Fixer-Upper.(The Talk of the Town)(Gowanus watershed)

"Not every water body can support a bathing situation," a representative of the state Department of Environmental Conservation said last week, in a classic instance of bureaucratic understatement. He was speaking at a forum dedicated to the future of the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, a mile-and-a-half-long shipping channel best known for its odor situation (sewage, with a hint of sulfur), and for the occasional floating cat or rat. New development is planned for the Gowanus watershed, and a crowd had packed the Belarussian church on Atlantic Avenue to discuss the environmental implications. "We have gone through 'Lavender Lake,' when our canal not only smelled but glowed in the dark," Joan Millman, a state assemblywoman, said. "Still does!" a man in the audience called out.

Harbor buffs will tell you that Brooklyn's first export was oysters--gigantic, plate-size oysters--discovered by the Dutch in the marshy creek that became the Gowanus. By the nineteen-seventies, however, it was official government policy to dump chlorine in the canal as a sanitary stopgap, and today the state classifies the Gowanus water as SD--the lowest of five grade levels, meaning that fish might be expected to exist but not propagate. Officials at the forum said that they are hoping to raise the Gowanus's quality, at a cost of about a hundred and forty million dollars, to Class I, so that it will join merely filthy waterways such as the Harlem River and Coney Island Creek.

"How is it that we're only wishing to go from--excuse my French--shit to piss?" a man with dreadlocks asked. He was Ludger Balan, the executive director of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy, and one of three living humans known to have swum in the Gowanus voluntarily. Balan said that he was motivated when, about a decade ago, he spotted a school of striped bass "screaming for air" near the Carroll Street Bridge. Wearing a suit of vulcanized rubber, he has dived in the canal approximately thirty times since. At the end of the forum, he positioned himself about a foot or two from the nearest wall, stared ahead, and said, "Usually in the Gowanus, this is as much as you can ...