Esopus Creek arts venue work plan begins
Officials for the Arm-of-the-Sea Theater have begun working on the engineering plan needed to construct a bulkhead along the Lower Esopus Creek in front of the planned Tidewater Center performing arts facility.
Theater co-founder Patrick Wadden provided the update Tuesday during a telephone interview, saying that $50,000 in funding has been approved through the state Department of Environmental Conservation Hudson River Estuary Program.
“We’ve just gotten (village) Planning Board approval for our overall project,” he said.
“With the Hudson River Estuary Program, it allows us to have access to the river,” Wadden said. “That has allowed us to hire an engineering firm to design about 135 feet of public access along the coal bin structure on the property.”
The 1.55-acre property is on the north side of Tina Chorvas Park and has 350 feet of waterfront along the creek on the site of a former paper mill that operated from the early 1800s. Among the goals of the project is to incorporate remains of the industrial use into the new facility to help provide an educational component for the theater group.
Funding through the state program is provided as part of efforts to extend the adjacent village-owned bulkhead.
“Like the public fishing area that was created on our property and Tina Chorvas Park with the New York Rising money ... this is something that will improve the access that the village has to offer,” Wadden said.
Under the plan, Arm-ofthe-Sea will build an art studio, have an operational support building, an indoor theater and meeting hall, outdoor performance space and an area used for outdoor education.
The site is 0.9 miles from
the mouth of the Hudson River and recognized as a significant tidal estuary area that has fish using the relatively deep Lower Esopus Creek water for spawning at different times of the year. That has also made it attractive for bald eagles during the winter, with the Lower Esopus Creek being having an elevated count of eagles when the ice covers the river.
Arm-of-the-Sea Theater programs have emphasized environmental themes, which officials expect will be easier to accomplish in an area where the constantly changing creek levels allow live demonstrations of climate change. During Superstorm Sandy in 2012, it was possible to watch the water levels rise as the Atlantic Ocean storm surge came up the Hudson River and coincided with peak high tide.
Wadden added that the Lower Esopus Creek is also supplied by water that comes from the nearby Catskill Mountains, which makes it unique in the number of ways that environmental interactions are viewed first-hand.
“This creek is connected to the high peaks of the Catskills and to the ocean,” he said. “So many of the themes of our theater work involve natural history and storytelling ... and this gives us not only our own performance venue but an expanded way to utilize (it) to tell the story.”