Tag Archives: mapping gowanus

Hidden Doorways in Gowanus

I took this photo in 2014 and this week, it was selected for re: place – snapshots of Gowanus in transition. Curated by Miska Draskoczy, it was the Arts Gowanus exhibit at the Affordable Art Fair in New York City. I just found out it sold (!). This was my first art opening. But I am hoping that it won’t be the last as I am determined to get a showing for the Mapping Gowanus project I started on this blog years ago.

The opening was a fun event, like a local party – attended by so many Gowanus neighbors and artists I have known and seen in the neighborhood for years – who also had photos in the show. Miska did a great job selecting images that reflect the changes that have taken place over the years; they were familiar and yet taken as a whole, captured the bittersweet feelings of change.

As for the Mapping Gowanus project – it is interesting to me that when I started it over a decade ago, people followed the rules of the assignment quite well for the most part. You are assigned a block, you are to walk the block, and create something within 3 days in response to it. The exercise was meant to create a deadline, and force an instinctive response. People wrote songs, took photos, wrote essays, made videos. No overthinking. At some point, people suddenly stopped taking the deadline part seriously. And though many blocks have been assigned, getting people to turn in their “homework” has been nearly impossible for the past several years. Why is that? Is it something that happened post-Covid? Our current political climate? Or is it the changing neighborhood itself? Whatever it is… I will try to pull some teeth and get those projects turned in. After re: place I am eager to put up this show.

If you are interested in a block assignment – please reach out!

I’m baaaack

How embarrassing. I haven’t been here since Covid lockdown, back when I thought I was being so cool to wear a bandana under my nose to prove I was paying attention to CDC guidelines.

A lot has changed since those days.

I don’t care to rehash the Covid stuff. But all of the changes that have occurred in Gowanus in these several years seem important to document. So I am rebooting the Mapping Gowanus project. Stay tuned for new block projects!

In the meantime, here are some recent pics from a Sunday stroll.

Mapping Gowanus: Hoyt st. b/w 4th st. and the Canal

 

Gowanus Sonnet

by Adam Reid Sexton

 

Post-Carroll Street, when you are Brooklyn-bound

On what my father called the IND,

The F emerges from beneath the ground,

And fills with light (by day) and you can see.

 

And what you see, if you look to the left:

Scratchiti; the reflection of your face;

A moonscape, blocks wide, edifice-bereft,

Within the tracks’ Erector Set embrace.

 

Perusal at Hoyt’s terminus reveals

Cement mixers, rotating, marked FB,

A Sheeler painting, all blue sky and steel:

Ferrara Brothers’ concrete factory —

 

The swan song of Kings County’s smokestack past,

As out of reach as Whole Foods’ lot is vast.

 

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Mapping Gowanus: Sackett st. b/w Bond & the Canal

Homage to crud

On my way to Sackett St. between Bond and the Gowanus Canal, I may have passed a dozen construction sites, where luxury housing is slated to fill any and every crevice of my hyper-gentrifying neighborhood, Cobble Hill. Gowanus, too, is now home to luxury “waterfront” properties situated on the Canal, which is, never mind, a highly polluted, odiferous Superfund site. The block I was mapping is a piece of pre-gentrified Brooklyn that will no doubt soon be another astronomically expensive enclave, after all there are some large empty lots on this block that simply cannot survive the low interest, cheap money that is fueling the latest frenzy of development.

There was evidence of impending change – a surveyor was there, and a construction site sign that warned visitors not to enter. Nothing was actually getting built, and the block was quiet, save for a few stragglers like myself. I felt like I was documenting some last remains of industry, poverty, detritus, vandalism, and even art.

I was touched by the deconstructed air conditioners that had been slaughtered for their copper, the residue of a meal, a puddle of broken glass, cracked sidewalks, patched cobblestone, a shredded plastic bag, graffiti (even a pathetic “Trump” stencil), and all the crud that left traces of transient activity – a few Bud Lights, an abandoned work glove, a no parking sign for a film shoot called “Cyclops” that I’m guessing was a flop. The block reminds me of the kinds of decayed places I sought out in my teens to kick around and smoke cigarettes or get high. I will miss this block when it becomes sanitized by the encroaching money, eager to smooth out its edges and discard the trash.

Joan Grossman, Feb. 28, 2017

     

 

 

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