The gleaming 12-story apartment building that opened to renters last month at Brooklyn, New York‘s 365 Bond St. counts a rooftop lounge, 24-hour concierge, spin studio and boat launch among its deluxe amenities.
But you won’t find these waterfront tenants dipping their toes in the water or digging a vegetable garden in the soil.
That’s because 365 Bond St. sits along the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal on a brownfield site — land where industrial use left contaminants in the soil. The Gowanus Canal is actually a SuperFund site: the highest level of toxicity in the brownfield hierarchy.
Industrial pollution is common in Gowanus, but with proximity to brownstone Brooklyn, an expanding restaurant scene and growing interest from tech companies, the neighborhood is among the borough’s hottest real estate markets.
The property’s developer, Lightstone, cleaned the land under New York state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program. It offers developers financial incentives to sanitize and then build on polluted lands.
The state certified the cleanup as complete in October 2015 and Lightstone declared the site “100 percent clean.”
But that doesn’t mean the property is pristine.