Talk:Gowanus Canal

Getting to featured
This article nearly made it to featured on its submit to FAC; I think a few relatively small improvements could ensure an easy and successful resubmit.


 * The purview of this article should be a little clearer; exactly how far should it go beyond the canal to cover the surrounding neighborhood?
 * As it stands now, the article addresses not only the canal itself, but also the industry and community around it. I think the latter is just as interesting, if not more.


 * Association with the mob and body dumping- is it real or just urban legend? (but even urban legend deserves to be covered)
 * I added some references to books and documentaries that expand on this a little bit more. This is one of those things that most likely did happen, but is perpetuated as an "urban legend" today.


 * Modern community development- the "cruises", the Canoe Dredgers, artists etc. (I'd also like to have more on that funeral director's ideas)
 * I added links to the Gowanus Canoe Dredgers, the Urban Divers, and Gowanus Artists, as well as mentioned them in the article. --Howrealisreal 21:37, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * What about references to the Canal in pop culture, etc? For example, They Might Be Giants references it in their Venue Song "Brooklyn" singing, "Let's celebrate Brooklyn now, even the Gowanus Canal."72.130.21.164 23:35, 11 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Waterfront infrastructure context- piers, Erie Basin and Atlantic Basin (I'll be submitting a new short article on Atlantic Basin soon.)
 * The introduction should probably be somewhat longer; this would also solve the problem of the canal crossings image.
 * I've heard that the canal once acting as a definite border between the Irish and Italian neighborhoods; how else has it acted as a border rather than a means of connection?
 * barge activity - I think the last vestige has been regular semi-weekly oil shipments in recent years

These are just some semi-random ideas; what do others think?--Pharos 21:23, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

I think the article could be greatly improved if the lede mentioned its length and width at its widest point.Frank Lynch (talk) 18:55, 22 February 2013 (UTC)


 * The Gowanus Canal Legend question and answers see http://brooklyn.about.com/od/historicbrooklyn/tp/Gowanus-Canal-Truth-Or-Fiction-That-Bodies-Were-Dumped-Here.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.83.72.154 (talk) 18:32, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Refinery?
I bicycled over the canal this afternoon on the 9th Street bridge, on my way from Flatbush to the Columbia Street Pier and Plymouth Church. Oil refinery? I don't recall seeing one anywhere in NYC, much less one between Sunset Park and Red Hook. There's an oil terminal or two, if not on the canal then less than a mile to the southwest, but they just pump fuel out of barges and pump it into trucks. There's no fractionating column, catalytic reactor or other sign of a refinery. Jim.henderson 01:50, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

GA Re-Review and In-line citations
Members of the WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. LuciferMorgan 02:45, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * As best I could I revised to use in-line citations. --Howrealisreal 21:49, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Gasoline manufactured
I notice the reference to oil refineries has disappeared, but the article still has a link to gas meaning gasoline. Isn't this improbable in a place that never had regular freight rail service? Bayonne makes gasoline, or formerly made it, but Bayonne has rail freight. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jim.henderson (talk • contribs) 04:48, 6 January 2007 (UTC).


 * Must mean the three manufactured gas plants (syngas) that were on the Gowanus. The Metropolitan Gas Light Company site is the current Lowe's and Pathmark. The Citizen Works parcel is the "Public Place" site (between Huntington, Smith, 4th Street, and the canal); a housing development has been proposed for this space. The Fulton Municipal Gas Company site is the Thomas Greene Park and playground. These are pretty much brownfields now and there's debate about the past and ongoing remediation efforts. --Howrealisreal 23:21, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Coordinates
geodata-check

Please note that the coordinates in this article need fixing as 40° 40′ 22.8″ S, 106° 0′ 10.8″ E is in the ocean W/SW of Australia, not New York City —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.212.215 (talk • contribs)


 * Coordinates in the article are currently at 40.673°N, -73.997°W. This is in New York.
 * 40° 40′ 22.8″ S, 106° 0′ 10.8″ E are the Antipodes, you must have clicked on that link on the geohack page. -- User:Docu

Color
Aww ... someone took out the sentence about groups trying to develop the Gowanus into a Venice of New York and that it was led by a funeral director. It was colorful and (knowing NYC's notorious real estate mongers) might even be partly true. Angry bee (talk) 04:33, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Updates to flushing tunnel
i'll try to update the article, but at leas wanted to get this noted.

NytImes ran an article on upcoming improvements to the Flushing Tunnel and the pump system that have the potential to further increase water quality. Link here:

NY times 2011-02-23 Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.72.162.118 (talk) 06:15, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Film
There is an franco-german film about this part of the harbour:
 * Claudia Müller, Claudia Steinberg (Dir.): New York - Stadt am Wasser. De, 2012, 44 Min

Look at the mediathek: [http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/047497-000/new-york-stadt-am-wasser Info des produz. Senders] arte.tv, 2015 jan. --Asdfj2 (talk) 17:30, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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The canal arose in the mid-19th century from local tidal wetlands and freshwater streams.
“What a piece of work is Man, How noble in style! How like a god, or an angel....” And how abject is the ungrammatical mess a colleague left behind as the foundational sentence of the article. I’ don’ matter none, whether its creator was the first, or a later, editor of the article, bcz it’s terminally ambiguous in syntax. Nor does matter how long it’s festered here. A tireless editor has come across it. Either of us may breath its last before the other, but the strugqgle is worthy of the candel that ‘twill take. --JerzyA (talk) 22:43, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Design post superfund site clean-up
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/framework-for-gowanus-canal-consolidates-years-of-visions?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a836de59f9-Issue_273&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-a836de59f9-43969129

