Sound Update: The Islands

Organizational newsletters are rarely interesting but one exception is the Sound Update newsletter that’s available now.

It’s a production of the Long Island Sound Study and is edited by Larissa Graham of New York Sea Grant. The issue -- the summer 2011 issue -- is about the Sound’s islands, or some of them: Great Gull and Plum, which are part of the same glacial moraine that forms the north shore of Long Island, and Hart Island, the Thimble Islands, the islands of the McKinney National Wildlife Refuge (including Falkner, Chimon and Cockenoe), and Davids Island, all of which are along the Bronx-Westchester-Connecticut shore.

I wrote the Davids Island piece and it’s not bad but there are others that are better, in particular the piece about Great Gull and its truly awesome tern rookery. I visited Great Gull for an unforgettable weekend in 1987 and wrote a chapter about it for my book but then decided it didn’t really fit so I left it out. I was glad to learn what’s been going on lately (namely, more of the same, which is good).

Here’s a link to the issue.

Develop Davids Island? That Idea Is Being Floated Again? Seriously?

Now that the federal government has spent $26 million in taxpayer money to clean up Davids Island, the mayor of New Rochelle wants to develop it. Here's an excerpt from Mayor Noam Bramson's State of the City address last week:

A NEW BEGINNING FOR DAVIDS ISLAND
Before concluding this discussion of development and planning strategy, I’d like to mention just one more site.

It is mere feet from the New York City border, yet a world away in its character. It is unique, and valuable in ways that defy standard measure. It is a nearly eighty-acre blank canvas that has stirred passion and debate for more than fifty years.

It is Davids Island.

Now, lest we forget, history tells us that Davids Island is a tough nut to crack. The myriad visions inspired by it are often incompatible – with each other, and with the hard realities of economics, politics, and environmental concern. One person’s dream of taxproducing high rises, is another person’s nightmare of sewage and traffic. For every advocate of a public park, there is a skeptic who asks: where is the funding or the demand to make it real.

In almost every prior instance, the City has reacted to a proposal from outside, based on someone’s else’s interests, instead of first shaping a plan based on ours.

And because the conflicts it generates have proven so intense and distracting, when Davids Island is on the front burner, it has a way of knocking everything else off the stove.

This history has, until now, made me hesitant to open a fresh debate about the island’s future.

But the time is right at last.

First, through the great work of Congresswoman Nita Lowey and the Army Corps of Engineers, we have benefited from a federal investment of $26 million dollars, resolving many of the surface environmental conditions that would otherwise pose serious impediments to progress.

Second, to be honest, the slow economy reduces the time pressures associated with our various other initiatives, and allows us to devote to Davids Island the necessary effort and attention.

Third, new design sensibilities and technologies give us options that did not previously exist, possibly resolving tensions between economic and environmental goals.

And fourth, the opportunity costs are low, which is another way of saying: what have we got to lose.

So I suggest that the City do what, on Davids Island, it has never done before. I suggest that we devise our own conceptual plan, not in response to a sales pitch from any specific builder, but as a basis for issuing our own request for proposals, aimed at achieving our own vision.

Tonight, I am asking the City’s development and planning staff, led by our new Commissioner Michael Freimuth, to establish a process for soliciting community, regional, and stakeholder input, establishing development criteria, and then selecting an appropriate development partner or partners.

And while it would be entirely premature to settle, or even raise, every question right now, I offer the following general principles as starting points:

Number one, our plan should include meaningful public access to ensure that the beauty of Davids Island can be experienced by all of our citizens.

Number two, our plan should fit within the dimensional envelope of the City’s Draft Local Waterfront Revitalization standards, which place clear restrictions on height and density, set open space minimums, and establish a preference for water-borne access.

And number three, perhaps most important, our plan should feature sustainable design of worldclass quality. We should insist on a product of global demonstration value, that befits the Island’s unique status and potential – visionary architecture, cutting-edge operation, and innovative approaches to energy use, waste reduction, resource consumption and conservation.

Let’s rule out right away run-of-the-mill, standard-brand construction that could be sited anywhere, anytime. And let’s find partners, reaching out to the very best in the field, who are just as interested in making a statement as in making a dollar.

The perpetual struggle at Davids Island has for too long pitted builders against environmentalists, local economic goals against regional planning models. A project based on and inspired by the concept of sustainability can at long last bring these objectives together.

There are no guarantees, and this road may prove as fraught with hurdles as those tried before, but let us resolve tonight to put aside our preconceptions and past positions, and with fresh eyes and fresh hopes, take the first steps together.
If we succeed, then people throughout the world who are interested in sustainable design and living will say to each other: to see the shape of the future, you must come to New Rochelle.

Fort Slocum's Final Remnant is Gone, But What Will Happen to Davids Island?

Although I wrote about Long Island Sound issues a lot in the late 1980s, when I was working as a reporter in New Rochelle, in some ways I think the best stuff I did was my coverage of a development proposed for Davids Island. A developer, with the very strong support of the New Rochelle city council, wanted to build 2,000 condos on the island, which is about 80 acres in size, and which until the early 1960s was the home of an army base called Fort Slocum.

My newspaper had always covered it uncritically, treating it as just another development of merely local interest. But when they assigned me to start covering the environment, I looked at it differently, as a project that would at the very least change the landscape in that part of the Sound and might well have bigger impacts in the Sound itself. My coverage coincided with a rise in opposition to the project in New Rochelle's south end and in neighboring villages. It's impossible to say what was more influential, and the truth is both fed on each other: skeptical newspaper coverage fed citizens to oppose the project, and informed, active citizens encouraged me to keep examining the issue. Eventually, in 1991, I think, that particular proposal died.

New Rochelle still owns Davids Island. Westchester County has offered to buy it for $6.5 million, to turn it into a park. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been dismantling and demolishing the remnants of Fort Slocum, including the 100-foot-tall water that was the island's most visible landmark.

The water tower finally came down yesterday, and the last structure to remain. The Journal News covered it and, time passing the way it does and memories being short, managed to not mention the development controversy which, looking back, was after all a short blip in time. But I agree with my friend Barbara Davis, the New Rochelle City Historian, who was among those in the late 1980s who did not want to see condos built on the island:

"There needs to be a great deal of public support," she said. "In the short term, what I hope is the great minds of Westchester will start thinking carefully about the future of the island for the best purposes of the public good. For it to be a viable ecosystem, it will take a tremendous amount of work."