From Poets’ Walk to Public Plaza
Scenic Hudson’s Evolving Role
by Paul De Angelis

Black Creek Preserve, 130-acre park, part of the necklace of public preserves Scenic Hudson has created up and down the Hudson.

Probably no place in northern Dutchess County better exemplifies the vision of Scenic Hudson, our area’s most significant citizen environmental group, than Poets’ Walk Park. Situated off River Road just north of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, the park was carved from nearby estates and retains its genteel associations with the writers and Romantic Landscape architects who first brought some order to its wildness. The trails that lead towards the river from the Overlook Pavilion are ideal for taking in both the engineering marvel of the Rhinecliff-Kinston bridge and the natural beauty of the Hudson and the Catskills. This visual tableau seems to incarnate the positive concept of “view shed”—an organizing idea that Scenic Hudson has probably done more to propagate than any other group.

Opening up to the general public such contemplative natural spaces has been no easy fight—especially against the mass culture trend of the mid-20th century. In the early 1960s Robert Moses was still hoping to run a superhighway across lower Manhattan and Con Edison hoped to implant the world’s largest pumped storage hydroelectric plant smack into the face of Storm King Mountain. A group of Hudson Valley residents gathered at the home of folklorist and Hudson River historian Carl Carmer to try to stop this assault on a legendary landmark. The group took on the name Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference; its co-founder Franny Reese would become the association’s first president. Their successful battle to block Con Edison led to the courts’ first recognition of a citizen’s interest in the environment and the adoption of Environmental Impact Statements as a prerequisite for major land development. It also helped pave the way for the National Environmental Protection Act.

Environmental Activism
This “Scenic Hudson Decision” was just the first of several environmental campaigns in which the group played a critical role. They pressured General Electric to clean up the PCBs dumped into the upper Hudson and continue to this day to monitor the company’s selective dredging. They lobbied aggressively for the first national acid rain control legislation as well as the New York State bottle bill. For years they have been agitating against the antiquated cooling technology at Indian Point that “kills hundreds of millions if not billions of fish” a year, according to Conservation Science Director Sacha Spector. But, unlike such organizations as Riverkeeper and Sloop Clearwater that are focused specifically on the river, Scenic Hudson President Ned Sullivan points out, “we are about the land.”

And being “about the land” means that Scenic Hudson has also become a significant landholder. Its Scenic Hudson Land Trust now has its own funding and board (members, elected by the parent organization, often serve on both boards). The Trust is responsible for thousands of acres in holdings and thousands more in easements. It has quickly evolved into a defining component of Scenic Hudson’s work, even as it collaborates with or transfers its assets to other land trusts (Winnakee, Dutchess Land Conservancy and the Nature Conservancy, etc.).

Ned Sullivan, president of Scenic Hudson, in his kayak.

Preservation and Parks
As easements and landholdings grow, Scenic Hudson has hastened to create parks and preserves accessible to the public. Their most recent Parks Guide lists three dozen parks created or enabled in some way by the organization, ranging from Vosburgh Swamp in Coxsackie to the Roosevelt Farm Lane Trail connecting FDR’s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s homes in Hyde Park, all the way south to Esplanade Park in Yonkers. Of these 36 they own or co-own nearly half, with three openings and one groundbreaking in the summer and fall of 2011. Besides the two parks in our immediate area (Poets’ Walk and Burger Hill, the latter now owned and maintained by Winnakee Land Trust), they played or play a crucial role in five parks across the river in the Town of Esopus. Around Poughkeepsie, they helped create the string of four parks or trails that together build a major loop trail including both the pedestrian-only Walkway over the Hudson and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge.

And that’s not to mention their four parks in Beacon, two in Cold Spring and eight in such Westchester communities as Peekskill, Haverstraw, Irvington and Tarrytown. They are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of most of the parks they own (and at least one they do not). With the organization’s offices in Poughkeepsie and a maintenance shed across the river in Highland, it helps that most of these are situated from Putnam County north. Keeping these parks in good order—not to mention the many educational programs—is a monumental and expensive task that accounts for about half of the Land Trust budget... even though many facilities are staffed by volunteers or under partnering arrangements with other civic groups or local governments.

