Mayor Bloomberg is expected in the next week or two to mark the grand opening of a new Holiday Inn on Union Street in Brooklyn, part of a broader trend of residential and commercial development under way and on the drawing boards for the neighborhood around the Gowanus Canal.

“Unfortunately, we do not have Gowanus Canal views,” a Holiday Inn sales manager, Cathy Pascale, who says some reservations at the hotel are being made for cruise passengers leaving from the new Red Hook terminal, says.

A view of the canal, which wends its way through a gritty industrial neighborhood, might once have been thought a punishment rather than a perk. However, a combination of private investment and government planning is bringing change to the Gowanus, once known for its foul odor and pollutants but now eyed as the centerpiece of an environmentally friendly “green district.”

Developer Shaya Boymelgreen and partners envision a residential and commercial “Gowanus Village,” east of the canal between Carroll and Second streets. A Boymelgreen spokeswoman, Sara Mirski, says they are “strongly considering a Green Building project by architects Enrique Norten and Cetra Ruddy.”

On the other side of the canal, another residential development is being proposed by Toll Brothers, a major national home builder.

Since these proposals for large-scale residential properties are in areas zoned for manufacturing uses, the city Planning Department is studying existing conditions — “to understand both where is there active industry on and near the canal and in adjacent manufacturing areas, and where the land has been vacant for a long time in order to balance interests of people who live in the area and the adjacent neighborhoods of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens,” says the director of the Brooklyn office of the city Planning Department, Regina Myer. “City planning’s objective is to begin a public process that would develop consensus for the area’s future land use,” she said.

The Gowanus Canal Community Development Corp. recently released a comprehensive plan for the future of the Gowanus area. Implementation will depend on how government agencies, developers, and community groups react. The development corporation proposes a “green,” sustainable mixed-use community, a big change from the past 150 years of the Gowanus Canal.

“The first green district in the history of the city,” says the director of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation, Thomas Chardevoyne.

The plan would include green buildings and green manufacturing. It would codify the de facto mixed use of residential and commercial and makes a point to embrace manufacturing and industrial uses.

The plan divides the canal into two major districts. For the northern district, above Third Street, with its smaller blocks and smaller-scale buildings, the proposal is for more residential in the mix. It encourages relocation of the “unenclosed industrial sites,” or truck yards. The southern district, closer to the harbor, is more conducive to water dependent uses, such as oil terminals, an asphalt plant and concrete manufacturing plants. Some large-scale retail is already there in the form of a Pathmark supermarket and a 2-year-old Lowe’s housewares, and a Whole Foods is on the way.

The development corporation also proposes a Gowanus Canal Business Improvement District to bring public and private resources together. For the southern district, the aim is to upgrade Second Avenue and to renovate and enliven the 9th Street elevated F-G train station. For the northern district, an enhancement of the Thomas Greene Park is proposed as a new node for residential and business activity.

Also announced was the initiation of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, which will advocate for public and private resources to rehabilitate the canal’s waterway.

For more than 30 years, public neglect kept the canal fetid and prevented the brownstone neighborhoods of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Boerum Hill from growing and connecting. The leadership of community activist Salvatore “Buddy” Scotto brought about the reopening of the flushing tunnel in 1999. Overnight the smell waned, derelict Smith Street became restaurant row, marine life and birds returned, seals are spotted in season, the art colony mushroomed, and investors flocked to develop fallow contaminated lands.

Mr. Scotto has been quoted saying, “All the investment in housing and business gets flushed away without investments in infrastructure.” What is needed is keeping the old 1911 flushing tunnel in good repair, upgrading it, correcting the combined sewer overflows — especially before the Atlantic Yards development adds more flow, cleaning debris from the canal, repairing bulkheads, and dredging contaminated sediments. Mr. Scotto also says: “The development projects will create pressure for infrastructure improvements — with, of course, the community keeping politicians’ feet to the fire.”

The Gowanus, like the canals in Chartres, Venice, Gdansk, and Georgetown, has an intimate scale and calm waters. Gowanus is rich in history; as a creek it was one of the first Dutch settlements; the site of the Battle of Brooklyn (“Good God, what brave men must I lose this day!” said Washington of the 400 Marylanders); the landscape industrialized by real estate developer Edwin Litchfield, who petitioned the legislature to allow the building of the canal (his Italianate Brooklyn Improvement Co. building still stands at Third Avenue and Third Street, and was recently landmarked). The canal has water, scale, ecology and history — and it smells better than Venice!

Ms. Weisbrod, director of the Partnership for Sustainable Ports, was consultant to the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corp. between 2000 and 2004.