What Evil Lurks... in Brooklyn's favorite superfund site?

Photo credit: David Alzaman/NY Daily NewsRemember when… Kramer donned wetsuit and goggles and plunged into the east river to swim laps because the gym pool was too crowded, setting off a series of bits about stinky mattresses and other Seinfeld-y stuff, and well, go back and watch the episode.

Flash forward to Sunday, Jan 26, 2014, truth is much grosser than fiction. A crazy man John D'Aquino, a member of the Coney Island River Rats dive team, which explores the waters around the city, planned to dive ON PURPOSE, into the Gowanus Canal, to see what the hell is going on down there. Dive, I said, not slip, not get pushed.

Sure, he was going to be hazmatted from head to toe, so maybe he would be protected from life-threatening, mutating contamination, but what about the PTSD from what he would see down there? Would he be swimming beside animated piles of shit with three eyeballs and fins? Cavorting with seagull-rat cross-breeds? The whole shitshow (hahaha!) was going to be live-streamed at the Green Building as part of some smarty-pants TEDx (independent off-shoot of TED) event about the Gowanus in all its horror and glory. Kind of fucking incredible; I would’ve loved to have seen it. So too would have all the smarty pants TED-types at the Green Building. Alas, “weather did not permit a live dive.” (aren't there heated hazmat suits??) Instead they stuck a camera into the water but oil pooled around the lens and all the viewers could see was brown muck. D’Aquino did do a live dive the previous day and reported sightings of mussels growing on wood pilings, so bring down your fishing net. No word on whether the bivalves had feet and wings, but a girl can hope.

VIA NYDAILYNEWS.COM