Bronx jeer for tale of 2 boathouses

Courtesy of Savona Bailey McClain

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com/

Bronx jeer for tale of 2 boathouses
June 17, 2004

Bette Midler was proudly pulling up weeds yesterday from flower beds in the children's garden of New York City's newest waterfront park and boathouse.

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Bronx jeer for tale of 2 boathouses


Celeb-backed boathouse sits ready to be towed to fancy site.


Bette Midler (center) discusses glittering new uptown park and boathouse with Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez (r.).

Bette Midler was proudly pulling up weeds yesterday from flower beds in the children's garden of New York City's newest waterfront park and boathouse.The narrow 5-acre strip of greenery, dubbed Swindler Cove Park, is tucked along the banks of the Harlem River at the end of Dyckman St. in northern Manhattan.

Tonight, Midler will officially inaugurate the park and the Peter Jay Sharp boathouse at astar-studded $500-a-plate reception and picnic, where Gov. Pataki will be the guest ofhonor.

But a few hundred feet away, on the Bronx side of the river at Roberto Clemente State Park, is the heartbreaking story of another community trying to bring the sport of rowing back to our town.

That story doesn't have big-name movie stars or celebrities to champion it, so politicians like Pataki don't seem to give a damn.

The Bronx story revolves around a group called the Empire State Rowing Association. Founded by former undergraduate rowers at Fordham and NYU in 1985, it has been running rowing programs for South Bronx kids since 1986 at Clemente Park. It's also the official practice club for students from those schools and Manhattan College.

During all that time, the Bronx group has been forced to store its boats in four beat-up old tractor-trailer containers at the northern edge of Clemente Park.

As soon as it was founded, the group petitioned the state for money for a new boathouse. State bureaucrats kept promising help, and in 1998, Parks Commissioner Bernadette Castro finally awarded it $87,000 as seed money for the community boathouse project.

The club, run by volunteers, managed to raise $30,000 to hire its own architect and design a no-frills boathouse. Total projected cost of the Bronx project is a mere $350,000.

In contrast, Swindler Cove Park cost $10 million, much of it in state funds.

Midler and the environmental group she runs, the New York Restoration Project, designed and created that park on the site of what was once a hideous illegal dump behind Public School 5.

A few years ago, the actress-singer persuaded state and city officials to finance the park and allow her group to manage it. She then got celebrity friends like Paul Newman, Yoko Ono and Sarah Jessica Parker, as well as a few foundations, to toss in an additional $4.5 million to build a gleaming new boathouse and pier alongside the park.

"We made a wish list of what we wanted and what we thought the community wanted," Midler told me yesterday when I caught up with her by chance at the park. "We want to bring back rowing to New York."

But once Midler's restoration group approached the state with plans for its boathouse, the Bronx group claims, state parks officials told the Empire State Rowing Association the Clemente Park boathouse project was being shelved.

Wendy Bishop, spokeswoman for the state Parks Department, denied yesterday that the Bronx project has been canceled. "There are still plans underway to put a boathouse at Roberto Clemente," Bishop said.

"They've been telling us thatsince 1985 and nothing gets done," said one club member. "They just keep stringing us along."

Darrell Penn has a 10-year-old daughter who attends rowing classes at Clemente Park every Saturday. He doesn't begrudge anyone the multimillion-dollar boathouse Midler has secured on the Manhattan side of the river.

But he says it's "frustrating that our organization has not been able to get help for our boathouse."

Tonight, while Grucci fireworks light up the sky and Pataki parties with the stars, the blue-collar rowers across the river who have waited 20 years for a mere $350,000 community boathouse will wonder why he keeps neglecting them.

Originally published on June 17, 2004