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with my garbage, I slid off the dead end of Second Street, in the Boerum Hill

neighborhood of Brooklyn, and down a seven-foot embankment oozing green

and brown liquid. I braced my foot on the end of a rotting nineteenth-century

beam and prayed that it would hold. It did, and soon I was seated in a slimeencrusted canoe in the Gowanus Canal, my sneakers awash in bilgewater. My

life vest and jeans now bore distinctive parallel skid marks. A sportsman in a

Gowanus Dredgers cap released the bowline and casually informed me that

those row houses—he pointed up Second Street—were discharging raw

sewage into the canal. “That would explain the smell,” I said.

It was Earth Day 2002, and I’d come out not to collect floating garbage—

the siren call for two dozen local Sierra Club members—but to get a little

exercise. I’d never paddled around the city, and I wanted a new perspective

on my neighborhood. I also wanted a backyard view of what the media were

touting as up-and-coming real estate. “Gowanus,” after morphing into the

tonier-sounding “Boerum Hill” in the sixties, was returning as a sales

category.