The artists at 543 Union Street knew all about the famously toxic canal that runs next to their building, a former box factory in Gowanus. But in the decades since they converted the factory to broad, timber-beamed lofts, the artists’ most pressing concerns were typical for a century-old building in Brooklyn — broken pipes, hallways in need of a fresh coat of paint, a perpetually damp basement.
That was before a letter arrived from the New York State Department of Health just before New Year’s Day 2023. It asked an unexpected and alarming question. Could the Health Department test the artists’ lofts for a chemical called trichloroethylene?
No one in the building had ever heard of trichloroethylene, or TCE, but they began to wonder whether their health was in danger. And there was another worry. Would they have to leave the building they had worked so hard to make hospitable?
This is the paradox of Gowanus. In 2010, the Gowanus Canal was listed as a national Superfund site, a designation the Environmental Protection Agency uses to prioritize cleaning up the most toxic places in the country. Yet since then, Gowanus has emerged from its industrial past to become one of Brooklyn’s hottest real estate markets and is in the midst of a construction boom. Fifty-two new buildings are either under construction or are expected to be built over the next five years.
The pollutants in the canal are well documented (benzene, mercury, chloroform, vinyl chloride, coal tar), and efforts to clean the waterway are proceeding, though years behind schedule. But the discovery of TCE, a chemical that has been linked to cancer, birth defects and Parkinson’s disease, revealed just how polluted the rest of Gowanus might be.
Since the spring of 2023, more than 100 buildings have been tested for TCE; 21 were found to have levels of chemicals in their indoor air that required immediate cleanup. At the box factory, TCE levels were 450 times the state’s allowable guidelines.
The news has rippled through the neighborhood. Local parents, in particular, have become concerned: Three schools near the canal have been tested, though none have shown high levels of TCE. (One of them had levels of other chemicals that require the state to take action.)
For Claire Weissberg, an artist who has owned a studio in the box factory for two decades, the news about TCE was concerning at first but not overwhelming.
“I guess because I’m from New York I feel like I’m always exposed to toxic chemicals,” she said soon after the state officials began investigating her building. “But I also never thought about it.”
“I’m glad we got tested,” she added, “because I feel like now they’re going to try to fix it.”
Since the City Council’s decision to rezone the blocks surrounding the canal in 2021, the neighborhood’s low-slung industrial buildings — formerly paint factories, dye shops and casket-makers — are being replaced by apartment complexes. The burst of construction means that sites along the canal, including the box factory, are being tested for the first time, revealing toxins that have been in the soil for much of the 20th century.
As required by the state environmental agency, developers breaking ground on any industrial site must hire engineers to test for chemicals. So far, the soil beneath at least a dozen of the proposed developments around the Gowanus Canal has been confirmed to have high levels of TCE. At this stage, a building on a site with a legacy of TCE can install an impermeable barrier beneath its foundation and a mitigation system that vents the chemicals into the outdoors.
Once it is in the open air, TCE evaporates quickly and is relatively harmless, said Paige Lawrence, a professor and chair of the department of environmental medicine at the University of Rochester.
The difficulty comes with determining which the hundreds of 19th- and early-20th-century buildings in Gowanus might be affected. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has so far identified at least 630 existing properties near the canal to test for TCE and other chemicals.
Further complicating the agency’s assessment is the fact that no property owner or resident in Gowanus is required to agree to the state’s tests. So far, only 100 property owners have consented to testing, a situation that frustrates local activists like Linda LaViolette, a longtime resident and a member of Voice of Gowanus, a community group that advocates the cleanup of contaminated properties.
“We have not had really good testing in this whole area,” said Ms. LaViolette, who lives near the corner of Union and Smith Streets, a block outside the current investigation area. “I don’t think we have the accountability, we don’t have transparency, and we don’t have a full picture of what the pollution and the environmental contaminants are.”
Over the past two years, state environmental officials said they had sent emails to more than 15,000 people with updates about the investigations in Gowanus, and had hosted several community meetings.
