Life Imitates The Jaundiced Eye Of Urban Outfitters Designers

The “Gowanus Canal Conservancy” sounds like an excellent idea for an ironic T-shirt:

One smells like fresh-cut grass and the other like an open sewer, but now Central Park, that breathtaking urban oasis, and the long-polluted Gowanus Canal have something in common — their own conservancies.

Activists in southwest Brooklyn recently announced the creation of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy in hopes of ensuring a brighter future for an industrial waterway once dubbed Lavender Lake — for its chemically altered hue.

“Everybody agrees the canal has to be cleaned,” said Thomas Chardavoyne, head of the nonprofit Gowanus Canal Community Development Corp., which formed the conservancy. The group will raise money and seek volunteers to convert the canal — which opened in 1866 and was once hailed as one of the world’s most important waterways — for dual recreational and industrial use.