Migrant Men Move Into Gowanus Shelter Before Planned State Toxin Testing
Though New York state’s environmental agency wants to test the former industrial building for contaminants, city officials say the landlord already provided them with a clean bill of health.
Over the weekend the city’s homeless services agency began housing migrant men in a newly opened 400-bed shelter that sits alongside Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal — before state environmental officials have begun planned testing of the site for potential toxic contamination.
The Department of Social Services declined to say precisely when the six-story former factory building opened as a shelter, but THE CITY visited the site Monday and reviewed daily sign-in sheets for residents dating back at least to Saturday.
The former manufacturing building sits alongside the notoriously fetid canal — designated for cleanup as a federal Superfund site in 2010 — and right next to one of the most contaminated sites in the entire city, a vacant lot still poisoned by toxins lurking in the soil beneath what had been a gas manufacturing plant.