Neighbors around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn already know their waterway is a toxic soup of heavy metals, sewage and probable carcinogens.
But some dream of treasures that might also be uncovered as a federal Superfund cleanup of the canal gets under way.
Perhaps remnants of a tidewater mill dam? A few Indian arrowheads and fishing hooks? Bullets, brass buttons and, who knows, a few human bones from the Battle of Brooklyn?
“Very few people realize that the largest battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in Brooklyn,” said Kimberly Maier, executive director of the Old Stone House, a museum on the site where some 400 soldiers from Maryland were nearly wiped out while holding back a much larger British force in August 1776.
“There’s always been this great mystery of where the Marylanders were buried,” she said. “Were they in one specific grave about 100 feet from the curb along Third Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets, or dumped into the Gowanus wetlands? What turns up would be amazing.”Continue reading the main story
The Superfund program, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, is known for unearthing pollutants that pose a threat to public health. But as the agency designs its projects across the country, it also plays a less well-known role — that of preservationist, documenting and often salvaging items of historical value found in contaminated soil, buildings and sediment at the bottom of rivers and canals.
That role can sometimes become as controversial as forcing polluters to pay for a cleanup or, as in the case of the Gowanus, interfering with a city’s ambitious economic development plans.
Fredric L. Quivik, a professor of industrial history and archaeology at Michigan Technological University, said that in regions where E.P.A. administrators are “single-minded” about a cleanup, they may consider preservation efforts “a distraction from their mission in life.” He added, “If there are local constituencies who care about these cultural resources, they’ll raise a ruckus.”
Federal officials said that 20 to 25 percent of some 1,300 current Superfund sites contain artifacts or structures of historical interest to their local communities or that capture whole swaths of the nation’s industrial eras. Many of the sites, the officials noted, are near water, which provided transportation and livelihoods to early industry and settlements.
One of the most significant examples of preservation at a contaminated site was found in Roebling, N.J., about 10 miles south of Trenton near the Delaware River. A museum is rising up there from the wasteland of what once was the steel mill complex founded by the family that built the Brooklyn Bridge and that produced the wire rope for the Golden Gate and George Washington Bridges.
The cleanup at the former John A. Roebling’s Sons Company, which operated at the site from 1905 to the 1950s, when the company was sold to new owners that operated there until the 1970s, is ridding a 200-acre site of asbestos and heavy metals like chromium, lead and copper for future commercial and recreational development by the Township of Florence, which owns the land.
In the process of demolishing contaminated buildings and dredging river and creek sediment, the E.P.A. has saved mill tools, large spools and machinery, and the employment records of thousands of immigrant workers, most of them Eastern Europeans who were often recruited fresh from Ellis Island.
The federal agency, which has spent $115 million on the cleanup since it began in the late 1980s, has provided $7 million to renovate the mill’s former gatehouse to establish the Roebling Museum, which opened to the public last summer. (Agency officials say the costs of historic property are financed with cleanup money, which either comes from polluters or, as in the case of the Roebling project, directly from the E.P.A.)
“What we’re recovering here is the part this place played in the American industrial revolution, in the immigrant experience,” said George Lengel, a Roebling Museum board member and local historian. “We couldn’t have done it without the E.P.A. This was too big a project for a small community.”
Under the National Historic Preservation Act, the protection agency is required to consider any possible harm to cultural resources. John F. Vetter, an archaeologist and the agency’s expert in historic preservation, said the investigation of potentially historic resources runs parallel to that of contaminants at the outset of a cleanup so that alternatives are weighed to avoid or minimize any damage.
Some notable discoveries, which are usually given to state museums and local communities, include Lenape Indian artifacts from the old DeRewal Chemical Company site in Kingwood, N.J., and 20-foot-long pieces of timber from Fort Edward in upstate New York. The timbers, found in the dredging of part of the Hudson River that had been contaminated with the toxic chemicals known as PCBs from discharges by two General Electric factories, is now undergoing preservation work at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vt., before going to the New York State Museum in Albany.)
In the case of American Indian burial grounds, Mr. Vetter said, some have been left alone, and in other cases remains have been reburied elsewhere, with the agreement of tribes. When preservation interferes with the cleanup, Mr. Vetter said, a “recordation,” or documentation, takes place to at least have a public account of what was lost.
“In each case, we look at how much we can keep intact,” Mr. Vetter added. “In some sites, we’re successful in preserving the historic features, and in others, we lose the historic features, and we do recordations.”
Yet the agency’s primary mission is still the cleanup, according to Professor Quivik, and some of its administrators have been criticized by state preservation officials for doing just the minimum to comply with their obligations to history. Preservation at the sites often depends on the advocacy of state and local preservationists, he added.
“Otherwise,” he said, “you demolish it, cover it over or haul it to the dump.”
In Brooklyn, neighbors and community groups are already forming an “archaeological and historic resources committee” as part of the community advisory group overseeing the project. One committee member, Eymund Diegel, an environmental planner, said he saw the agency as an ally, but “they will have to make technical choices that don’t necessarily mesh with other plans.”
One brewing battle, he said, is whether to preserve or replace the canal’s old bulkheads because of the need to create a barrier to prevent more contamination from the soil into the water.
“There’s debate about what should be done,” Mr. Diegel said. “People are now discussing whether this or that should be preserved, and that’s a healthy debate because the main problem with the Gowanus has been neglect.”
For all the excitement, Mr. Diegel and others acknowledged that expectations of major archaeological discoveries are low given how heavily the area has been developed over the centuries. Many residents, Mr. Diegel said, would be happy just improving the quality of water along the 1.8-mile-long canal, which was carved out of tidal wetlands and streams in the 1860s.
“Clean water,” he said, ”is the ultimate archaeological resource they could find.”Continue reading the main story