Community Corner
The Gowanus Canal Conservancy’s First Winter Festival
The Gowanus Canal Conservancy will hold its first Winter Festival fundraiser on December 3 to help fund green infrastructure around the canal.
Do you need an excuse to eat delicious local food, drink local beer and listen to Brooklyn rock bands all while helping to clean the Gowanus Canal?
Well, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on the preservation, restoration and green infrastructure development of the canal and the surrounding area, is throwing its first Winter Festival fundraiser on December 3.
The fundraiser will take place from 6 p.m. to 12 p.m. in Build It Green NYC’s new space on Ninth Street, between the canal and Second Avenue, which is a nonprofit retail outlet for salvaged building materials.
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The Winter Festival will have a three-course dinner catered by Lot 2, a restaurant on Sixth Avenue at 20th Street, and beer will be provided by Butternut, Captain Lawrence and other New York breweries.
The proceeds from the fundraiser will help fund the Gowanus Canal Conservancy’s composting program, which has produced 12 cubic yards of compost used to restock the depleted soil along the canal and their monthly volunteer program, Clean and Green, which picks up trash in the canal-area, plants trees and builds rain gardens.
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“All this volunteer activity costs money and the best way for us to do it is to help get the community to support us,” said Andrew Simons, the board chair for the Conservancy.
The last Clean and Green program planted nine trees and 110 perennials, put down mulch and cleaned Ennius Park on Second Avenue between 11th and 12th streets on October 23.
Proceeds will also fund green infrastructure on the public spaces on street ends along the Gowanus. The Conservancy is planning to start its Sponge Park pilot, which will be a public park and a system of bioswales along the canal’s banks to help filter rainwater before it enters the combined sewers, on Sixth Street and First Street in the spring of 2012.
The Winter Festival will also have a silent auction for attendees to bid on items like paintings by local artist Ella Yang, an ornamental tree donated by Pleasant Run Nursery in NJ, which will be brought to your house and planted, a tour of the cooking TV show “Chopped” to meet the host and receive a signed chef’s jacket, an artisan sausage making class for two from Brooklyn Cured, a magnum reserve of cider from , a dinner for two at Lot 2 and more.
Tickets are $60 for the whole night, from 6 p.m. to 12 p.m., which includes the three-course meal, two beers and the concert. The concert will feature three Brooklyn-based rock bands, which will be announced soon. For those of who only want to hear music, tickets are $15. To buy tickets, click here.
Although the evening is meant to be fun, the underlining purpose is to help continue efforts to clean .
“The Winter Festival will directly help us to get three green infrastructure projects built within the next year,” said Simons. “To me that’s the most important part.”
“It will be money well spent in the neighborhood. The fundraiser is all about our neighborhood citizens helping to get the Gowanus-area improved,” Simons said.
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