Redeveloping Brooklyn's Waterfront Wasteland?

"The redevelopment process was creeping forward when, in April, the federal Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was considering adding the Gowanus Canal to its Superfund cleanup program, which is reserved for the nation's worst hazardous-waste sites. The move surprised and enraged city officials, who warn that the "stigma" of being included in the program could halt economic improvement indefinitely."

"As the environmental debate rages on, the Gowanus Canal has been left to wait on the verge of metamorphosis, no longer one thing but not yet another. 'It's this area of transition,' a real estate broker named William Duke told me recently. It was a warm weekday evening in September, and we were standing at the trash-strewn terminus of a street that dead-ends into the waterway. 'Between the old and the new, the natural world and the man-made world,' Duke went on. 'It's poetic.'"