Scenic Hudson parks premiering this summer include Beacon’s Long Dock, with a kayak pavilion and River Center that hosts arts programs run by Mill Street Loft; nearby Glasco’s Falling Waters Preserve, at the Dominican Sisters’, with riverside trails and waterfall; and Tarrytown’s RiverWalk, with a converted former asphalt plant and a riverfront esplanade. Scheduled to break ground in the fall are major improvements to the West Point Foundry Preserve, in Cold Spring across from the military academy. Besides a series of new trails, construction will begin on two exhibit structures about the Parrott Rifle factory, manufacturers of one of the most-commonly used Civil War artillery guns and site of a visit by President Lincoln. Also in the planning stages, farther downriver, is Peekskill Landing Park.

Outdoor action in Beacon at Scenic Hudson's Long Dock Park and Peter Jay Sharp Park — a short walk from the Beacon Metro-North station.

Poets’ Walk Park, being both one of the most-used parks and including many built structures, benefits from a particularly high level of attention, according to Parks Director Rita Shaheen. There, someone walks the trails weekly to check that there are no blow downs, that any trash is removed, the parking lot is in good order and brochures are re-stocked. Variable mowing maintains the grasses at different heights, for more diversity of habitat. Geoff Carter, familiar to many in our area from his role at Montgomery Place, recently became Scenic Hudson’s Parks and Stewardship Manager.

Mapping the Viewshed
Given its dual roles as land conservation advocate and parks steward over a vast area, Scenic Hudson has struggled to identify its conservation priorities. A solution to the problem is their recent Saving the Land that Matters Most initiative—a mapping strategy for evaluating a land parcel’s importance to the overall environmental health of the valley. This map follows an algorithmic analysis worked out largely by Conservation Science Director Sacha Spector utilizing four layers of environmental “value” information about every parcel of land within the targeted area, weighted for specific variables on particular lots. Three of these layers rely on NY State-designated scenic or biologically-important areas or on the State’s natural heritage program for rare and endangered species. The fourth derives from Scenic Hudson’s own computer-generated view shed analysis that takes as its “viewer” a 5½-foot-tall onlooker in dozens of places up and downriver. To avoid being tainted by commercial considerations, this map of ecological “hot spots” most eligible for preservation specifically excludes any appraisal of the property’s real estate value.

Beacon Point Project, a shoreline installation by renowned artist George Trakas, is a popular feature of Scenic Hudson's Long Dock Park. At high tide, water flows through it.

Green Economics?
For Scenic Hudson, being “about the land” has necessarily meant plunging into the thicket of real estate and private ownership interests that fuel the debate over “development.” Sullivan likes to say that his group is concerned with a lot more than “just scenery,” and a look at their far-ranging initiatives and activities proves the point. Their high-profile campaign against the proposed St. Lawrence Cement Plant in Hudson (utilizing such anti-plant spokespeople as Meryl Streep) accentuated some of the deep cultural and class divisions that have long bedeviled the cause of conservation. Their more recent forays into urban parks and appropriately “green” economic development in city centers strikes me as a welcome change of emphasis. Suburban style development, they argue, destroys not just the natural environment, but the tourism and agriculture that are the main motors of economic activity in the valley.

Scenic Hudson’s president, Ned Sullivan, with his mixed background in private sector, government, and nonprofit groups. certainly has the breadth of experience to lead the group in a more populist direction. He’s a founding member of the Hudson Valley Economic Development council and speaks enthusiastically about Prism Solar in Highland, and the new food packaging operations at Kingston’s Tech City. He’s also bullish about farm development and the sustainability of the food shed for the New York metropolitan area and beyond, with initiatives such as the new Town of Red Hook–Scenic Hudson–Dutchess Land Conservancy plan to conserve eight different farms along Kerley Corners Road in Upper Red Hook.

Today, Scenic Hudson’s intertwined functions of public advocacy, land acquisition, and parks administration—combined with its web of connections to government, business, farming and civic organizations—have turned it into one of the region’s significant political actors. Some complain that as it has grown and become more established, some of its earlier spirit and agility has been impaired. This was not at all my impression from the hours I spent at their Poughkeepsie headquarters, where a sense of mission and optimism seemed to galvanize everyone I met.

For example, Senior Vice President and Land Trust Executive Director Steve Rosenberg sees the Hudson Valley as like the “cork in the bottle”—the only possible destination for those relocating from the New York City metropolitan area. To him, “thinking ahead a number of years is laying the groundwork for an economically vital and healthy Hudson River Valley... The fabric of the valley is being stitched back together, rewired with a growing sense of community, after the post–world War II disruptions.” And for Science Director Spector, working at Scenic Hudson gives him an “opportunity to... know, decades from now, when I drive through projects I worked on, in this area where I grew up, I’ll be able to see landscapes I had some small part in protecting.”