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Cry Then A River
New York Magazine
On the Hudson in Columbia County, one of the most hallowed of American
landscapes, a plan for a vast new cement plant -- with a skyscraping,
400-foot smokestack -- is igniting civil war between weekenders and locals.
BY RALPH GARDNER
The hardy, disease-resistant remnants of Edith Wharton's New York-Delanos,
Livingstons, Elliotts -- together with a healthy infusion of newer though no
less cultured blood gathered at Midwood, the philanthropist Joan K.
Davidson's estate overlooking the Hudson River a hundred miles north of the
city, on a recent unimprovable spring afternoon.
But the conversation wasn't just about the excellence of the host, the
charming scruffiness of the landscape (copies of a September 2001 story
about Midwood in Martha Stewart Living were available on porch tables), or
summer plans. The most animated discussion was reserved for -- of all
incongruous and intolerable things -- a cement plant that a Swiss
multinational proposes to plop right in the middle of God's country a few
miles north of here. The facility -- less a single factory than a massive
industrial city, to hear Davidson's guests tell it -- threatens to spoil
everyone's views, fresh air, and weekend well-being.
As the Hudson flowed majestically to sea beneath them and Bill
Cunningham, the Times society photographer, scurried about snapping
pictures, the guests snacked on shad and lemonade, and talked about the
plant.
"Wouldn't it be terrible if this idyllic paradise were ruined by a Swiss
global polluter?" sighed Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, an art critic and
anti-plant activist, as she pointed to the waters of the Hudson glimmering
in the afternoon sun below. "These are the scenes that Cole and Church
painted. This is the birthplace of American art."
"We spent a lot of time on the chemical pollution of the river and made
some progress, and now we're about to rape the view," added Kirk Varnedoe,
the former chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art and just one of the
many members of the city's cultural establishment fighting the plant. Others
include the artist William Wegman, Annie Leibovitz, Gourmet editor Ruth
Reichl, and musician Patti Smith. "This would be an eyesore of the most
astonishing dimensions. And furthermore, what it would do to pollute the air
is terrible."
The plant, with its 406-foot smokestack, has sparked something of a class
war between the locals and the weekenders here in Columbia County, which
over the past decade has seen an infusion of moneyed Manhattanites in search
of a lower-keyed alternative to the Hamptons. Travel any road in the county
and you can see red STOP THE PLANT or blue SUPPORT THE PLANT signs on front
lawns.
"We had signs in front of our house that got taken down so often I just
gave up," says an opponent of the plant who asked that his name not be used.
"I don't want whoever did it to break my windows."
"It's really sad," says a local antiques dealer. "Every dilapidated house
has a blue sign in front of it. And every beautiful, well-maintained house
has a red sign in front of it."
Most of Columbia County's elected officials are for the plant. Upstate
can't survive on bed-and-breakfasts alone, they say. And to hear St.
Lawrence Cement, the company that wants to build the plant, tell it, the
factory will be, if not quite a thing of beauty, at least built with great
sensitivity to its hallowed surroundings. Not only will it be
state-of-the-art and virtually nonpolluting, they say, but it will be
painted colors so discreet that it will virtually vanish into the verdant
landscape.
"We worked with some people who did camouflage work for the stealth
aircraft," boasts Phillip Lochbrunner, the project's manager.
Indeed, the company's claims extend even further -- into the
counterintuitive. They assert that the plant will actually make the air
cleaner.
They're able to make this startling claim with impressively straight
faces because the proposed plant will replace an aging sixties cement plant
St. Lawrence owns on the other side of the Hudson in Catskill, New York,
which leaves something to be desired by today's more exacting air-pollution
standards.
"I thought this was a no-brainer when we first started," says Dan
Odescalchi, a St. Lawrence public-relations consultant. "It would be a net
environmental benefit and stabilize the local economy."
"St. Lawrence Cement felt they were coming into a Petticoat Junction-type
county where they'd be welcome just because they have a shiny logo,"
contends Patrick Manning, the area's state assemblyman. "But there are some
people who felt strongly about having their side heard."
