Jiggle the Handle

Busy as buttermilk

That's Buttermilk Channel, painted by Charles A. Platt sometime around the turn of the last century. with Red Hook visible on the right and lower Manhattan straight ahead. Buttermilk Channel is the narrow tidal strait that separates Governors Island from Brooklyn. It got its name, according to one story, because so much milk was lost in transport from the dairies of Brooklyn across the strait to Manhattan that the water churned buttermilk. Charming. But Buttermilk Channel gives something back to Brooklyn besides cream (or whatever buttermilk is). It's the source of freshwater used to flush the Gowanus Canal. Or was, anyway.

(Courtesy New York Times)

Shortly after the canal was built in the 1880s, it started to stink, for obvious reasons. So, in 1911, the City built a tunnel to bring fresh(er) water from Buttermilk Channel into the canal and, well, flush it out into the bay. The tunnel follows the route of Degraw Street, more or less, between Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, to the head of the canal. It stopped functioning around 1961, and the canal returned to its familiar fetid state. Thankfully, the tunnel is now in the midst of a four-year big-budget renovation. The New York Times did a great piece on this last year.

There you have it: the Gowanus Flushing Tunnel--the fourth, well, third-and-a-half anyway--waterway the BQE passes over. And on that semi-triumphant note, your correspondent concludes this series. We've traveled from Rapelye Street to the Maspeth Kills, from Bushwick Creek to Buttermilk Channel. Hope you enjoyed it, parts anyway. There's not much left to say, except, "Catch ya further down the trail."