“We were tired of shoveling snow and taking out the garbage,” Ms. Friedland said. The couple went into contract for a two-bedroom condo in fall 2014, before the development was built; they sold their old place in fall 2015. Both transactions were more than $1.5 million and less than $2 million, she said. Their timing, however, was off.
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Aaron Zebrook for The New York Times
“We didn’t know it was going to be 15 months,” Ms. Friedland said of the condo’s construction. She is retired from a job in customer relations at British Airways, but she and her husband, the inventor and co-founder of Pawz waterproof dog boots, are not retiring sorts. While they were between homes, her former career afforded them discounts as they traveled to London, Bucharest, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Borneo and Spain before the building was completed and they could stop living out of their suitcases.
“We’re pretty active,” Mr. Friedland said, “and it’s very convenient to go anywhere from here.”
What You’ll Find
Gowanus fans out around the 1.8-mile-long canal, polluted by decades of industrial and sewage discharge. A Superfund cleanup, overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, may take 10 years, according to Andrea Parker, executive director of the nonprofit Gowanus Canal Conservancy.
Canalside developments like 365 Bond, a 430-unit luxury rental (studios start at $2,382), are banking on the cleanup. “To some people it seemed risky, but to us it seemed obvious,” said Mitchell Hochberg, the president of Lightstone, its owner. “There’s great public transportation, restaurants and bars.”
Its borders are generally considered the Gowanus Expressway to the south, Fourth Avenue to the east, Baltic Street to the north, with a jagged western boundary along Hoyt and Smith Streets, a sliver of which is in the Carroll Gardens Historic District.
CARROLL GARDENS
HISTORIC DISTRICt
“Everybody keeps redefining it based on financial return,” said Paul Basile, 50, the president of the Gowanus Alliance, a 300-member group working to preserve its backbone as a center of commerce.
What You’ll Pay
On Dec. 27, a custom area search of Gowanus on The New York Times website, using Baltic Street as the northern border, showed 37 properties for sale, ranging from $425,000 for a two-bedroom income-restricted co-op in a walk-up to $4.2 million for a 19th-century townhouse also in the Carroll Gardens Historic District.
The median sales price through the third quarter of 2016 for a condo or co-op was $985,000, a 36.8 percent increase from the same period the previous year, according to Gregory J. Heym, the chief economist at Terra Holdings. With only 31 sales, he said, the data was too small to break down by bedroom size. Mr. Heym said the median price for the 28 townhouse sales was $1.53 million, a decrease of 15 percent.
Rentals, mostly found in brownstones, range from $1,700 to $2,400 for studios, $1,900 to $2,400 for one-bedrooms and $2,250 to $3,200 for two-bedrooms, according to Aleksandra Scepanovic, the managing director of Ideal Properties Group.
The Vibe
Talk of rezoning for more residential development is in the air, but Brad Lander, 47, a councilman representing District 39 in Brooklyn, which includes Gowanus, does not envision any changes for at least a few years.
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Aaron Zebrook for The New York Times
“We’re engaged in a community-based planning process called Bridging Gowanus, and the neighborhood’s Industrial Business Zone around the Gowanus basin is sacrosanct,” he said.
On local streets, creative types on bicycles contend with trucks rumbling toward the expressway. While marine life has improved in the last couple of years, human contact with canal water is not advised, experts say. Safer activities include the Royal Palms Shuffleboard courts or stopping for a slice of pie at Four & Twenty Blackbirds or a drink at Lavender Lake, a long-ago nickname for the canal.
The Schools
Gowanus is part of District 15, which includes Public School 32 Samuel Mills Sprole, 317 Hoyt Street, serving about 515 students from prekindergarten through Grade 5. According to the city’s 2015-2016 School Quality Snapshot, 62 percent met state standards in English, versus 39 percent citywide; 62 percent did so in math, versus 40 percent. Middle School 442 Carroll Gardens School for Innovation, which shares the building, is moving to Windsor Terrace, so the elementary school can undergo a three-year construction project to add roughly 436 seats.
Another option in the district is Middle School 51 William Alexander, 350 Fifth Avenue, in Park Slope, serving about 1,124 students. Standards in English were met by 78 percent, versus 37 percent citywide, and math standards by 79 percent, versus 32 percent.
The Commute
There are subway stations in the neighborhood at Smith-Ninth Streets (F and G); Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street (R, F and G full time, D and N part time); Union Street-Fourth Avenue (R full time, D and N part time); and Prospect Avenue (R full time, D and N part time).
The History
The Gowanus marshland was developed as a canal in the mid-1800s and for decades was a major transport lane to New York Harbor. Organized crime exploited it during Prohibition, according to “Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal,” by Joseph Alexiou. By 1960 it was obsolete, “a stagnant cesspool in a neighborhood that New York City forgot.” The Environmental Protection Agency listed it as a Superfund site in 2010.