Petticoat Junction, however, never looked like Midwood. "The conversation
is so emotional and heated," observes Rudy Wurlitzer, a screenwriter and
guest at the party. "It's become a resentment of new people. It's a class
struggle."
Wurlitzer has tried to fathom the local support for the project. By the
company's own admission, he says, the new $330 million facility (paying
property tax on $25 million) will generate virtually no new jobs, since
they'll simply move their existing work force from the old plant across the
river to the new one.
"They have faith in the patriarchal corporate entity," he says,
describing the company's nonstop butterflies-and-flowers ad campaign in the
local newspapers as "Orwellian."
However, after ticking off some of the things St. Lawrence has done to
win the locals' affections -- supporting the town Little League team and a
local theater troupe, constructing a pavilion at the new municipal park, and
throwing barbecues and picnics -- Wurlitzer pauses to examine the guests at
Davidson's. "They're both, in terms of class structures, equally rigid, in a
way," he admits.
If St. Lawrence, which is majority-owned by a Swiss multinational called
Holcim, wins the day, conveyer belts will transport raw materials two miles
inland from the banks of the Hudson River to the coal-fired plant located in
a limestone quarry larger than the adjacent city of Hudson. The finished
product will then be transported back to the river, to be loaded on giant,
800-foot barges.
"There aren't very many sites in the entire Northeast where you've got
the combination of limestone and this water access," explains Phil
Lochbrunner. "As a matter of fact, you're kind of looking at them."
Lochbrunner, 49, who has been in the cement business since he was a
junior at SMU, brushes off the environmentalists' air-pollution worries with
bland brilliance. The reason the company is fighting administrative-law
judge Helene Goldberger's ruling to hold an adjudicatory hearing -- in
effect putting the project on trial -- isn't because they're afraid of
exposing their clean-air claims to scrutiny, he says. They simply see no
point in delaying bringing a healthier environment to the public.
"This ought to be a great story," he says.
Gerry Simons, the crusty, likable chairman of Columbia County's Board of
Supervisors, agrees. Last year, the supervisors voted 22 to 1 in support of
the plant. Simons spent 30 years working at a Kimberly-Clark factory. He's
unimpressed that 35 of 36 doctors at the local hospital, less than a mile
from the plant, issued a resolution opposing it.
"This is where the rock is," he says with a fatalistic shrug.
The supervisor aroused a certain amount of controversy when he had
employees of a publicly funded agency perform a demographic breakdown on the
pro- and anti-plant petitions delivered to his office. The results
apparently reassured him that the people, at least the people who can name
their supervisor and vote locally, supported the plant.
"We looked at where the names came from and found most of the 'in favor'
names came from locals," he reports. "The opposition names were from partly
local, partly New York City, and partly as far away as California and
Oregon.
"In my town, in 1974, I had 45 farms shipping milk," he goes on. "Today I
have five farms shipping milk. These blue-collar workers are looking for
jobs. I don't think the normal blue-collar worker is probably anywhere near
as financially well-off as the weekender."
The plant's opponents warn of a massive exodus of second-home owners and
a resulting plunge in real-estate values if the plant gets built. The
antiques dealers who have resurrected the city of Hudson, a mile downwind
from the plant, will fail; Columbia County's blossoming art scene will
wither away; the boutique farmers making award-winning goat cheeses and
growing designer vegetables for New York City restaurants will depart.
Marlene Brody, who raises Thoroughbred horses in Ghent, a small town ten
miles from the proposed plant (her late husband was Jerome Brody, the head
of Restaurant Associates and the owner of Gallagher's Steak House and the
Grand Central Oyster Bar), is one who says she'll move. She's been rallying
other horse farms in the area to fight the plant.
"How can you raise an athlete with that stuff in the air?" she wonders.
"I think the plant would bring Hudson to what it was when we moved here in
the summer of '72. It was slumsville."
St. Lawrence hasn't been entirely able to resist the temptation to tap
the locals' resentment of the weekenders (though the plant also has a
significant number of local opponents). A mailing sent by a group called
Hudson Valley Environmental/Economic Coalition, which has ties to the
company, featured a cartoon of a fat cat clutching a wad of cash in one hand
and an overstuffed bank bag in the other.
