Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty
Gowanus has long been smelly. As far back as 1864, a resident claimed the canal stunk so bad it killed his father-in-law. Then, as now, to live in the neighborhood is to live among its odors. They emanate from the ground, which is filled with coal tar, and from the canal, which is filled with sewage. But since at least January, even the most hard-core of Gowanus dwellers say things have gotten out of hand. “I’ve lived here for 50 years,” one said during a neighborhood advisory board meeting this fall. “I’ve smelled rats and dead bodies in the canal, but it’s never smelled as bad as it has smelled in the last nine months.”
The cause, it seems, is a long-awaited project to construct underground sewage tanks on Nevins Street between Sackett and Butler. Building these tanks, part of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Environmental Protection’s Superfund cleanup, will keep sewage from overflowing into the canal when it rains, which will eventually make the Gowanus cleaner and less smelly. But in order to do that, they’ve had to dig 200 feet into soil contaminated with toxic coal tar, unearthing smells that residents describe as a mix of “hot blacktop and mothballs.” It’s unpleasant, to say the least.
“Gowanus has its smells that come and go,” Katherine Buckel, who lives on Sackett Street, tells me. But once the digging got underway, she says, the stench became “really strong and lasted for days on end.” In the ensuing months, more than a dozen households in the new stink zone banded together and started emailing government officials and local politicians to voice their concerns and frustrations. “Feels like I can taste it,” one person wrote on a particularly bad day in June. “I’m struggling to sleep,” another added. “It’s like there’s a bucket of gasoline next to my pillow.” Some days were apparently so overpowering that they couldn’t use the nearby Thomas Greene playground and pool or even leave their homes. People reported getting migraines and feeling physically ill.
The DEP and EPA haven’t been much help so far, residents say. The department counters that smell control isn’t always straightforward. “Many complaints cannot be corroborated,” a DEP PowerPoint about the odors reads, along with a map of the numerous other sites being developed in the neighborhood right now. “Some were verified and attributed to DEP’s site and addressed promptly.” And according to the DEP, the odor does not rise above EPA-level health limits based on recent air sampling. “We take quality-of-life complaints very seriously,” Beth DeFalco, DEP deputy commissioner of public affairs, told me in an email. “Human noses are highly sensitive and can detect the odors associated with the contamination at levels far, far below what would be harmful.” The department knows it’s not great, she adds, but “some level of odors are unavoidable when doing this type of work.”
But who can blame the residents of Gowanus for wanting reasonably un-smelly air? Especially because efforts to “fix” the issue have so far been mixed. The DEP added more tarps and odor-suppressing foam over the dig site, which seemed fine. But it also began misting scented deodorizer — basically the same stuff you’d find in a bathroom — from constantly running sprayers attached to the fences lining the site. This latter bit, residents say, only made the smell worse, like layering a bad thing over another bad thing. “It was a really gross cinnamon-candle smell trying to cover up a mothball smell,” Buckel said. In response to complaints about the new smell, the DEP also tried citrus, pine, and botanical scents, none of which were well received. Adding to the frustration with the perfuming effort was the fact that people were routinely getting misted by the sprayers while walking down the street. (I even got hit by it once while biking by.)
Construction is currently paused as the DEP gets ready for the next phase. The plan this time around is to excavate only 60 feet. But Sackett and Nevins Street residents think the best solution would be a big tent over the entire project — a sort of hot box for the smell. A similar site just a block away on Sackett being developed by real-estate company Domain is tented, and residents say it rarely smells. “We have had absolutely no issues with them,” Nene Humphrey, who lives across from it, says. But the DEP says that tenting the site will extend the work by at least 19 months and cost around $59 million more. Instead, it’s proposed that the city expedite the timeline to get the work done within five months. “This will narrow the window of potential community impacts and also take advantage of the colder months when odors are naturally suppressed by low temperatures,” DeFalco wrote.
The final decision is up to the EPA, but the DEP has also promised to truck the stinky soil away from the site right after it’s dug up and use a cannon-like machine called OdorBoss to spray deodorizer. And on one point, all parties might agree: Whatever deodorizer gets sprayed in the next phase will be unscented.
