Brooklyn's Gowanus Open Studios has reached its 30th edition, and this year's event doubled as a reckoning with the neighbourhood's transformation. More than 100 sites opened their doors across the post-industrial maze along the canal on Saturday, and Hyperallergic critic Rhea Nayyar spent six hours walking through stairwells, hallways and nondescript entrances — covering, by her own estimate, barely a tenth of the programme.

What she found was a love letter to the canal and to the creative community gathered on its banks, written against a backdrop of remediation, development and gentrification. A striking amount of plein air work addressed the canal's ongoing water-remediation efforts, while other artists documented familiar street corners before they change "in the blink of an eye" — as the entire neighbourhood has done in the past five years alone.

Landscape painter Elizabeth O'Reilly, who has kept a studio on the same block as the Union Street Bridge since 1992, described watching the area swing 180 degrees: from a site of profound industrial abuse and infrastructural neglect to one of glimmering luxury high-rises in various states of completion. "It makes me a bit sad," she said. Her paintings and collages of the canal date largely to the late 2000s and early 2010s, the years the waterway was designated a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. The canal, she noted, still smells, and still floods with raw sewage when it rains.

Other stops included Lesley Kushner's studio of figurative beeswax sculptures. Between the oily reflections on the water and the new towers rising above it, the weekend read as a portrait of a creative district caught at the hinge point between its industrial past and its waterfront-development future.