What Makes Gowanus ‘Gowanus’?

In this essay, architecture student and Van Alen intern Leeya Rice reflects on Gowanus Yearbook, a student-led project created by Rida Chaudhry, Ananaya Singh, and Kaye Yuvallos. Hosted at Van Alen Institute, this living portrait of Gowanus prompts us to consider who gets remembered as neighborhoods undergo dramatic change. The project invites local residents to be photographed, mark their photos with the year they arrived or were born in Gowanus, and draw a symbol answering the prompt: “What makes Gowanus Gowanus?”

A neighborhood’s physical form may be singular, but its meaning is always plural. If the identity of a place is not confined to one interpretation, but instead emerges from a collection of many different perspectives, then a neighborhood’s perceived identity is ultimately shaped by those who experience it. Those experiences accumulate into culture, shaping both how a neighborhood looks and how it is perceived.

However, a neighborhood’s population is never static. New inhabitants arrive as longtime residents move away, and even those who remain evolve as individuals. The fluidity of a community suggests that the identity of its place is always in the process of redefinition — it is constantly being lost and remade as its people change.

This tension is acutely visible in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which has been undergoing neighborhood-wide rezoning, rapid development, and canal remediation since 2021. Drawing in new residents and commercial activity, this large-scale urban “revitalization” does more than add buildings — it recomposes the population, and with it, the cultural fabric that has long defined the neighborhood. 

That transformation is already visible. The opening of Whole Foods along the canal in 2013 — on land that evolved over a century from a historic concrete factory into a gritty automotive scrapyard — became an early symbol of Gowanus’s changing identity. For some, it represented long-awaited investment and environmental cleanup; for others, it foreshadowed the neighborhood’s shift toward a new demographic. Today, as new residential buildings rise along the remediated canal, the physical changes are inseparable from questions about who the neighborhood is being remade for and whether the relationships that have characterized Gowanus can endure. 

A place’s capacity to foster community is what grounds neighborhood identity. When neighbors know one another – when their shared existence extends beyond proximity into recognition, familiarity, and care – a neighborhood’s identity becomes rooted in community. Collectivity creates unity, and unity creates the cultural coherence needed to characterize a place.

As neighborhoods grow denser and populations become more transient, maintaining this sense of community becomes increasingly difficult. The faces that once felt familiar grow distant, and everyday interactions become increasingly transactional. In these moments, people begin to inhabit the same place without truly inhabiting it together. When people live in social isolation despite living in close proximity to one another, community-based neighborhood identity can begin to erode.

This erosion produces a familiar pattern: the inverse relationship between community strength and aesthetic emphasis. When a neighborhood’s interconnectedness begins to unravel, its identity gradually migrates away from its people and onto its surfaces. A neighborhood once known through the relationships it fostered becomes known for its picturesque coffee shops and streetscapes. The emphasis shifts from who experiences a place to what exists within it.

This tension between lived relationships and visual identity is at the heart of Gowanus Yearbook. Conceived in response to the neighborhood’s ongoing redevelopment, Gowanus Yearbook asks a deceptively simple question: what — and more importantly who — gets remembered? Through photographs of residents and drawn responses to the prompt, “what makes Gowanus Gowanus?,” the project foregrounds individual perspectives rather than presenting a single narrative.

That emphasis on individuality is embedded in the project’s formal choices. Unlike sentences, which often guide readers toward a specific conclusion, drawings remain inherently open to interpretation. Each unique line and curve acts as a clue revealing — however subtly — the person behind the drawing. Even when multiple residents draw the same place, their pictures differ, making visible the many ways a single neighborhood can be understood. Images inevitably simplify reality by translating it into two dimensions, but they also reveal the complexity behind perspective itself. Together, the photos and drawings that compose Gowanus Yearbook become a collective portrait of the neighborhood, embracing difference while asserting that no single experience can define a place.

In a moment of rapid change, Gowanus Yearbook reminds us that the neighborhood is defined by its variety of individual perspectives. It works to preserve the memories of the people and places that existed before the changes unfolding today, recognizing that redevelopment alters not only the physical landscape but also the social structure from which neighborhood identity emerges. By documenting individuals and their perspectives, the project holds onto memories that might otherwise disappear beneath new buildings and new populations.

Gowanus Yearbook doesn’t resolve the tensions it highlights, nor does it stop Gowanus from changing. Instead, through drawings and portraits, it insists that a neighborhood is not its aesthetic, but the accumulated, overlapping, and often irreconcilable experiences of the people who’ve lived there. That insistence, in a city moving as fast as New York, is not a small thing.

About the Author

Leeya Rice is an undergraduate student at Wellesley College studying architecture and the humanities. Her interests center on the relationships between the built environment, cultural memory, and public life, with a particular focus on how architecture reflects social and political ideas across different historical and geographic contexts. In addition to her coursework at Wellesley, she participates in architecture and design studios through cross-registration at MIT, works as a research assistant supporting scholarship on modern architecture and liberalism, and recently completed a summer internship at Van Alen Institute.