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In Gowanus, Brooklyn, one dance company merges art, history, and activism during an immersive tour of the neighborhood.
The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn — a salt marsh turned industrial wasteland turned superfund site turned luxury housing development — may have one of the most complex histories of all the neighborhoods in New York City.
To help people understand this history and envision its sustainable future, Brooklyn’s Artichoke Dance Company hosts an annual immersive performance tour of the neighborhood.
Lynn Neuman, the troupe’s lead choreographer, and Michael Higgins, community organizer and member of Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice, led me and a curious group of neighbors around the canal last month.
At four different locations, Lynn and Michael, who met while advocating for the preservation and affordability of Gowanus, gave us brief snippets of the canal’s history, but allowed the team of six dancers to fill in the nuances that simple retellings lack.
At the first stop, we learned about how, starting in the 1830s, the budding commercial shipping industry used the canal as a dumping ground for industrial waste, coal tar from gas plants, raw city sewage, and even bodies (according to some urban legends). A canal, by definition, is a stagnant waterway with limited access to open water. So when something was dumped into the canal, it sat there to fester and rot.
The neighborhood became a neglected, half-vacant corner of Brooklyn that was generally considered unsafe. At this stop in the performance, each dancer executed short and choppy movements to represent the isolation and abandonment the neighborhood was facing at this time.
By the mid-20th century, industrial dumping had mostly stopped as factories closed and maritime shipping declined. But more than a century of waste clouded the murky green waters of the canal and made Gowanus an unpleasant neighborhood to live in.
At the next stop, Lynn and Michael described how the canal was identified as a superfund site in 2010, a designation that led to $1.6 billion in funding to remove the toxic pollutants that accumulated over time.
Community members, who recognized how toxic the canal had become, supported the designation. But builders and real estate developers opposed it, as they believed that the area had serious money-making potential. The dancers, by this stop, were executing more and more lifts with an almost fluid motion and synchronicity.
The canal’s location between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, two of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, made Gowanus vulnerable to gentrification. As the area directly surrounding the canal became less polluted, middle-class families and young professionals flocked to Gowanus as an alternative to its high-rent neighbors. It was a prime example of “green gentrification,” when environmental remediation goes hand-in-hand with skyrocketing real estate values and displacement of current residents.
Ultimately, in 2021, the New York City Council approved a massive rezoning of an 82-block area in Gowanus that included the addition of nearly 8,000 new apartments, 3,000 of which are permanently affordable units, as well as a $200 million investment in Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens, two local public housing projects.
But with studios currently going for $3,400 a month, the new apartments remain out of reach for most. Michael described a lottery for 700 affordable units with rents ranging from $900 to $2,000 in one of the developments. He asked the tour group to guess how many people applied for these coveted apartments. We guessed 10,000 and 20,000, but the number was closer to 50,000.
Grassroots organizations like the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice, and Gowanus Alliance have worked alongside the federal government over the years to clean up the canal and ensure that the neighborhood remains affordable. Artichoke Dance Company’s ongoing collaboration with these groups promotes community recognition and awareness on both the political and artistic sides of the canal’s journey through time.
“I wanted to use what I saw on the ground here in Gowanus,” Lynn told me, to create a “visual language for the power of community activism.” The dance numbers — one per location of the tour — told the story of New Yorkers coming together as a community. Dancers lifted each other up with ease, moved as one, and demonstrated the nuances of connectivity and conflict within community organizing.
By the end of the tour, the dancers executed multi-person lifts, hand-holding, and synchronized movements to portray how the movement to clean up Gowanus gained strength when the community galvanized their collective support.
Advocacy for the canal is far from over. On the banks of the canal, the battle for affordable housing continues, and efforts to keep neighborhoods clean and affordable are continually at the forefront of progressive political agendas.
Lynn and Michael were both visibly excited by Brad Lander’s recent win in the democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives for New York’s 10th District, which includes Gowanus. “Lander was a champion and enthusiastic supporter of the 2021 rezoning,” Lynn said. “With his backing, we were able to find money for [affordable housing] developments.”
As a former salt marsh, the area has a history of rich biodiversity, and community members have a long-term goal of making the canal a functioning ecosystem again.
Currently, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy is exploring new ways to encourage mussel and oyster growth along the bulkheads of the canal to help naturally purify the water. “We’ve started to see fish, crabs, and birds poking around the area, which was a really exciting sign,” Lynn says.
