


Layers of history


Red Hook is permeated by a ghostly aura—the spirit of industry. Decades of productive energies linger there with a heavy but elusive presence, like something far-off and epic. Relics from Brooklyn’s industrial prime are visible everywhere: derelict factories—cratered, garbage cramming their rusted lesions; cobblestones and trolley tracks peeking up through spots of worn asphalt; faded letters on buildings announcing long extinct companies—layers of time etched into the skyline.

The landscape of working factories and copious decay intermingled heightens the aura. There’s an intimacy at street-level, an immersion of the senses. Passing through industry’s vestiges, the environment expands. The soundscape grows more distinct, especially on warm days . . . the exuberant sounds of hammering, sawing, humming motors pour out from open doors, trailing you down the street . . . glow of a torch in a factory window a half-block away.


Phantoms of industry

The smell of petroleum by-products signals your entrance into the southeastern corner of Red Hook—the Industrial Zone. Steel, brick and concrete hold sway here, surrounding you with a monolithic palette of black/red/gray, as if all of sudden you’re in the bowels of the city. Elemental. You feel it in your gut. There’s a strangeness that engulfs you.


Thunderhead smokestack


The urge to produce or create is part of our genetic memory—a deep-rooted tendency, encoded in our DNA over time. Underlying all that is manmade—every plastic trinket that rolls off an assembly line, every painting, pop song, and opera—is the imperative to create. This is the true “meaning of life,” in all its primal, amorphous power. The industrial zone, out in the open, monolithic in scale, embodies this instinct.


On the waterfront


Brooklyn was once the fourth largest industrial center in the U.S, after World War II, employing about 600,000 people in manufacturing jobs. Today it’s less than a tenth of that number. Still, industry lives in Brooklyn. Any weekday stroll through Red Hook or Gowanus or Greenpoint confirms that artisans, tradesmen, and laborers remain in force.

Inevitably, though, in all such quarters, the artists come. They see possibilities where others see only squalor and oblivion. Artists are the vanguard of gentrification. In their wake come the galleries, boutiques, and bistros, signaling a new horizon, a decade or less in the future, when most of the borough will not exist in its present form.


Vintage decay


The specter of industry will always linger in former hotbeds of production, ensuring a legacy to build on, expanding Brooklyn’s uncanny interchange between past, present, and future.

SLIDESHOW – Industrial Brooklyn (Flickr)

My Canoe Trip on the Gowanus Canal

The Gowanus Canal is a strong Grey God. When she takes you in her arms you know that you have been kissed and spanked—and then you are kissed and spanked again.

—Craig Mullen


Recently I took a canoe trip on the Gowanus Canal, courtesy of Ellie Hanlon, captain of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. The Dredgers is a nonprofit group whose mission is to introduce New Yorkers to this singular waterway and provide education related to the canal and bordering shoreline neighborhoods. I couldn’t imagine a better guide than Hanlon. She has a near encyclopedic knowledge of the canal and its history. Also, she can discourse at length on key environmental issues and never for a second is it tedious, because she deftly ties it to the immediate surroundings. I’m talking real-time education. Most importantly, Hanlon is passionate about the canal, which she calls the “jewel of Brooklyn.” She is simply a force of nature, like some combination of Rachel Carson, Don King, and Hilary Duff; Hanlon is to the Gowanus Canal what Hemingway was to Key West.

The view from beneath the Union Street Bridge


Gear and electrical system under the Third Street Bridge


The banks of ruin


Canoeing on the Gowanus affords one a matchless perspective of the canal and its environs. To float atop the waterway and actually move through the forbidding industrial zone is to realize the poverty of the peripheral, street-level view. For me the proximity was intoxicating. I passed within inches of crumbling bulkheads I had previously only seen from a distance and luxuriated in the rich tapestry of decay—the unique patterns of damage, the dense mesh of flotsam and jetsam. I gazed in fascination at the undersides of bridges over which I had walked dozens of times, oblivious to the intricate mechanics beneath.

“The Gowanus Canal is magic,” says Hanlon, and I completely agree. I know we’re not the only ones who feel this way. The canal evokes strong feelings within many different types of people, which attests to its complex aura. It is at once indisputably real (like the concrete plants that surround it) and deeply metaphorical, both symbolizing and embodying essential truths—about Brooklyn and the world. And snaking within this tangle of the tangible and ethereal is aesthetics, for the canal is a visually arresting tableau, whose capacity to inspire shows vividly that it contains multitudes.





