Lost water · 1699 – buried, still flowing
Vechte's Brook
The buried stream that fed the Gowanus — paved over as the neighborhood built up, never stopped flowing, and still floods the streets it used to drain.
A farm on a brook
In 1699 the Dutch farmer Claes Arentson Vechte built a stone house on the western slope of what's now Park Slope, on a small brook that ran down toward the tidal Gowanus Creek. The stream supplied his farm — the Vechte-Cortelyou House, later famous as the Old Stone House of the Battle of Brooklyn — and drained the whole hillside that today holds Prospect Park, Windsor Terrace, and the South Slope.
Paved over, not gone
As the neighborhood was graded and built up in the 19th century, Vechte's Brook was buried and routed into the city's combined sewer system. But a buried stream is still a stream: groundwater still moves down the old channel, and the rainwater that the brook's ponds and wetlands once held now rushes straight into undersized sewer pipes.
The hydrology, by the numbers
Vechte's Brook was one of four named freshwater sources feeding the tidal Gowanus — alongside Brouwer's Brook to its north, and the Bergen and Sassian streams to the west. Today their combined drainage area, the Gowanus watershed, covers roughly 1,700 acres, almost entirely paved. Because Brooklyn's sewers are combined — stormwater and sewage share the same pipes — heavy rain overwhelms the system and flushes a mix of the two straight into the canal: on the order of 360 million gallons of combined-sewer overflow a year, spread across roughly 40 rainfall events. The water that used to soak into the brook's ponds and wetlands now has nowhere to go but the pipe, and then the canal.
Reading the old map
Bernard Ratzer's celebrated 1766–67 survey of New York (above) captures the Gowanus before any of this — a broad tidal creek fringed with salt marsh, fed by streams running down off the high ground that is now Park Slope and Prospect Park. Trace the inlets back inland and you're looking at the original path of Vechte's Brook. Map historians and groups like the Gowanus Canal Conservancy have used exactly these old surveys, overlaid on modern topography, to reconstruct where the buried streams ran — and to argue for “daylighting” pieces of the watershed as green infrastructure.
Why the streets still flood
The brook's severed connection to the old Gowanus basins is a major reason low-lying blocks in Gowanus, Park Slope, and Windsor Terrace still flood in heavy rain. The Gowanus Canal itself became a federal Superfund site in 2010 — its sediment a century's worth of industrial runoff and sewage. The water that shaped the neighborhood is still down there, under the asphalt, still trying to find the creek.
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