14 May 2004

Clearwater on National Register

by Noreen O'Donnell

NEW YORK - The Hudson River sloop Clearwater, launched 35 years ago to save the river from the pollution with which it had been spoiled, was named to the National Register of Historic Places yesterday as its best-known creator, folk singer Pete Seeger, looked on.

"I feel more optimistic now than I was 58 years ago when the atom bomb was dropped," Seeger, who turned 85 this month, said after the ceremony on the edge of the Hudson. "I thought it would only be a few decades before — if we weren't killed by the bomb we'd be poisoned by the fallout."

The 75-foot sloop, which sailed alongside the West Side pier on which the ceremony took place, is a replica of the vessels that plied the Hudson in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the designation, it is now recognized as one of the country's resources considered worthy of preservation and is eligible for federal grants.

Seeger, Vic Schwarz and the others who built the sloop thought of it as a way to bring people to the Hudson's edge, where they could appreciate its beauty and fragility and be inspired to restore it.

At the time, the Hudson River had been written it off as an industrial river and had literally been blacked out from federal maps, said Andre Mele, Clearwater's executive director. It was so laden with toxic chemicals, raw sewage and oil that it was unable to support fish over many of its miles and would run red, green or blue depending on the color the General Motors plant in North Tarrytown was using to paint vehicles, he said.

"Launching the Clearwater in 1969 was nothing short of revolutionary, and it became a seismic event on a national scale," he said. "It made news from coast to coast."

The next year, Seeger and fellow musician Don McLean sailed the sloop to Washington, D.C., and held an impromptu concert in the House of Representatives office building to highlight the need to protect the country's waterways.

"And by golly, two years later the Clean Water Act was signed into federal legislation," said Bernadette Castro, New York state's parks commissioner, who made the announcement yesterday. The Clearwater is also listed on a similar state registry.

Castro used the ceremony to reveal that another vessel, the historic fireboat John J. Harvey, which escorted the Clearwater to the pier with jets of water, had been awarded a $320,000 matching grant.

Seeger and Schwarz said they had been inspired by a 1908 book, "The Sloops of the Hudson." Schwarz recalled Seeger had a boat then and so he lent the book to Seeger telling him, "Here Pete, you might be interested in reading about some of the people who sailed this river and the kind of vessels they sailed in."

Seeger cheered the volunteers who have since kept the sloop sailing.

"Vic and I planted the seed," he said, "but you should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance."

The Clearwater has grown into an environmental organization based in Poughkeepsie, and it is among the groups fighting to get General Electric to remove the polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, it had dumped into the river.

The sloop has offered environmental education classes to thousands of adults and more than 430,000 young people. They were represented yesterday by The Little Sloop Singers of Poughkeepsie Day School, who sang about — what else — water, with the help of Seeger and his banjo.

"Keep it clean for me and I'll keep it clean for you," the children sang.

Read original article (if still published)
Read more articles...