Trichloroethylene was widely used for much of the 20th century. It was a spot cleaner in dry cleaning, an extractor of oil from vegetables and coffee, and was especially valuable as a degreaser in the paint factories and gas plants that sprung up alongside the Gowanus Canal more than a hundred years ago. These factories routinely dumped their chemicals on the ground, where they flowed freely into the soil or ran off into the canal. The chemicals have remained there ever since.
“It was the miracle solvent,” said Lenny Siegel, the executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, a nonprofit that has monitored the cleanup of contaminated sites across the country. Now, TCE is linked to several types of cancers and neurological disorders. For pregnant women, even a couple of days’ exposure in the first trimester of pregnancy can increase the risk of birth defects, Mr. Siegel said. Last October, the E.P.A. proposed a ban on future uses of TCE, 50 years after the agency first identified the chemical as a carcinogen.
Most of the industry around Gowanus was gone by the 1970s, which made the neighborhood appealing to artists seeking cheap space. Then about a decade ago, the neighborhood began to change again. In 2013, a Whole Foods appeared along the canal. The neighborhood’s first luxury apartment complex was approved. The next year, the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club, a 20,000-square-foot bar and restaurant offering shuffleboard, opened across the street from the box factory.
A discovery near the shuffleboard club was the first inkling that the neighborhood’s industrial past would not be so easily escaped. When developers bought the land surrounding the Royal Palms in 2019, they envisioned a 350-apartment complex with a yoga center and co-working spaces. Fueling the Gowanus land rush, in part, was a tax break for developers that signed up for the state’s environmental cleanup program. But when engineers first tested the soil around the shuffleboard club, they found levels of TCE and other chemicals high enough to be considered a “significant threat” to people’s health or the environment, according to records from the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
When state environmental officers tested the air inside the shuffleboard club in 2021, TCE levels were 20 times the state’s allowable guidelines.
Beneath the sidewalk outside the club, levels of TCE in the soil reached 86,000 micrograms per cubic meter, a reading that is “off the charts,” said Samuel Goldman, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied TCE.
Based on those soil readings, state inspectors began to suspect that the TCE found in the shuffleboard club was part of a wider plume extending beneath nearby homes and warehouses.
When asked for comment, the owners of the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club provided The New York Times with a copy of a letter they had received from state health officials. “At no time during the environmental investigation and cleanup actions underway at the site did the levels observed reach a point where occupancy use restrictions were necessitated,” the letter read. In addition, the letter pointed out that machinery had been installed in the building to prevent chemicals below ground from entering the indoor air.
Toward the end of 2022, the state environmental agency sent its first letter to the box factory and other inhabited buildings considered to be at risk of TCE exposure. Fewer than half agreed to testing.
The process for removing TCE is relatively straightforward.
In most buildings, machinery can be installed to draw contaminated air out of the building’s basement like a straw and vent it outside, where it evaporates. The state environmental agency has installed mitigation devices throughout Gowanus at no cost to property owners.
But Voice of Gowanus has pushed for the removal of all contaminated soil, an expensive measure that could mean digging hundreds of feet into the earth. The state says this is unnecessary in most cases.
The biggest challenge facing agencies is persuading property owners to agree to testing, said John Brennan, a project manager at the Environmental Protection Agency. If test results come back above state guidelines, tenants must be notified, according to New York law. (The law does not apply to all employees working at a contaminated building.) There are no penalties, however, for a property owner who declines testing.
At the box factory, after the decision to test the lofts revealed a high level of TCE, state officials installed a mitigation system and tested again every few months. A team of health inspectors would regularly descend on the building, visit every studio, collect air samples and check on the system in the basement.
And after nearly a year of testing, the artists at 543 Union finally got some good news: TCE was mostly gone from their studios, though it lingered in the unfinished basement, where a little stream of water sometimes appeared — a common occurrence in the 19th-century buildings that dominate this part of Brooklyn.
Heide-Marie Dudek, who works for the state environmental agency, described the site as “a uniquely complicated problem to solve.”
State officials have told the artists of 543 Union that they will continue to test until TCE is no longer detected.
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