"Don't let a group of millionaires from New York City deny Columbia
County good paying jobs and a stronger economy," it said.
Dan Odescalchi has confessed to helping some of the plant's supporters
craft letters to the local papers. "Some people felt the entire argument was
unbalanced, with most of the comment coming from people who are more
comfortable expressing themselves in writing," he told the Independent, a
county newspaper.
One pro-plant letter in the Register-Star, another local paper, ran under
the headline DON'T LISTEN TO RICH FOLKS; THEY DON'T NEED THE JOBS. The
following day, the paper ran a rather terse correction: "Edward Ogden of
Philmont says he did not write the letter that appeared above his name on
Page A5 in Thursday's edition of the Register-Star."
The plant's adversaries take a sort of masochistic pleasure in pointing
out the irony of vilifying them as millionaires when the person who stands
to gain the most if the project goes through is Thomas Schmidheiny, a Swiss
billionaire and the chairman of Holcim.
"My understanding is that polluting, coal-burning cement plants are
illegal in Switzerland," says writer Peter Biskind, a full-time Columbia
County resident. "They're building the kind of plant that would be illegal
in their own country. They're turning Columbia County into a Third World
country."
One weekender sees the locals' support for the project as a failure of
American public education. "I think we're generally better-educated and more
sophisticated than the locals," he says, explaining why they can't see
through St. Lawrence's P.R. offensive. "I don't want to discuss the
intelligence of the locals; that's terrible. But look at the schools in
Columbia County. They're awful.
"Even if their educations aren't Ivy League-caliber, the locals are
shrewd enough to detect inconsistencies in some of the opponents' arguments.
"The people opposed to it drive these SUVs that get eight or nine miles to a
gallon," says Thomas Fleming, the librarian at Hudson High School and a
plant supporter. "You drive up Warren Street and you see these Navigators
and Mountaineers, yet they're opposed to the plant. You should be coming in
a little car if you're that concerned about the environment."
Tom Koulos, a retired salesman and plant supporter, has made something of
a second career for himself writing letters to the editors of the local
papers that take aim at aesthetes who make reference in their letters to the
embarrassment of contemplating such a magnificent eyesore at the same moment
as the Tate in London is mounting "American Sublime," a celebration of
Hudson River School painting.
"If we don't have cement to build houses to keep us warm in winter, what
happens?" Koulos demands. "People right now are very scared down in the
city. They're trying to get the heck out of there. They're coming up here
hoping they can get away from things. You can't get away from life. You
can't escape reality."
One of the more intriguing -- if completely unconfirmed -- rumors
floating among the plant's better-connected opponents has David Rockefeller,
one of Columbia County's largest landowners, taking aside Schmidheiny, whom
he knows, and talking sense to him, billionaire to billionaire.
One important factor St. Lawrence has in its favor is a powerful
nostalgia for cement in these parts. Back in the forties and fifties, two
cement plants employed well over a thousand people (they closed in the
seventies). Carmine Pierro, an aide to Hudson mayor Richard Scalera, who
strongly supports the plant, remembers riding his bike out to one of the
plants after school in the late fifties and collecting money for his Little
League team.
"People gave you nickels and dimes," he recalls. "These guys would give
you dollar bills. They were the top-paying jobs."
There's even an element of romance to the cement dust people would
discover on their cars when they woke up in the morning. Back then, Charlie
Schneider, a local farmer and plant supporter, hardly had to lime his
fields.
"The pH of the soil stayed higher because there was dust in the air," he
remembers. "Roofs didn't have to be painted so much. They got a coating of
cement dust on them."
"There's a feeling the good old days are just around the corner,"
observes the poet John Ashbery, who owns a Victorian in the middle of
Hudson. "But in towns like Hudson, they'll never really come back. When the
malls came around in the sixties, it spelled doom for most of the stores in
Hudson."
Adds Rob Makas, another local opponent, who manages a gourmet-food store
owned by someone from the city, "People make fun of me. They say, 'Oh, what?