A canoe on the Gowanus is conspicuous and Hanlon likes to shout “Ahoy!” to curious landlubbers. More than a few people who noticed us made some crack about falling into the canal. (“You’ll have to cut off any body part that touches the water.”) The workers we passed were baffled by our presence and some thought we were daft, though it was all good-natured. Most of the employees of the factories, oil companies, and other businesses along the water probably see the canal as something altogether mundane, with no merit aside from being the place where they earn their living. And for them the idea of aestheticizing such a place, which is to say appreciating its non-commercial aspects, is completely alien. But this is as it should be; they are busy doing the real work that needs to be done there, playing a key role in making the Gowanus a functioning canal. They are integral to the diverse ecosystem that gives the place its character.





Paddling through the fetid water, surrounded by petrochemical odors, it seems unlikely that anything could live in such a toxic environment, but life is all around the canal. On my trip I saw marine life (mostly dead, though), waterfowl, and various indigenous species, like the Coney Island White Fish (used condoms floating on the water). It must be a tough life, though. This was made clear by the sight of a woeful duck in the 11th Street Basin (next to Lowe’s), sick and sluggish amidst the sludge.

The nature of man is to pervert nature. Witness the signature products of this tendency, the industrial revolution and nuclear weapons, where machines—those extensions of man, those alloys of organic and inorganic elements—were put in the service of further “taming” the environment and doing battle with other men. The price of modernity, which some call “progress,” is contamination. There may be ideal ways to handle the toxins essential to industrial processes if not avoid them altogether, but the workings of industry have proven these ideals to be impractical. Businesses and governments take shortcuts to maximize profits or achieve quotas, or ignorance rules and we don’t realize until it’s too late just what it is that makes us sick and how. Behold the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn’s own piece of this inglorious mosaic of pollution, rotting infrastructure, and the decline of U.S. manufacturing. It ain’t pretty, but in its own way, it’s quite beautiful.

Ikea in Red Hook: Globalization Comes to Brooklyn

After years of controversy Ikea has finally arrived in Red Hook, at the site of the former Todd Shipyard. The store looks just like every other one in the chain, but the lively waterfront and the gritty charms of the neighborhood, with its profusion of smokestacks and industrial buildings, give this “big box” a unique frame. I’d be surprised if there’s a more picturesque Ikea setting anywhere in the world.



Come for the furniture, stay for the nautical history


The mercantile behemoth has transformed the grounds behind the store into “Erie Basin Park,” a combination esplanade/open air museum with no shortage of relaxing vantage points. The six-acre park offers a gull’s eye of the waterfront, especially the heavily trafficked barge port across the basin, in the bend of the hook-shaped peninsula from which the neighborhood gets its name.







You can also see The Lady poking up over one of the squat 19th century buildings on a nearby pier, as a steady stream of tugboats and water taxis pass by. Nice touches abound, like spanking new concrete piers that end right before dilapidated remains of the old piers; ropes and bollards and other shipping tools in artful displays; and the visual showpieces of the whole property, those towering cranes—object reminders of shipbuilding’s massive scale.

It was a great experience, transcendent even—until I started shopping.

True to form, Ikea has domesticated the waterfront, substituting a consumer-friendly theme park for a once authentic nautical landscape. But I have to admit, it was a great experience, transcendent even—until I started shopping.

I was right to save the worst for last: two laps around that inhuman sprawl of a store, only to leave empty handed (I couldn’t find what I came for). Never has the word “Exit” seemed so alluring. I’m sure this says more about me than Ikea. I’ve always dreaded shopping—even more than the typical male—especially in large indoor spaces. When I was young and my mother took me to the mall, I would start to feel nauseous before we even got there.


Ikea is a wonder of branding and systemization. More than just a strong business concept, it is the blue-and-yellow face of globalization. The manner in which it has planted itself in Red Hook, integrating vestiges of the old economy—in effect using local color to sell its sleek products—is likely a sign of things to come. Whether you call it “exploitation,” “gentrification,” or “progress," Brooklyn is approaching the brave new world and will soon enter it completely, either by willful passage or dragged kicking and screaming.