"The news did not interrupt the unhurried rhythms of life along the shadowy canal, the toxic dividing line between two fancy neighborhoods carved into wetlands more than 150 years ago. On the water where the E.P.A found pesticides and the cancer-causing chemicals known as PCBs bobbed the boat where John Ziegler and a friend have stayed on and off for five months, aiming to “get off the grid.”
They collect sunlight in solar panels for electricity and burn wood for heat. Mr. Ziegler, a writer and an amateur ornithologist, has seen a family of mallards, and hawks. The walls of the canal mute the city noise. The full moons, he said, are “gorgeous.”
But after a big rain, slicks of various colors and toxicities drift by the barge, so Mr. Ziegler said he was pleased that the E.P.A. had stepped in to clean up. “It’ll take a lot longer,” he said, “but it will actually work.”
Upstream from his boat and down, fuel tanks were cleaned, trucks were parked, scrap metal was collected and cars were serviced. Gene Wayda, 68, has watched it all since 1970, when he opened his machine shop on Butler Street at the canal’s northern tip.
Then, Irish schoolteachers lived next door. A Dun & Bradstreet printing plant was on the corner. Mr. Wayda played his own role in the neighborhood’s remarkable commercial diversity, constructing those hand-powered unicycles called distance measuring wheels. His patch of Gowanus had deteriorated and then stabilized. The dirty canal was a piece of unfinished business."
