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a.c Gowanus means: ͞a young or small pine,͟ or ͞the sleeper͟ in the Delaware Indian
languagei

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a.c It is hard to imagine but the Gowanus Canal used to be a freshwater ! *cwith
lots of !/ , $   andc/ . Very early Americans called the ' also
lived here in harmony with the land and water.

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a.c In the 1600s, Dutch farmers lived with the water as part of their lives. They
fished for the large, delicious oysters and shipped them by the barrel back to
Europe, making Gowanus oysters Brooklyn's first export. The creek was close to
sea level and the six-foot tides of the bay forced salt water up into its winding
course to create a brackish mix of water that was ideal for the bivalves.

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a.c By the middle 19th century, the City of Brooklyn was the fastest growing city in
America and had built more and more buildings around the Creek. The Gowanus
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a.c The people living in Gowanus wanted to use the water for    more than to
protect it for  cand they dug out the plants and the dirt and made the sides
nice and square and created a man-madewaterbody known as a /!

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a.c Carroll Street, 1888

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a.c The dirty and (sometimes smelly!) canal was called͞Lavender Lake͟ by locals
beginning in the 1880s.iic
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a.c When it rains, NYC sewer pipes combine waste from toilets with stormwater and
release both into the Canal ʹ called a CSO. c
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a.c Superfund
b.c Dredging (digging up the bottom of the canal)
c.c Cleaning up the Flushing Tunnel to bring in freshwater
d.c Picking up plastics
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a.c Plants: Marsh grasses, bulrush, pickerel weed, Blue flag irises, bayberry and
dogwood bushes

b.c Animals: ducks, seagulls, herons, geese, egrets, horseshoe crabs, blue crabs,
fiddler crabs, baby flounder, shrimp, mussells, killifish, jellyfish and a raccooniiic
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i
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/gowanuscanal/gowanuscanal.html
ii
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/gowanuscanal/gowanuscanal.html
iii
http://www.waterfrontmuseum.org/dredgers/wildlife.html

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