The real story of National Grid’s “Greenpoint Energy Center” in North Brooklyn:

The community near the site is working hard to remediate the area and bring life back to the creek, but National Grid made this work much more difficult by continuing to reinforce its toxic and climate disastrous operation on 117 acres of land surrounded by an opaque fence. The facility houses its liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage, liquefiers, and vaporizers and continues the painful legacy of fossil fuel poisoning in the community. It is time to end the fossil fuel era and retire this toxic facility, a heart of the fracked gas system in New York City.

Some History:

National Grid’s LNG facility at 287 Maspeth Avenue in Brooklyn is built on the occupied land of the Mespeatches (where the name Maspeth originates) who inhabited the headwaters of Newtown Creek and collected strawberries, grapes, chestnuts, walnuts, and medicinal plants that grew wild throughout the island. They were productive farmers as well, growing together corn, beans, squash, as well as other sustaining plant foods. Corn, beans, and squash were called “the three sisters” by the Lenape. ​

Dutch colonial settlers arrived in the mid-1600s and began the industrialization of Newtown Creek, the industrial area with the longest continuous history in the United States.

In the mid-1800s the site housed a kerosene and oil refinery, and subsequently, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which was responsible for North America’s largest terrestrial oil spill. It later transitioned to the Brooklyn Union Gas company and was bought by National Grid, a UK-based corporation, in 2006. It is currently a Superfund site, a federal program designed to address abandoned hazardous waste sites.