April Showers Bring May Flowers and Floods

This week’s Photo of the Week looks back just 15 years to April 2007. A person in jeans and a raincoat rides their bicycle through at least eight inches of water with their kid in tow. The caption on the back of the photograph reads “4.15.07 - Flooding. End of 1st street and Canal.”  In April 2007, a devastating Nor'easter barreled up the East Coast of the United States, bringing with it high winds and record-breaking rainfall. The storm and torrential rains flooded low-lying roads and caused tidal surges that wreaked havoc on coastal and riverfront communities. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus, the destructive Nor’easter caused the Gowanus Canal to overflow, leeching a brackish mixture of rainfall, street runoff and combined sewage overflow throughout the low-lying streets along the waterfront. 

The Gowanus Canal meets 1st street one block south of the Carroll Street bridge. This photograph is one of many taken by Linda Mariano documenting the flooding and impact of the storm on the neighborhood and its residents. She followed along the canal, photographing street ends where the canal breached the bulkhead. The water remained pooled, finding no retreat to storm drains or back into the canal, a sight all too familiar for folks living along the infamous waterway.  

Linda Mariano was a Gowanus resident, retired art teacher, and founding member of the Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus. Linda’s candid photographs of the aftermath of the 2007 Nor’easter are part of the Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus records at the Center for Brooklyn History.

Stay tuned for an upcoming Brooklynology post delving deeper into the history of the organization and the materials in the collection.   

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at [email protected].