A digital rendering of the future Everett Nack Estuary Education Center proposed by the Hudson Sloop Club.
By Jamie Larson Hudson, New York has a long and complicated relationship with its namesake river. Centuries of industry and pollution led to a city built with its back to the Hudson. It was only over the past few decades of slow, hard-won progress that the river was restored as the face of the city. Now, the Hudson Sloop Club, a new nonprofit made up of environmentally minded builders, educators, boaters, sportsmen, kids and Hudsonians of all stripes, has come together to begin the next generation of environmental stewardship.
The Sloop Club is off to a good start, too, recently receiving a $91,780 grant from the Hudson River Estuary Program, for the creation of the Everett Nack Estuary Education Center at the Hudson Waterfront Park. The compact structure will be built from a recycled shipping container on an undeveloped and currently overgrown point between the park and a industrial loading dock. It will be powered by solar panels, contain a display aquarium as well as scientific equipment and computers useful for any number of educational and recreational activities on the water or at its edge. The plan represents an earnest understanding by the club of the river's past and future. It doesn’t ignore the imposition or necessity of an industrial presence on the river but it’s also a model of passive sustainable structures that adapt to the river’s needs rather than bending it to ours.
“The point is getting everybody out on the river," says Sloop Club Director Nick Zachos. “We look at it in three tiers: access, education and, if you allow people to develop a relationship with the river, stewardship." The three-year-old Club, which offers many unique boat-building and hands-on environmental education workshops for kids at the Hudson Middle School, Kite's Nest, and their own summer programming, received its nonprofit status just last fall. The organization is volunteer run, so the grant is a big early win. Zachos says their strength is their desire to partner with other groups. For example, though they planned and wrote the grant, the city of Hudson was the official applicant.
“This is not just a Sloop Club endeavor," says Zachos. “We want to bring other groups together and ask ‘what would you like to do here?’ It’s for the whole community." The Club, which also has a small fleet of interesting boats, is holding a fish fry on Friday, May 27 at the waterfront park. It will be an opportunity to learn about the Club and new center, and upcoming summer programming (including a camp). Zachos says they hope to find volunteers with useful skills, from landscapers to builders and others, to donate and help stretch the grant as far as it can go. Plans are to have the center up and running by next summer. Along with being built in an environmentally conscious way, the new center will also be able to adapt as the river changes. Climate change means higher storm surges and the center will take a passive approach to flooding. The small structure will actually let water in and through without damaging it or its contents. Humans have changed the earth’s environment and this little building is an example of the way we will have to learn to adapt.
Though the Sloop Club is still small, a lot of people in Hudson have taken notice of how much it’s accomplished in a short time. It’s succeeded because Zachos and the club's other main members are knowledgeable, hard working and genuinely friendly folks. The river has needed and deserved stewardship like this for a long time, and a club so dedicated to the future of its people and the river enhances the city and environment for all.
