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Reminder: Brooklyn's "Hipster Havens" Are Indeed Poisonous

Emma Whitford

Published Jul 30, 2015

Modified Jul 30, 2015

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Emma Whitford

Published Jul 30, 2015

Modified Jul 30, 2015

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Come September, a community group of North Brooklynites will release a digital map of toxic "hot spots" in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where land is expensive and also, often, contaminated.

The group, called Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG, for short), is working in conjunction with the Pratt Institute to compile a scary GIS map using public information from state, city, and federal health and environmental departments. Here's a preview, from Crain's:

The map will cite such spots as the North Seventh Street Starbucks, the site of an electroplating and metal-finishing operation until the late 1990s. There, federal crews cleaned up nearly 7,000 gallons of ground pollutants. Another lot, on the corner of Dupont Street in Greenpoint, formerly housed the Nuhart Plastics factory, now a state Superfund site with high levels of phthalates, trichloroethylene and petroleum.

According to NAG, the GIS map will be chock full of data about each site, including site type—Superfund? Brownfield? Oil spill? Waste transfer?—and the associated health risks.

The group also has a grant to assess plans to turn the Nuhart factory—which is currently giving off two noxious plumes (one of which has TCE, a dry-cleaning solvent associated with face numbness and liver cancer), into condos.

Posing the question "Are Brooklyn's hipster havens poisonous?" Crain's interviewed North Brooklyn residents who expressed varying degrees of nonchalance. "I guess that's why the coffee is so good," said Matt Dallow, an actor, of the Starbucks in question. While Andrea Hopmann of North Williamsburg said, "If there's a real danger, a lot of people in the neighborhood would work to make it better." But, "If people are growing third eyes, then I'll take the first train out of here. You have to weigh the risks."

While we wait for the truth to be compiled neatly on one clickable map, it's worth noting how much information is already out there about contaminated land in real-estate-friendly neighborhoods beyond Manhattan.

There are those Meeker Avenue Plumes just south of the Superfund Newtown Creek, for example, which are the result of "decades of dumping and irresponsible manufacturing" from dry-cleaning and metalworking businesses in the neighborhood. Chemicals in those plumes have been linked to cancer. (For a detailed map of all 57 sites around Newtown in need of remediation, gulp and look here.)

Looking beyond Williamsburg/Greenpoint, there's the coal tar soaking the soil around the Gowanus Canal, helping to give Brooklyn's other Superfund waterway its signature oily sheen, and, also, producing cancer-causing fumes. Over in Red Hook, four of the nine ballfields in Red Hook Park have been closed for "several years" thanks to lead contamination. And then there's the former home of the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company just over the Queens border in Ridgewood, which had a thing for dumping radioactive thorium into the sewers between 1924 and 1950, and was dubbed the The Most Radioactive Place in New York City by the New Yorker last spring.

But brokers and Crain's readers, fear not: It wouldn't be #Brooklyn, or #Quooklyn for that matter, without fearless DJs willing to debut bars and venues in close proximity to Superfund sites. Take it from Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin, who just opened halcyon Nowadays near the Wolff-Alport Superfund site, having had great success with their late Mister Sunday day party on the banks of the ol' Gowanus.

Carter, who had testing done to the soil on his Ridgewood site while enduring a lengthy lease-signing process last fall, told us in June that he wasn't aware of his proximity to a Superfund site until June 17th, the day before the bar opened. Still, with test results in hand, he seemed unfazed. "We're a small business, started by three guys with no investors, and we're all here all the time. So are our families." That's the spirit!

Tagged

fear

Hipster Neighborhoods

superfund

toxic

Emma Whitford

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