Butler Street Pump

The Gowanus Canal has been filthy for generations. By 1900, industry on the Gowanus Canal coupled with inadequate systems for sewage disposal and unlimited discharges of raw sewage directly into its waters, had transformed the Canal into a polluted, stagnant eyesore.

On June 21, 1911, the Gowanus Flushing Tunnel was built. It contained a propeller that circulated the canal's water and flushed water in and out of the canal to and from New York Harbor's Buttermilk Channel through a tunnel cut beneath Brooklyn's downtown that reaches the harbor at Degraw Street. The pump and flushing tunnel functioned until the mid-1960s when a city worker accidentally dropped a manhole cover into the system that destroyed the pump. The canal was left polluted and stagnant once again until the Depratment of Environmental Protection (DEP) reactivated the pump with a new propeller, motor and sluice gates in 1999.

Since then the pump has been bringing Harbor water into the Canal at an average rate of 200 million gallons a day. Sometimes the pump pushes water so rapidly out from the canal's end that it seems that EV is navigating up a real river like a real boat, pushing through millions of gallons of water, heading towards a glowing future.

The pump keeps our illusion of motion intact and suppresses the natural stink of the polluted canal. It is also integral to bringing oxygen and supporting the colonies of fish, crabs, oysters and mussels that have settled there. The "revitalization" of the canal's water is also the fuel for a series of real estate speculations and develpment gambles aimed at turning the canal into "Brooklyn's Venice."

Sometime in the next few years, the DEP will be turning off the pump for major repairs. The rancid odor of the canal's waters will return. Repairs are scheduled to take up to two years, pending funding is available to stick to the projected timeline. Otherwise the pump could be off indefinately.

-- PaulaZ - 21 Nov 2005
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