As you walk on third street toward or from Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, across the Gowanus Canal (see previous blog), you pass a huge, abandoned red-brick building, a memento of the Canal's now faded industrial past. I've always thought it a beautiful, if delapidated, structure, with wonderful arched windows. I had fantasies of buying the property and turning it into a green building, with small businesses and creative ventures, and providing a park for the community's kids. The artists who were squatting in the building would provide their labor for rent.

Of course, as this blog points out, the building's provenance is complicated and the land on which it stands and the surrounds are deeply polluted. But there's still a romance to the shell that's hard to shake. One day, perhaps, someone with very deep pockets will rise to the occasion and redeem this magnificent structure.