It has been a brutal week out there. Prospect Park hit 100 degrees Thursday and the heat wave continues. Half the neighborhood is on vacation and the other half is inside with the AC on.

Forty-eight tall ships from twenty countries are sailing into New York Harbor today for the 250th, which felt like the right moment to start something we have been planning since spring. This is not a history newsletter, and that is probably not why you are here. But what happened in this neighborhood 250 years ago is too important to skip. Every few weeks this summer, we are going to tell that story in the Big Story section. Today we start at the beginning, with what Gowanus actually looked like before the battle came to it.

Now Open / Coming Soon —  A Scandinavian bakery is coming to Carroll Gardens, plus two neighborhood spots worth adding to your list

The Big Story — Before there was a neighborhood here, there was a tidal mill, a Dutch farmhouse, and world famous oysters. The story of pre-battle Gowanus, from the Lenape Canarsee to the summer of 1776

Things to Do — Tall ships in the harbor, where to catch the fireworks, a day-into-night party at Public Records, Anime Hoe Down at Littlefield, a ten-year anniversary dance party at Union Hall, and a few more things worth putting on the calendar

The Local — The man who put white tablecloths out on Court Street before anyone asked for them

Development Watch — Douglass Port is moving people in and a new building tops out at 3rd and Sackett

Quick Hits — Polar bears are coming to Gowanus??

A Scandinavian Bakery Is Coming to Court and President
Smør Bakery
Court Street and President Street
Coming Soon
Smør Bakery, known for its cardamom buns, breakfast burritos, and Scandinavian-inspired pastries, has announced a new location at the corner of Court and President Streets. The bakery already has a following in the East Village and Williamsburg, and this will be its first stop in Carroll Gardens. No firm opening date yet, but later this summer is the target. We'll have it when they open the doors.

Twenty Years of Pancakes on Smith Street
Cafe Luluc
214 Smith Street
Open · Daily 9am–9:45pm
Cafe Luluc has been on Smith Street for more than two decades, and the fluffy pancakes are still the reason people line up on weekend mornings. French-American bistro, pressed-tin ceiling, sidewalk tables, and a happy hour wine garden that's easy to forget about until you need it.

Scandinavian Ritual on Court Street
Konditori · 201 Court Street
Open · Daily
Konditori is a small Swedish coffee chain built around the concept of fika, the Scandinavian ritual of slowing down for coffee and something sweet. The Court Street location keeps the brand's signature look: 1960s refrigerators, old classroom chairs, and hand-built copper counters. You’ll wonder why it’s taken you so long to walk in.

This is the first in a summer series on what happened in this neighborhood 250 years ago.

For most of human history, what we call Gowanus was not a neighborhood at all. It was a tidal inlet fed by a dozen or more freshwater streams, draining a marshy basin that spread across what is now Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Cobble Hill. The water was clean. The six-foot tides pushed salt water in from the harbor twice a day, mixing with the freshwater springs that bubbled up through the hills. The result was one of the richest estuaries in the region.

What the creek produced was unlike anything else in the area. The oysters alone were remarkable. Accounts from the colonial period describe them as dinner-plate sized, some stretching close to a foot long. The Gowanus oyster was not a local delicacy. It was an export commodity, shipped across the Atlantic. When the Dutch settled here in the 1630s and 1640s, Gowanus oysters became the first international export from Brooklyn. The Gowanus Bay's six-foot tides pushed brackish water deep into the creek twice a day, creating exactly the conditions in which large bivalves thrive.

Before the Dutch arrived, the creek was home to the Lenape. Specifically, the Canarsee band, whose sachem was named Gouwane. The creek, and eventually the neighborhood, carries his name. Hundreds of people lived at Marechkawick, a Lenape town on the banks of the Gowanus, growing corn and fishing in the same waters that would later sustain the Dutch families who settled along the creek. The Dutch purchased the land from Lenape leaders beginning in 1636. Within a generation, the Lenape were gone from this stretch of Brooklyn.

The Dutch who settled here knew what they had. They also knew how to engineer it. By the middle of the 17th century, they had built a series of tidal mills along the creek, filling millponds that rose and fell with the tides. When the pond was full, the miller would close a gate to hold the water. When the tide went out, he would open the sluice, and the outrushing water would turn the millstones. Adam Brouwer, a former soldier with the Dutch West India Company, built the first of these mills near what is now the intersection of Union and Bond streets, around 1645. It was the first gristmill in all of New Netherland. Two more followed: Denton’s Mill, near what is now between Carroll and 3rd Streets, and Cole’s Mill, near present-day 9th Street.

