It is so easy to write from prison. It is easy to write. Sending letters from prison is more difficult.
I’ve been watching a new city rise from a toxic supersite in the heart of Brooklyn. During the pandemic, real estate investors slipped past the community locked in by Covid to get the permits for glass skyscrapers on the sides of the Gowanus canal. It was the hole in the donut of Brooklyn, they argued, and it had to be developed. Brooklyn has a lot of holes in its donut, but this one was the deepest and most appetizing to the money that floats around these days like Teslas looking for parking. Before the skyscrapers were even built, the future tenants were enticed to live on the Wharf or Litoral of Gowanus. Lovers in row boats floated gently on the waters of this stream, admiring aviary and marine life.
The Gowanus canal transports the shit of Brooklyn downhill to the Upper New York Bay. Not just shit: also industrial poison, contaminated sediment and stormwater runoff. Birds avoid it, dogs strain at the leash when they are walked over the Union Street Bridge. I saw a duck die on the Gowanus. First there were two, sluggishly trying to reach the canal wall. When I looked again there was only one, head leaning left, then it stopped and died. On either side, cement walls went up to frame steel boxes and rows of thick beams. Barbed wire surrounded the sites.
One day, I met a pensive man looking at the murky water, and hoped he wasn’t going to do what I thought he wanted to do. “Hey,” I said, “you don’t want to do that!” He told me he was a civil engineer engaged in cleaning the Gowanus. He was going to bury large steel spheres at the point where the canal flowed underground. These balls would capture the toxic effluvia of Brooklyn and turn it somehow into spring water. “Big job,” I said, and he laughed. “It should pacify the regulators.”
I was glad I had been mistaken. Where I come from, poets jump from Pont Neuf in Paris into the Seine. Not that the Seine is cleaner, but it has a tradition. I hate to see people jump in new shit. “Anyway,” I said, “I hope to see these regulators drink the first glass of water from the clean canal.” I thought of the dead duck, and I saw, sadly, the regulators leaning left and dying.
After this vivifying conversation I walked on and saw more glass towers springing up. I understood the plan. You could see from the bridge a black monolith rising at the crossroad between Flatbush and Atlantic avenues. It was the tallest building in Brooklyn, it was Darth Vader. Lined up between Darth Vader, the Gowanus was flanked by rising glass monsters all the way to the Whole Foods on 3rd Street. Caught in the vise of these megahives were the quaint 19th century brownstones of Park Slope and Prospect Park, a green Victorian space built by Frederick Law Olmstead.
Glued to the window of an office where the Gowanus Monster (a slimy creature wrapped in offal that used to live in the Gowanus, but now owns the penthouse at the top of Darth Vader) was a map that gently advised the tens of thousands of suckers who were going to imprison themselves in the coming glass cells not to use too much water in case of serious rain. The result of using too much water would be the rise of old shit from the murky Gowanus that would drown everything, including the charming brownstones and Prospect Park.
The warning map disappeared days after it was posted because a biblical rain upchucked the waters of Gowanus. Now this is New York, you are tempted to say, buildings appear and disappear overnight. The sky is there to be scraped by towers, trains run underground, there are commuters, rats and pigeons, Wall Street, and so on, but the speed of this fill-the-donut op is breath-taking. From the myriad windows of these boxes the tenants will have an everlasting view of each other. The top floors may see as far as the Atlantic Ocean, but unless they hire Walt Whitman to sing the grandeur of their vistas, they will mostly spend their times in elevators with their hearts in their mouths, hoping that the Gowanus monster won’t show up. And that the electrical grid stays healthy and unhacked by that fat kid on the sofa that tends to Trump’s diapers. They have paid inflated millions for their pads.
