Bayside By The Canal

The Bayside Fuel Oil Depot in Brooklyn. Drawn from one of the bleakest Greenspaces in NYC: a small strip of brown grass at the end of the parking lot of a Lowe's Home Improvement store, with a couple of benches overlooking the Gowanus Canal. The Gowanus is a Superfund site, having the distinction of being one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. To the left of these tanks is a metal salvage yard and the BQE, to the right is the F/G train tracks. Quite the scenic view. I wonder how much in financial incentives this developer received for putting in this "park."

That being said, it's a pretty quiet spot to sit. I sat there drawing this, listening to a podcast. At a certain point, I started to hear the faint sounds of ... bagpipes? As it happens, one of the hosts of this podcast is Scottish, so I thought maybe he was playing bagpipe music in the background. But, no, it was this guy . . .

  

I support this fellow for finding a secluded spot to practice, rather than afflicting his neighbors with it.

 

As with my previous post, the one of the Tuck-It-Away building, after completing this drawing, I saw the site from another angle which completely changed my understanding of it. From the ground, it looks like a pair of two tiered tanks, like a wedding cake. But seen from the train platform above, I realized the lower cylinder was a wall encasing a central tank. Also, I'd thought that all the pipes in that pipeline terminating by the canal (which I'm sure has nothing to do with the canal's Superfund status) originated from the tank on the left, and that the blue pipes to the right just ended there, but from the bird's eye view you can see the layout of the pipelines. Perspective, man. Whoa.