Those mills were grinding tobacco, wheat, and corn grown on the farms that lined the creek. Getting the flour and cornmeal to market was its own challenge. Boats loaded at the mill landing had to navigate the winding creek south to Gowanus Bay, then work their way around the Red Hook peninsula through Buttermilk Channel to reach Manhattan. It was a treacherous trip. In 1664, Brouwer petitioned the colonial governor, Peter Stuyvesant, for permission to dig a shortcut: a hand-dug channel straight through the marsh to the harbor. Stuyvesant said yes. That channel, cut by hand through tidal wetland in the 1660s, is the direct ancestor of the canal you walk past today.

It is worth pausing to understand how much water there was. The creek itself was just the main stem. Around it spread an enormous tidal marsh. Denton’s Mill Pond alone covered 24 acres, rising and falling between what would become Nevins Street and 4th Avenue. The wet zone at the heart of Gowanus stretched roughly from what is now Court Street to nearly 4th Avenue, four to five city blocks of marsh, millpond, and creek that was impassable on foot at high tide. Part of the reason 4th Avenue still floods when it rains hard is that it was built on the bottom of that pond. The water still knows where it wants to go.

By 1699, a Dutch settler named Claes Vechte had built a farmhouse of brick and stone on the creek’s edge. That building still stands today as the Old Stone House in Washington Park. The Vechte farm raised grain, fruit, vegetables, oysters, and cattle for sale. Like many of their neighbors, the Vechtes enslaved people of African descent, who did most of the labor that made the farm run. When visitors to the farms along the Gowanus Meadows described them as prosperous and abundant, they were describing something built on that labor.

A Dutch traveler who visited the farms along the Gowanus in the 1600s left a description that is almost impossible to square with what the neighborhood looks like now. He wrote of being welcomed warmly at every plantation, of passing peach trees in every direction, all laden with fruit. He wrote of the oysters. He wrote of neighbors who shared whatever they had. Gowanus was, in his telling, a place of extraordinary abundance. The same low, marshy land that would later become a toxic industrial canal was, not so long before, one of the finest places to farm in the entire colony.

By the summer of 1776, those farms were still there, still producing, still run by the same families who had broken this soil four and five generations earlier. The Dutch spoken in Brooklyn had barely changed since the 1640s. The families who farmed along the creek, Vechte, Brouwer, Cortelyou, were not abstractions. Their names are still written across this borough. Cortelyou Road in Flatbush carries one family's name to this day. The Old Stone House in Washington Park, which you can walk into on a weekend afternoon, is the reconstructed farmhouse of the Vechte family, who worked this land for generations before any of this happened. These were not distant historical figures. They were people rooted to this place in the deepest sense. And in August of 1776, that place was about to become a battlefield.

They would have known something was coming. British ships had been appearing in the harbor since early July, and through that month the fleet kept growing. By mid-August, more than 400 ships rode at anchor off Staten Island, carrying 32,000 troops, the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent overseas. One American soldier, watching them arrive, wrote that it looked like “all London afloat.” From the heights above Gowanus, on a clear day, you could have seen those ships. On August 22, 1776, the British landed at Gravesend, five miles to the south. The farms were still standing. The mill was still running. The families who had broken this soil across four generations now had five days.

Next time: what happened when those five days were up.

Want to walk the battlefield yourself? We built a self-guided tour of the Brooklyn sites connected to the battle. It’s free, it’s on your phone, and it starts not too far from home. Find it at battle.thegowanaut.com.

Further reading:

Angel in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick - The best single-volume narrative of the American Revolution. Reads like a novel.

The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 by John J. Gallagher - The most detailed account of the battle itself, with granular attention to the Gowanus terrain.

Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal by Joseph Alexiou - The definitive history of this place, from the Lenape through the Superfund designation. If you read one book about Gowanus, make it this one.

The Old Stone House | theoldstonehouse.org/history - Excellent primary source material on the Vechte farm and the colonial era.

Sail4th 250: The Tall Ships Are Here at Brooklyn Bridge Park
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Sat July 4 – Wed July 8 · Parade today
The largest peacetime maritime gathering in American history is happening just a short walk from our front doors. More than 30 tall ships from 20 countries sail up the Hudson starting at 9:30am, passing the Statue of Liberty and continuing to the George Washington Bridge, with the Blue Angels flyover following around 10:15am. The parade runs until about 2pm. From July 5 through 8, several of the ships dock at Brooklyn Bridge Park for free public tours, no ticket required, though reservations are smart.

Anime Hoe Down at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Sat July 4 · Doors 6pm, show 7pm · 21+
Anime Hoe Down returns to Littlefield for the Fourth: cowboy cosplay, a DJ set from Shonen Pump, and cowgirl performances all night by Midnight Maid Cafe. An annual tradition at this point, and one of the better excuses in the neighborhood to skip the fireworks crowds.

Soul Summit x Shelter: Day-Into-Night at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sat July 4 · 3pm onward
Public Records is throwing a full day-into-night party for the Fourth, with Analog Soul, Lovie & Honey Bun, Madre Guía, Niyah West, Shawn Dub, and Suze Ijó on the lineup. Plant-based food and cocktails as usual, but this one is built to run all afternoon into the night.

