Gowanus Guardian: A One-Man Crusade Against Canal Pollution

At 8:00 a.m. on a cold Tuesday morning, Gary Francis stood on the bank of the Gowanus Canal, wearing a gray beanie with the words “Fuck CSOs” embroidered in hot pink.

CSO stands for Combined Sewer Overflow. This foul spillover mixes with industrial pollution, making the Gowanus Canal the most contaminated canal in the nation.

Millions of gallons of raw sewage pour into the canal every time there’s a serious downpour. This is because New York City’s sewer system, like most older cities, combine both raw sewage and storm water. In fact, Brooklyn is home to the oldest sewer system in the country. Devised to hold much less storm water than current conditions produce, the sewers release solid waste from toilets all over the city into the canal.

Francis has become a self-appointed one-man crusader against CSOs.

Originally from England, Francis is a specialist in scagliola, a rare and historic marbling technique — a craft that led him to jobs around the world restoring historic buildings. When he got to America in 1989 to restore the New Jersey State House, he fell in love, got married, and stayed. The couple moved to Maine, where he switched from marbling to ship building.

When the marriage foundered, he took a job on sailboat delivery crew, which made its rounds between the eastern United States and the Caribbean. “I jumped ship from the crew and just lived down there for a year,” he said. Remnants of an English accent peek through his soft-spoken voice.

When Francis returned to Brooklyn in 2010, he faced a rough transition to urban living. He knew he had to find his way back to the water: “I just assumed that I could, because it’s New York City and surrounded by water, but it’s actually harder than you think to get in the water here.”

Hard, but not impossible: Francis is now captain of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, leading canoe expeditions on the canal. The Dredgers’ mission is to make the Gowanus waterfront come alive so that people can start to value and enjoy the canal. In the summer, the Dredgers host paddle-in movie nights, art exhibits, and comedy shows in their headquarters, a garage-like space they call the Boathouse.

But with the water quality of the canal so poor and the city’s response so lackluster, Francis has adopted the Gowanus as his life’s mission, at least for now. Since September, he has collected water quality data at four stops along the canal every single morning.

His first stop is 9th St. Bridge.

At each site, the 56-year-old jumps over the fence onto the concrete rail next to the water. He chalks his athleticism up to his “short stint” in England’s special forces. He then ties a bright blue and green rope to the fence and uses it to lower his blue testing box into the murky water. He leaves the kit in the water for two and a half minutes, and when he pulls it up, he has 15 seconds to take an iPhone picture of the screen readout before it fades.

This testing equipment is manufactured by the local Bronx company Duro, which customized the unit especially for Francis. He needed a kit designed only to gather data that doesn’t require processing in a laboratory. Francis does not have access to one — the man has no prior scientific or data collection experience. But Duro’s CEO, Brian Wilson, said that Francis is “the first person to get this much data in this canal ever.”

Francis struck up a conversation with the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, workers at his last stop, right outside the Dredgers’ headquarters. He said it’s taken him a year to become cordial with them. Both are out here working every day, but the EPA guys are cagey about talking to people about the work, mostly because of the community pushback about the rezoning. He introduced “his buddy Mike,” an EPA contractor whose last name, Francis confessed, he doesn’t know.

Francis excitedly videotaped as the contractors lowered a diver down into the canal like a teenage superfan. It took a team of three people to hose off the diver after he emerged.

Francis genuinely loves this work, even on cold December mornings. He is not quite sure what the outcome of his data collection will be, but he is motivated by a steadfast belief in himself: “This is the template for how to save the planet,” said Francis.

After his daily morning rounds, which wrap up around 9:00 a.m., Francis bikes to his job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he makes concrete. This isn’t just any concrete. He is the head fabricator at Art in Construction, which he says produces some of the fanciest concrete in the world. Think artisanal concrete, if you can — handmade, custom, high-quality. Every object in the sprawling workspace is organized in teetering piles, covered in white dust, and seems vaguely dangerous. But the windows along the walls reveal a sparkling skyline.

It is here that Gary mixes his concrete. “The key to good concrete is quality control. It’s like baking — it’s all about using good ingredients, being very precise, and making sure you can repeat it. That last part is key,” said Francis, pouring over the formula he reads from a well-worn sheet of paper. “This is the science side of art.”

“Our clients are one percenters,” said Francis. “People who can afford to customize everything.” He just finished a project making the bathroom floor for a building on 5th Avenue. He pointed to a white cloth covering something spiky. “We had to sign an NDA about who commissioned that spiral staircase,” he said, using the shorthand for non-disclosure agreement.

The Navy Yard has kept its original steam heat system, making the space hot and humid. Francis put a thermometer up to the dusty metal radiator, yielding a reading of 230 degrees Fahrenheit. “I love this climate,” said Francis. “It reminds me of the island.” A pencil is tucked behind his ear under a blue baseball cap. What color his shoes or pants were originally is impossible to say, as if he had spent the morning rolling in snow.

Even here, Francis’s passion for the water is evident. His blue paddleboard hangs from the ceiling, and his passion project — building vertical habitats for Atlantic ribbed mussels — takes up an entire table. Ribbed mussels, unlike oysters, can still survive in the Gowanus Canal. At low tide, you can see countless mussels in the cracks of the canal’s old wooden bulkheads.

Francis’s boss, Stephen Balser, sat at a desk in the space’s showroom, gazing noncommittally at some paperwork. This room is significantly less dusty than the others, and Francis’s elegant, handmade sinks hang from the ceiling.

“When I first heard Francis was paddleboarding on the Gowanus, I thought, ‘paddleboarding on the Gowanus? Are you crazy?’” said Balser.

“Yes!” shouted Francis.

“Well,” David said. “The crazier the better.”