A waterfront glow-up is transforming Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal

For a Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal is looking surprisingly nice these days. Long an industrial dumping site, the Brooklyn waterway has undergone decades of interventions to undo that damage. Now, after years of planning and community outreach, redevelopments along the polluted Gowanus Canal waterfront are giving the area a welcoming residential gloss.

Two recently opened projects exemplify the transformation underway along the Gowanus Canal. Both designed by the landscape architecture...