Young Adult Friction: Ten-Year Anniversary at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Sat July 4 · 10pm
Park Slope's long-running indie and alt dance night turns ten, and they're throwing a proper anniversary party. If fireworks aren't your thing, or you want somewhere to land after, this is the move.

Macy's 4th of July Fireworks: Where to Watch
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Sat July 4 · Fireworks around 9:25pm
The 50th anniversary edition of the Macy's show is going bigger to match the 250th-more than 85,000 shells launching from the Brooklyn Bridge itself, plus barges on both the East and Hudson Rivers, with a new laser show added to the bridge. Ticketed zones within Brooklyn Bridge Park were distributed by lottery, so your best bet now is the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or an unobstructed view anywhere along the neighborhood's western edge. Brooklyn Bridge Park closes to non-ticketed visitors before the show, so stake out a spot early.

The Good Liars at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Tues July 7 · Doors 7pm, show 8pm
Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler have spent years embedding themselves in rallies, conventions, and conspiracy conferences to talk to the true believers up close. The stories they bring back are somehow funnier and more unsettling than anything you'd expect.

Alison Leiby: I'm A Lot at Bell House
149 7th Street
Tues July 7 · 7:30pm
Alison Leiby headlines a lineup that also includes Liza Treyger, Josh Gondelman, Ashley Hamilton, and Claire Parker. Leiby writes about anxiety and modern life with the kind of precision that makes the audience laugh at things they probably shouldn't.

Summercon 2026 at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Fri July 10 · 10am
One of the longest-running hacker and security conferences in the country lands at Littlefield for the day. Not a typical Gowanus booking, which is exactly why it's worth knowing about if that's your world.

The Nursery: DJ Sprinkles and Frank & Tony at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sun July 12 · 4pm
The outdoor garden series continues with a strong booking. DJ Sprinkles and Frank & Tony sharing a bill in the open-air Nursery space. Worth building a Sunday around.

Marco Polo Ristorante
345 Court Street at Union Street
Open Daily for Lunch and Dinner

Joseph Chirico arrived from San Martino, in southern Italy, in the late 1960s. He was nineteen years old, spoke almost no English, and found work as a maintenance man. Eleven years later, he was opening a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant on Court Street. He didn't ask whether the neighborhood was ready for it.

It was. Borough President Howard Golden and Congressman Ed Towns cut the ribbon. Within a few years, Joe DiMaggio had a regular table, and Joe Torre came through. Chirico was importing bufala mozzarella and porcini mushrooms to Carroll Gardens before either ingredient had any name recognition outside of Italian kitchens, running wine dinners in a neighborhood that still thought of Sunday dinner as the main event. He eventually served as president of the Brooklyn Restaurant Association and, from 1995 to 2004, owned Gage & Tollner, the landmark Downtown Brooklyn dining room that had been feeding the borough since 1879. Marco Polo was always the constant.

The restaurant is now run by his son, Marco, who started bussing tables there at age twelve and studied culinary arts at Johnson & Wales before taking over the kitchen. "You fall in love with it, with the customers, the people, and you can't think about doing anything else," he told Brooklyn Magazine on the restaurant's thirtieth anniversary. "It becomes a part of you." That was thirteen years ago.

The neighborhood has been through every reinvention Brooklyn offers since 1983. The Chiricos just kept cooking. That's a harder trick than it sounds.

Douglass Port Is Moving People In
251 Douglass Street
Residents started moving into Douglass Port at the beginning of June, and the building is now about 20 percent leased. The 15-story, 260-unit Charney and Tavros building is the second completed tower in the Gowanus Wharf campus, following Union Channel's full lease-up last year. Market-rate studios start at $3,400 per month, with three-bedroom units at $4,750 per month. Fifty-eight units are designated affordable. Leasing is active now at gowanuswharf.com.

A New Building Is Topping Out at 3rd and Sackett
579 Sackett Street
A relatively quiet one on the corner of 3rd Avenue and Sackett Street topped out in March. Developed by BlueSky Developers and designed by Kao Hwa Lee Architects, the 11-story building will yield 64 rental units and 3,348 square feet of ground-floor retail. Year-end 2026 is the target delivery. That retail corner at 3rd and Sackett is worth watching as the block fills in.

A pair of polar bears is coming to the canal- Yes, you read that right!
A mirror-encrusted polar bear cub and its glowing mother will live beside the canal. The public art piece is being built by Bushwick artist Jen Lewin. The bears will be joined by other artworks on the public esplanade at Nevins Landing.

Forty-eight tall ships, a day-long party on Butler Street, and the best fireworks show in fifty years. Have a great weekend!

If something's happening out there, we want to know about it. Email, photo, neighborhood gossip — we'll take it.
[email protected].

Exploring Gowanus · Every Saturday