I had the pleasure of joining Pete Seeger, the Grammy-winning Rivertown Kids and some friends in some music on Sunday at the annual Beacon Sloop Club Strawberry Festival, which is held in a park on the Hudson River that was once a landfill. I was invited to speak on the remarkable ability of landscapes to recover ecological vigor and aesthetic appeal even after extraordinary degradation. There’s a bit more on what I said below.
Here’s a brief video vignette showing the preparation of a core attraction at the festival — the fresh-made strawberry shortcake:
A couple of decades ago, I used to join Seeger and dozens of other volunteers in the “pick your own” fields of the lower Hudson Valley to harvest the heaps of berries required to serve the hundreds of festival attendees. Lately the berries have been purchased. But the biscuits and whipped cream are prepared as they always have been.
Rituals evolve. Waterfronts evolve, too.
Beacon was an industrial hub through the first two thirds of the 20th century, then deteriorated into a post-industrial wasteland. It became one of many cities and towns along a great river that largely turned their backs on the waterfront because of the despoliation, untreated sewage and pollution.
That has all changed, with more changes to come. First came the revival of the river’s waters, through the activism of groups like the sloop club (which takes people on free sails on the sloop Woody Guthrie on summer evenings), Clearwater, Scenic Hudson and many others, but also through ambitious programs to build sewage plants and tighten pollution laws.
More recently, there’s been an explosion of redevelopment along the banks — much of it enabling both social and environmental revivals. The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries sits on a peninsula where a tangle of vegetation still hides the vestiges of a brick factory and rail yard. Nearby, what had been a deteriorating abandoned factory for cracker boxes is now one of the world’s biggest museums of contemporary art.
Soon, another long-neglected industrial portion of the waterfront will become Long Dock Park, a $16.5-million project of Scenic Hudson.
Standing next to Seeger on the little hummock that serves as the (solar powered) stage, I spoke about the combination of vision and activism that’s required to forge such progress. The vision comes when people realize that a longstanding blight need not persist. (This is happening around the world; revisit my piece on the rediscovered, and uncovered, stream running through downtown Seoul for another example.)
The activism isn’t simply organizing demonstrations, or even festivals, but engaging in the often tough challenge of negotiating outcomes that provide the greatest mix of benefits, while never completely satisfying anyone.
That’s what was on display in Beacon on Sunday, along with the delicious berries and wonderfully uplifting sound of children and elders singing in harmony.