The Gowanus Canal Might Be Safe Enough to Swim in Our Lifetimes

By Michael Gonik

There may just be a non-dystopian future in which the Gowanus Canal goes from federal Superfund site to local swimming hole.

According to a report from Crain’s, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation is pushing to have the notoriously polluted waterway reclassified, in an attempt to pressure the city to escalate its cleanup effort and make the canal safe for swimming. The Gowanus Canal currently holds a “Class SD” ranking from the DEC, which is apparently enough to support some fishing. In a proposal to redesignate the canal along with 30 other waterways, the DEC is suggesting bumping the canal’s ranking to “Class SC,” which would force the city to continue its investment in the rehabilitation of the water to achieve a quality that could also support swimming and boating.

Though the glow-up is within eyesight, we’re still looking at a project that could take years to bring up to safe swimming standards. As part of its Superfund designation of the canal, the Environmental Protection Agency has been building a pair of colossal water tanks that would reportedly filter out the raw sewage entering the canal when the city’s drainage system gets backed up during particularly heavy downpours. Those tanks are expected to be completed by 2030, but even once they’re fully functional, it would take a few years for the water quality to reach “go ahead and dive in” levels of toxicity. “Until the Superfund cleanup is complete, plus sometime after that, we won’t be swimming in Gowanus,” Em Ruby, a coordinator at waterways protection organization, Riverkeeper, told Crain’s.

Still, that would make a safe lap up and down the canal attainable within most of our lifetimes, only two-ish decades since it became a Superfund site (though the poisonous-particulate-per-gallon ratio hasn’t deterred everyone from taking a dip—swimmers have been spotted in the canal for both academic and pure flex purposes here and there over the last decade). And who knows? Perhaps we’ll even live long enough to see parts of the canal so spotless and incapable of altering one’s genetic composition that whole stretches of it are turned into tiny lap pools like those stretches of Fire Island’s bayside that are effectively only accessible by boat.