Are you afraid of a little cement dust?' "
The city of 7,000 has experienced a remarkable, if spotty, revival thanks
to dozens of antiques dealers who moved here from Manhattan and turned
Warren Street, the main street, into something of a Home Depot for interior
decorators from New York. However, there's a surreal quality about the
predominantly lower-middle-class town as the residents wheel their
children's strollers past shops selling Mies chairs.
St. Lawrence hasn't exactly allayed its opponents' pollution fears. The
EPA challenged the company's claim that the facility would be
state-of-the-art. Even though St. Lawrence claims it will reduce emissions
of sulphur dioxide by 85 percent and oxides of nitrogen by 27 percent as
compared to the other plant, its application asks for permission to raise
pollution from 16 million to 20 million pounds a year (by the opponents'
math). And despite the company's promises not to burn waste matter and old
tires -- traditionally a valuable source of revenue for cement plants,
including other St. Lawrence plants around the country -- its enemies insist
these promises are hollow and nonbinding.
Then there's the company's "dismal environmental record," as the
Berkshire Eagle put it in an editorial opposing the project. For example, in
January, the Dallas Morning News reported that despite Holcim's promises to
cut pollution in half at its giant plant in Midlothian, Texas (where St.
Lawrence flew Columbia County residents in the hopes of impressing them with
its prowess at making cement), pollution has actually increased.
One of the most important victories the judge handed opponents was her
ruling that the company's record at its other facilities could be considered
in determining whether to grant St. Lawrence permission to build in
Greenport.
Of special concern is particulate matter, the tiny dust particles that
lodge in the lungs and increase the risk of respiratory disease. A couple of
Harvard scientists hired by St. Lawrence say that particulate matter can be
divided into toxic and nontoxic types and make the rather intriguing
argument that the smoke billowing from the plant's stack will be nontoxic.
"There are elemental compounds such as calcium and potassium that are
unlikely to have any toxicity whether it's breathed as a particle, taken as
a pill, or in any other form," explains John Godleski, one of the Harvard
researchers. "Do you take Tums?"
"It's what comes out of your teapot," says Dan Odescalchi.
Counters George Thurston, an NYU associate professor and the opponents'
expert (he testified before the U.S. Senate on air quality at ground zero),
"They're saying the kiln emissions would be nontoxic. I've been monitoring
the World Trade Center, and some of the most irritating particles that came
from that disaster were cement-dust particles -- because they were very
alkaline. This is what we think was the cause of the 'World Trade Center
cough.' "
Godleski and his Harvard colleague, Petros Koutrakis, may have an
unwanted footnote attached to their research. More than 40 Harvard grads who
oppose the plant are signing a letter to their alma mater protesting the
blasphemy of allowing their beloved college's name to be attached to St.
Lawrence-sponsored research.
"It's a scandalous thing," says Ashton Hawkins, Harvard '59 and the
former executive vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The
Harvard School of Public Health is, in effect, endorsing the clean-air
claims of the cement plant. A letter is being prepared to protest this to
Harvard."
Hawkins's personal P.R. offensive has even extended so far as to
buttonhole his friend Bill Moyers, his neighbor on Central Park West, in the
elevator. Moyers is the producer of a recent majestic PBS documentary on the
Hudson River that paid scant attention to the controversy. "I said, 'I hope
you're going to do something on the cement plant,' " Hawkins reports. "He
said, 'Call me.' "
St. Lawrence's opponents' ads, which feature pictures of Chernobyl-like
stacks belching black smoke, are just as slick as St. Lawrence's. One of the
more mild and amusing ones, shot by Annie Leibovitz, a plant opponent who
has a weekend home in Rhinebeck, has a wrestler bear-hugging a tree. "Save
the Hudson Valley," it says. "Stop St. Lawrence Cement."
Perhaps the most effective piece of propaganda Friends of Hudson, the
grassroots organization spearheading opposition to the plant, has produced
is a size-comparison chart that shows the proposed plant's astonishing bulk
next to the Statue of Liberty's. Lady Liberty looks like a callow schoolgirl
beside the massive factory.
"They neglect to put the base of the Statue of Liberty," sniffs
Odescalchi.
