Leonard Thomas, who passed away December 14, 2025, at 76, was one of the chief bridge tenders of the Gowanus Canal.
Lenny introduced me to so much of the history of Brooklyn’s Lavender Lake. Standing on the edge of the historic Carroll Street bridge, he told me how honored he was to be the caretaker of Brooklyn’s waterfront heritage.
He also loved that it gave him the time to write his recipes. Leonard Thomas was the Chicken Man of the Gowanus.
My first exhibit of Gowanus Canal images was held in the tennis house at Prospect Park, home of the Brooklyn Center for Urban Education (BCUE), with the Chicken Man providing the food for the opening party. That was April 1999, the end of my first decade of a photo project that continues to this day.
The Gowanus Canal was the wild west in the 1990s, trapped between two gentrifying areas. It didn’t help that all of those gentrifying neighborhoods sent all their wastewater into the Gowanus Canal, effectively turning it into the largest sewer pipe in New York City. The water was fetid, with every type of pollution imaginable. I started canoeing on it and took several urban boat tours, falling in love with the five bridges in just a 1.7 mile stretch.
Leonard Thomas and I would meet at the bridges.
I will never forget the first time he invited me into the Union Street Bridge tender station and allowed me to photograph the process for opening.
I was photographing one of the regulars, an oil boat bringing its load to the tanks located on shore. Lenny would start at Hamilton Avenue, opening the dual bridge and stopping commuters in their tracks. It was the most time-consuming of the five bridges spanning the waterway. Next was the Ninth Street Bridge, now a new state of the art vertical rising bridge. In Lenny’s days, it split open in the center, roadway rising to let the boats pass through with the world’s highest subway station above it. Next was the Third Avenue Bridge, which felt like the middle of nowhere, an industrial area with long dead industry. Now it’s home to Whole Foods and multiple high rises. My favorite came next, the enigmatic Carroll Street Bridge, one of the last retractable bridges in America. Every time I see it, I feel like time stands still. One of my favorite pictures of Leonard is standing on the open bridge with the canal at his feet.
When the oil boat was approaching the Union Street bridge and I had followed the boat through each, Leonard looked at me and said, “Want to see what it looks like from up there?”
He brought me inside where everything was switches, dials and levers on a gleaming stainless steel control panel. To me, it was overwhelming. He was like the engineer on the starship Enterprise. He loved what he did.
After the publication of “Cooking with the Chicken Man” in 1998, I had an incredibly fun day with Leonard in Times Square, where he brought his grill and smoker, bringing recipes conceived on the Gowanus Canal to the Crossroads of the World.
Leonard will always be the Chicken Man of the Gowanus, and one of those great human beings I feel honored to have known.
