“The construction of the Gowanus Parkway [in 1941], laying a concrete slab on top of lively, bustling Third Avenue, buried the avenue in shadow, and when the parkway was completed, the avenue was cast forever into darkness and gloom, and its bustle and life were gone forever. And through that shadow, down on the ten-lane surface road beneath the parkway, rumbled regiments, brigades, divisions of huge tractor-trailer trucks, engines gunning and backfiring, horns blasting, brakes screeching . . . And from above, from the parkway itself, came the continual surging, dull, surf-like roar, punctuated, of course, by more backfires and blasts and screeches, of the cars passing overhead. Once Third Avenue had been friendly. Now it was frightening.”
The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), by Robert Caro
“The Gowanus Expressway gets a bad rap, deservedly so. I mean, during rush hour it's probably the largest elevated parking lot in the world. But there’s an upside to it as well. In some ways the Gowanus serves as a natural boundary, separating the industrial part of Sunset Park from the residential part. And that has helped to preserve some of the industry. Sunset Park is very much an immigrant community, and it’s unique in that a large percentage of the people who live here work here, and I think that is special, and I think that needs to be preserved.”
From an interview with a Sunset Park Community leader (2006)
By any conventional standard, whether aesthetic, environmental, or cultural, the Gowanus Expressway is a monstrosity. Still, I find leisurely walks along Third Avenue enjoyable and inspiring. There’s something arresting about the whole brutalist structure—especially those green pillars—and the peculiar commercial life that flourishes beneath it. The Gowanus evinces a powerful idea: however unlovely a thing is, it might still be capable of evoking powerful feelings within a person and providing a glimpse of the sublime. If something can stimulate a person in this way, and do it consistently, it could be said to possess intrinsic beauty. Intrinsic beauty elevates a thing or a collection of things (like a neighborhood); intrinsic beauty is a mark of power. This idea goes to the heart of explaining Brooklyn’s singular vitality. It isn’t just a diverse area with some typically charming elements (Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Park, etc.) and some other elements that are opposite (like the Gowanus). It is a place where everything meshes into a totality, where all is subordinate to the overarching mystique and profound beauty that is Brooklyn.
The unintentionally funny generic names of a few small manufacturing companies on Second Avenue suggest a certain immigrant earnestness, and lead me to believe that the quality of their craftsmanship is inversely proportional to their verbal creativity.
Brooklyn was once the fourth largest industrial center in the U.S., employing about 600,000 people in manufacturing jobs right after World War II. Today it’s less than a tenth of that number. But industry lives in Brooklyn, which is obvious from any weekday stroll through places like Gowanus, Greenpoint, and Sunset Park. Artisans, tradesmen, and laborers flood these quarters, representing a manufacturing boomlet driven by a steady influx of both skilled and unskilled labor from all over the world.
To me—a man of the keyboard, a “knowledge worker”—the surviving spirit of Brooklyn’s once imposing industrial economy is intoxicating; the landscape of working factories intermingled with copious decay strikes me as some kind of exotic dreamscape. But whenever I trawl industrial Brooklyn, with my camera and notebook and my ethereal concerns, I am constantly reminded of the working man's enduring place in the real world.