Sniffs back Sam Pratt, executive director of Friends of Hudson, "I didn't
include the base of the mountain, either." He's referring to Becraft
Mountain, where the company wants to "hide" the plant inside its quarry.
Many of the locals resent what they perceive to be the high-handed way
they say Friends of Hudson and other environmental groups have been
unwilling to listen to the plant's supporters or work with them to craft a
compromise.
"An element of the local community, instead of trying to find out what
was right, immediately tried to kill it," claims Julia Phillips, an
aristocratic woman who runs an apple farm that's been in her husband's
family since the 1700s and who might be expected to side with the opposition
to the plant. The view from her front yard would be of the factory's
400-foot stack. "That polarized people in a way they didn't need to be
polarized."
Despite the pollution arguments, the opponents probably stand their best
chance of defeating the plant on the issue of size. By St. Lawrence's own
admission in its draft environmental-impact statement, the project would be
very large. "The height and mass of the proposed cement plant would be
disproportionate in scale to other elements of the regional landscape," it
writes. "The proposed cement plant would be a highly dominant visual
element."
Among the organizations that have joined Friends of Hudson in fighting
the plant are the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the
Preservation League of New York State, which has put Hudson and Columbia
County on its list as one of the seven most-endangered sites in the state.
Perhaps most important, the plant will be visible from Olana, the
Persian-style mansion a few miles away that the artist Frederic Edwin Church
built for himself on a mountain overlooking the Hudson.
"Because Olana is a national landmark, it has protections that are not
afforded to other historic homes," explains Sara Griffen, Olana's director.
Even though the plant can't be seen from the house itself, "it is the entire
250 acres that is a national landmark," Griffen adds. "The plant will be
seen from multiple places."
Some of the plant's supporters have tried to argue that nature and
industry have always coexisted on the Hudson. In fact, the painters of the
Hudson River School simply painted out the river's nineteenth-century
factories to make their works properly Edenic and salable to city folk. Kirk
Varnedoe doesn't buy the argument.
"You try painting these towers out of the landscape," he says. "Please.
Comparing nineteenth-century industry on the Hudson to what this plant is,
is like comparing the Wright brothers' flyer to the Mars probe. It's a
completely different order of magnitude." Adds Donald Westlake, the mystery
writer and another Columbia County weekender, "This plant is a return to the
wrong nineteenth century."
One might wonder where governor George Pataki, who has made environmental
protection, and the protection of the Hudson Valley in particular, a
cornerstone of his administration's record, stands on all this. State
comptroller and Pataki gubernatorial opponent Carl McCall has come out
against the plant. And Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, a
Pataki ally in fighting coal-burning power plants in the Midwest, wrote a
vehement letter of opposition to the plant to the administrative-law judge
hearing the case. (Some of the plant's most vocal opponents live downwind in
the Berkshires and northern Connecticut).
"He's the ultimate arbiter if we get permits or not," says Lochbrunner of
Pataki.
Even though opponents of the plant have tried to ambush the governor at
public appearances, thus far he's taken no stand on the issue. "I put my
hand over his and said, 'Please, Mr. Pataki, don't let them put up the St.
Lawrence cement plant. It'll destroy everything we have here,' " recalls
Ginger Feldman, a plant opponent and self-described little old lady in
tennis shoes. "He was dismissive."
Peter Constantakes, a spokesman for the New York State Department of
Environmental Conservation, says it would be premature for the governor to
take a stand on the issue. "He's letting the process go as it's intended,"
Constantakes says.
The opposition vows to fight the project even if Pataki supports it. The
Columbia Action Network, an opposition group in the northern part of the
county, raised $20,000 to fight the plant at a single cocktail party. The
hors d'oeuvre, including tasty inside-out BLTs (cherry tomatoes stuffed with
bacon, mayo, and lettuce), were prepared by Ruth Reichl, the editor of
Gourmet.
"I cooked the bacon for that," boasts Jerry Croghan, a psychotherapist
with a weekend home near Reichl's in Spencertown. He adds, "The cement plant
underestimated how much money there is up here against it. People don't do
money up here the way they do in the Hamptons. They don't show off their
homes. But they can write checks and write checks and write checks." |