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20170106173230/https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160229/gowanus/52-million-project-reduce-gowanus-flooding-begin-soon to https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160229/gowanus/52-million-project-reduce-gowanus-flooding-begin-soon
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20161027164606/http://gothamist.com/2013/10/13/photos_my_canoe_ride_on_the_toxic_g.php to http://gothamist.com/2013/10/13/photos_my_canoe_ride_on_the_toxic_g.php
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20151223123327/http://gothamist.com/2007/04/19/brooklyns_sludg.php to http://gothamist.com/2007/04/19/brooklyns_sludg.php

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Great job
This article is really well done. It should be a Featured Article! Yoninah (talk) 21:37, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I can't do it now, because I'm going to be busy until September, but I'll probably think about nominating it as soon as I can afterward. epicgenius (talk) 23:53, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Congratulations on doing such a great job and sticking with it to get it to GA! Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 00:47, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I thought your expansions of the article last year were good, too. It probably wouldn't have been able to reach GA without these additions. epicgenius (talk) 01:11, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

List of deaths, suicide attempts, people saved, etc.
While I appreciate the effort put into this section, I just removed it from this page. It is a pretty long list of deaths, suicide attempts, and other incidents in the canal (and this only spans 1882-1921!). Per WP:NOTTRIVIA, we really shouldn't be including this list of incidents here, and we don't need to list each and every single person who jumped in the canal, or drowned, or was rescued. It tends to attract unnecessary trivia and many of these news articles are short one-sentence mentions.

Below are the list entries that I removed. Feel free to discuss each incident on a case by case basis; if it's notable, it can be restored. epicgenius (talk) 19:32, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

List of incidents that were removed

 * 1882 at an ungiven date a woman is reported to have unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Gowanus Canal;
 * May 10,1892 Canal boat "Alpha" sunk in canal with a cargo of coal.
 * July 24, 1900 a man is rescued after he tried to commit suicide by jumping into the canal.
 * December 31, 1903: a dredge found sunk in canal; an unnamed engineer/nightwatchman missing and believed drowned on board
 * December 2,1904 unknown John Doe found dead in canal
 * February 8. 1905 a Policeman rescues a man who had fallen into the canal.
 * December 19,1908 Missing man from New Jersey found dead in canal
 * December 9 1920 NYPD Officer Daniel Grennan accidentally drowned in the canal
 * July 25, 1921 car accidentally drove into the canal; car and two deceased occupants recovered
 * Feb 14, 1983 a former basketball player/taxi driver dies after accidently driving into Gowanus Canal

Major edits, September 13, 2019
I reverted this edit that was made today. On the whole, this entire edit needs discussion because it is trying to cram many major changes into a single edit. Since this is a good article, i think any major rearrangement of the article should be discussed here first.

Here are my objections in particular:
 * The proposed lead is too detailed and yet it fails to cover many of the major aspects of the article.
 * There are six lead paragraphs, yet the first lead paragraph is only one sentence about its geographical location. The text Once a vital cargo transportation hub, the canal has seen decreasing use since the mid-20th century, parallel with the decline of domestic waterborne shipping. It continues to be used for occasional movement of goods and daily navigation of small boats, tugs and barges. - this provides vital context to the rest of the article - has been removed.
 * The lead contains excessive detail about the history, with numerous syntax/grammatical errors. For instance, In 1848, the Brooklyn Common Council issues an engineering report in conjunction with plans by Daniel Richards for the drainage of 1700 acres of land between Brooklyn’s Court-Street and the Fifth-Avenue, Warren-Street and Gowanus Bay. The plan authorized construction for a 100 foot wide, 1.5 mile long canal, with the banks of the canal set at 4-feet above high water level with a canal depth of 5-feet below low water mark. In this way the upland “meadows will gradually become more firm”. The goal of the development scheme was to have an engineered drainage basin which would allow for building on the upland meadows and provide a navigable water way which would serve as the end of the New York State Erie canal transportation route. If this text is included at all, it should really be included in the "History" section. At most, the lead would have one section.
 * There are four paragraphs, out of six, devoted to history. I don't think this is an appropriate representation as it gives undue weight to the history of the canal.
 * The references in the body sections are being removed and replaced with direct external links, in violation of External links. Example: By the 1990s, it was recognized as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. And after of century of local community activism calling for the cleanup of the canal, in 2009, New York State invited the federal EPA in to assess the situation. With overwhelming community support, the EPA designated the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site in 2010. In 2013 the EPA issues a Record of Decision, a court order which delineates what the polluting parties must do to remediate the situation. Again, this has a lot of tense problems.
 * I am concerned that the editor in question,, may have a conflict of interest. The following text was added: Following the conclusion of the DEP USA Project study, a group of stakeholders formed an activist civic organization, Friends & Residents of Greater Gowanus (FROGG). In 2006 FROGG, acting in conjunction with Community Board 6, submitted a grant application to New York State for Brownfield cleanup planning grant for "Gowanus Canal Corridor AQUATIC BROWNFIELD & UPLAND BROWNFIELD AREA".
 * I think the removal of the text about EPA cuts in 2017 needs to be discussed. There was no discussion of the removal of sourced content in here. epicgenius (talk) 15:50, 13 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the thoughtful post. I'm inclined to agree with you.  About the direct external links, you're right, but that's not a big deal, in the sense that it's easy to fix.  About the other stuff, yes, changes of this magnitude should be discussed here first.   Hello.  I see that Epicgenius has already posted on your user talk page about conflict of interest.  Such editing by involved parties is allowed, but generally discouraged.  The "conflict" is that if you have a stake in the subject matter -- a dog in the fight, so to speak -- then it's harder to make changes to the article that are neutral and objective, which is the goal on Wikipedia.  — Mudwater (Talk) 00:08, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

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