Reisman: Another way to remember Pete Seeger

After iconic folksinger Pete Seeger died last year at the age of 94, a movement was started to name the new Tappan Zee Bridge after him.

The idea got a lot of attention in the press. A change.org petition garnered more than 15,000 signatures from admirers who felt that attaching Seeger's name to the colossal span was an appropriate way to memorialize his work with Hudson Clearwater Sloop Inc., an organization dedicated to the preservation of the Hudson River and its surrounding wetlands.

Predictably, not everyone liked the idea. Some felt that it didn't do justice to Seeger's environmental advocacy because it connected him to an industrial-sized conveyance for exhaust-spewing cars and trucks.

Others objected on the grounds they didn't like Seeger's political views, digging up old stuff about him going all the way back to the Depression era and then the early Cold War years. Few things seem to achieve consensus in these polarized times.

Whether they approved of Seeger or not, most people just thought the bridge should remain the Tappan Zee. (Technically, it's the Gov. Malcolm E. Wilson Bridge, but no one calls it by that name except, perhaps, loyal members of the late governor's family.)

In any case, the Pete Seeger Bridge idea petered out. Please pardon the pun.

But now a new proposal has emerged that might make more sense: Put Seeger's name on Croton Point Park.

This idea was recently hatched by M.H. Fryburg and Stefan Lonce, founders of a nonprofit organization called 4 A Better Westchester and New York State Association, Inc.

Lonce and Fryburg drafted a resolution that cites Seeger's consciousness raising about pollution in the Hudson and further notes his founding of the Clearwater Music Festival, which is held every year at the 500-acre county-owned park in Croton.

What they didn't mention in their resolution is that Croton Point Park, a peninsula which juts into the Hudson, has an important history that dovetails nicely with Seeger's cause to fight pollution.

For 60 years a large portion of the park was used as a county dump. An environmentally ruinous mountain of garbage swallowed some 200 acres of tidal wetlands.

Efforts to close the landfill were foiled until it was discovered that toxic goo was seeping into the river. That resulted in a flurry of lawsuits and federal intervention — and eventually the creation of a $237 million state-of-the-art garbage burning plant in Peekskill.

The Croton landfill was finally closed in 1986. It took three years and $40 million in county and state funds to clean up the area and convert it back to parkland.

In 1995, at a ceremony held at the park, then-County Executive Andrew O'Rourke graciously credited environmentalists for their tireless lobbying efforts. By his side were John Cronin, the riverkeeper, and Pete Seeger.

"They used to see us as the Evil Empire, and we tended to look at them as kooks in canoes," said O'Rourke, a Republican who died in 2013.

So the Pete Seeger Croton Point Park might be a fitting memorial. After all, in Beacon, where Seeger happily lived on a bluff above the river, the town decided to rename its riverside park for Seeger and his wife.

That park had been the site of a dump, too.

Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner, who was an early proponent of renaming the Tappan Zee Bridge after Seeger, now thinks it unlikely to happen "because the governor doesn't seem interested."

As an alternative, Feiner has proposed that plans for the new bridge's pedestrian walkway include an outdoor environmental museum dedicated to Seeger.

"I think that he deserves to have something named for him," he said. "I think people should recognize that he made the world a better place."

Feiner agreed that Croton Point Park also would be a good way to remember him.

It's uncertain if there's enough political will do get this done.

But think of it this way: Everybody deserves clean water and everybody breathes the same air.

There shouldn't be a partisan divide when it comes to loving a river.

Email: preisman@lohud.com Twitter: @philreisman