The smells in Gowanus are so pungent that a Brooklyn architect was able to create an olfactory-based map for the area as part of a design competition.
For three days over the summer, Annie Barrett and three of her employees walked around Gowanus tracking all the scents their noses picked up – from the noxious fumes given off by the canal to the mouth-watering bakeries.
They broke the smells into three categories: 1. Negative man-made smells like garbage or sewage, 2. Pleasing man-made smells from food or fresh-cut lumber at the factories, and 3. Organic smells from plants.
“The biggest pattern is that right around the corridor of the canal, but especially at the south end where you see less change to the manufacturing nature of the neighborhood, you have the biggest collection of negative man-made smells,” Barrett said.
“When you go to the north, you get more into the newer parts of the neighborhood where there are restaurants, bakeries, pizzerias,” she added.
The most common spot to find natural smells was at the 10 dead ends they found.
“You find a lot of wildflowers and grasses that naturally occur in the environment because there is nothing else happening there.”
Barrett’s smell map got her second place in a design competition called “Axis Civitas,” which was organized by the nonprofit group Gowanus By Design, that asked participants to create an atlas of the area’s changes and propose a possible spot for a community center.
“The urban field station would be a community resource where people could go and learn about the Gowanus Canal,” said the group’s executive director David Briggs. “They could learn about how the neighborhood is changing and how cleanup is going for the Superfund site.”
The competition’s entries are on display for the next week at the Site:Brooklyn gallery on Seventh Street.
The $5,000 grand prize went to Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and Weill Cornell Medical College for its map of a microbiome made up of all the organisms found at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal, which is one of the most polluted waterways in the US and was deemed a Superfund site in 2010.
Briggs plans to start an IndieGoGo campaign to raise $70,000 to create what he called a “live atlas” that would provide the community with updates about new land developments, phases of the canal cleanup and any other environmental issues in the neighborhood.
It would also give him the opportunity to bring the competition’s maps created by Barrett and the other participants online so locals could add their own findings and enhance them.