New York Times/Debra WestLandowners Resist Plans for a Wetland |
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| 97-year old Lucille Lapenta |
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For 30 years, Lucille Lapenta leased her waterfront back yard on the Hudson River in Nyack, N.Y., to a neighbor who ran a small shipyard on his own property and needed extra land. When the neighbor abandoned the shipyard more than a decade ago, the dock fell into decay. The barge that had served as a machine shop caught fire, and a charred hull was left at the water's edge. The boat sheds rotted and were bulldozed into an unsightly heap.
The mess does not bother Mrs. Lapenta, who is 97 and has lived along the river for most of this century. But it troubles community leaders, who want to revitalize Nyack's waterfront and hope to draw more tourists to the village of antiques shops, stylish restaurants and charming Victorian homes.
Village officials want to turn the property into a wetland and bird sanctuary that would be closed to the public but visible from an adjacent park. The village has already received $289,000 in state grants to study whether paint scrapings, varnish, motor oil and other chemicals from the former boat yard are contaminating the river.
But to achieve its goals and begin the study, the village must buy much of Mrs. Lapenta's back yard, and a strip of the back yards of her two adjacent neighbors. None want to sell.
"We've been here so long, and we had it to ourselves," Mrs. Lapenta said last week, looking past the shoreline ruins to the graceful span of the Tappan Zee Bridge. "They want to take all our land. We'd have nothing if they take it."
The Village Board has scheduled a public hearing for April 28 on condemning the properties and seizing them by eminent domain, which is the right of a government to
take private property for public use after compensating the owner.
"Condemnation is like amputation," said Mayor Terry Hekker. "Nobody thinks it's a good idea on its own, only when it's for the good of the greater body. We have 7,000 people in the village and 22,000 in the surrounding communities, and all of these people have an interest in the waterfront."
Not long ago, the Hudson was considered a polluted liability, lined with railroad tracks and factories. Now, with manufacturing gone and the river cleaner along the lower Hudson Valley, towns see the shoreline as their best asset. Nearly every community in the valley has its own version of a South Street Seaport planned.
All this excitement is a curiosity to Mrs. Lapenta, who emigrated from Italy and settled in Nyack at age 11 and was always too busy working to pay the river much attention.
Mrs. Lapenta and her husband, William, who died in 1971, ran a grocery store in Nyack. She had no interest in boating or fishing, and after a polio scare associated
with river water in the 1930s, she did not allow her children to swim in the Hudson.
But she always liked to look eastward at the river from her house, which has a comfortable, fenced-in back yard that is about 25 feet above the land that the village
plans to seize. Mrs. Lapenta said she thought that the value of the tiny house she had lived in since 1925 hinged on its access to the river.
A small house up the street, with riverfront access, recently sold for $600,000, said Mrs. Lapenta's son Rocco, 71. He said he thought that her property was worth a similar amount and was surprised when the village's appraisal found that the entire property, with house, was worth just $290,000. The village offered Mrs. Lapenta $40,000 for the portion of the back yard along the river.
The offer was an insult, said Mrs. Lapenta's daughter, Doris Rion, 69, who lives across the street from her mother. She said the family had offered to pay for the removal of the debris and the sagging dock. The family is not convinced that there are significant levels of contaminants in the soil, Mrs. Rion said.
"My parents worked their whole lives for this," she added. "To give it up for a wetland, for a bird sanctuary, it doesn't seem right. We're willing to clean it up. It should be cleaned up. But it's my mother's."
Mrs. Lapenta's neighbors, Deborah Mann and Louis Spitz, never had riverfront access and are only involved in the battle because of an arcane state law.
Their houses sit on the same hill as Mrs. Lapenta's, and the half-acre shoreline property that starts at the base of that hill contains the abandoned shipyard, which now
belongs to the state. The state planned to sell the property to the village, but state laws give Ms. Mann and Spitz, as the nearest inland property owners, the right of first refusal for state-owned shoreline property. They declined to waive those rights.
Ms. Mann said she did not trust village leaders to clean up the site. "Whether they are able to complete the mission is questionable to me," she said. "Things get started here and don't get finished."
Now, the village intends to seize a 1-foot-deep strip from Ms. Mann's and Spitz's properties so that Nyack becomes the nearest inland owner and is then entitled to buy the abandoned shipyard.
Ms. Hekker said she was dumbfounded by the homeowners' refusal to release their claim on the land so that it could be cleaned. "I think we are improving the value of
their property," she said. "As it is, if they wanted to sell it, nobody could get a mortgage on that property."
She said the cleanup could cost from $1 million to $5 million, which she hoped the state would cover with environmental bond act money.
She acknowledges that if the village does not take title to the property by July, $267,000 of the grant money for the environmental study must be returned and the cleanup plan will probably be scuttled. Ms. Hekker said the village was bound by law to offer Mrs. Lapenta no more than the appraised value for the land.
To Mrs. Lapenta, the idea of a wetland, with insects and garbage-trapping reeds, behind her house is repellent. "I don't want a bunch of birds in my back yard," she said. "I like birds, but owls and all that? Please. Everything in its place."Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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