Gowanus Crossing Reboot

 

Gowanus Crossing is a memoir of a life lived along Brooklyn's infamous Gowanus Canal. I grew up on Carroll Street across from Monte's Venetian Room, at the time a landmark red sauce restaurant that drew a never-ending mix of politicans, gangsters and celebrities--I fought viciously over a handful of change Tony Bennett scattered on the sidewalk one night. Monte's, half-a-block from the polluted canal, was the heart of an Italian enclave of dockworkers and shopkeepers emigrated from Salerno Province. Al Capone was born on Garfield Place, two blocks from my house. My world was shaped by the Irish nuns of Our Lady of Peace parish who saw themselves as missionaries and the Italians, vulgarians to be driven down the path to Salvation; counterbalanced by glittering mafiosi who represented wealth, success and stability in a chaotic world. No teenage boy could want better role models (nothing was forbidden); no adult worse. Gowanus Crossing is not another half-assed wise guy saga, or a story of escape from a destructive environment. Its what I find locked in my  heart all these years later. Part of me loved this world: the writer inside could embellish and lie and live in my head, burying the violence, cruelty and waste in the drama of it all; the innocent boy could not. I left South Brookyn in my twenties before the canal became a fashionable destination, and my family destroyed, but South Brooklyn never left me. Will not leave me. What follows in the 2012 blog posts is how it all came flooding back:

Prologue

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of us who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after we'd escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS, abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.

In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.

The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.