They found love in the muck.
Despite its notorious reputation for being a polluted pool of stagnant filth, the Gowanus Canal was recently the site of a marriage pr🅠oposal — and she said yes.
Gowanus residents Emma Borochoff, 30, and Jamison Pence, 32, have been dating for three-and-a-half years, lived in the neighborhood for two, and frequently go on walks over the Superfund-designated waterway’s br🐎idges, a pleasure they’ve been enjoying even more frequently in quarantine. Inspired by their jaunts, and wanting to have his friends present in a COVID-safe way during the big moment, Pence had the idea to get down and dirty🐬 with his proposal on the canal itself, the Brooklyn Paper .
“Last summer, w𒅌e did a canal crawl, and that’s what prompted the engagement — we wanted to do another canal crawl this year, but because of the pandemic, we made it a small crawl,” Pence, a sales manager, told The Post. On the August afternoon the couple was slated to go bar-hoppingꦑ along the canal on foot with their buddies, he told Borochoff at the last minute that he’d scheduled a canoe ride first.
“I was like, ‘Oh, great! But we’re going to be late,’ ” said Borochoff, who is also in marketing. (The couple began as an office romance.) “I had no idea.”
Pence borrowed a canoe from the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club and waited until they had paddled to the ✤Carroll Street Bridge, where their friends suddenly appeared.
“Everyone came out of nowhere on the bridge, and ▨I just thought they were superpumped we were canoeing,” said Borochoff. “Then they were all yelling for me to turn around.”
“I think the hard part was reaching for the ring,” said Pence of his experience climbing towards Borochoff’s end of the canoe. “And🧸 making sure I held onto th💃at with a death grip while still moseying my way to the front.”
Inspiredꦜ by the proposal, the partners in slime plan to have a camp-themed wedding in their native Maryland, with canoeing for sure on the itinerary.
The couple are currently in Aruba, on an “engagementmoon” they had planned well before the proposal. Despite the country’s crystal-clear Car🙈ibbean waters, though, they still yearn for the iridescent waters of their engagement site.
“You don’t have that nice rainbow sheen the Gowanus has,” said B💧orochoff.
