San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ambitious plan for theme park divides town
You live in a small town where people cherish their open space. Neighbors drop in without calling ahead, and come together in a townwide $5 charity challenge.
A developer wants to come in and build a $500 million theme park, promising all kinds of jobs and revenue.
Do you want this? Or do you organize to try to stop it?
On a lustrous September morning, Nick Gallo looked out his backyard at the trees separating his modest home from the candy-colored dreamscape of Legoland N.Y., a 150-acre theme park that fully opened in July. Gallo, 73, a retired electrician, moved to this Hudson Valley town from Brooklyn 50 years ago to get away from the noise and crowding.
A sign on a neighbor's lawn shouted in foothigh capital letters, “STOP LEGOLAND.”
His is a subdivision of quiet streets all named after trees. With a wry smile, he described the woods beyond his back fence as a place he cannot go without risk of arrest.
“It's a billion-dollar corporation, and we spent $40,000 to $50,000 fighting it,” Gallo said, speaking without bitterness of a battle that had consumed much of the last five years. “We fought a good fight and we lost,” he said.
The town of Goshen, tucked between the New York City suburbs and the second-home havens of the Catskills, is horse country and black dirt farmland, where Noah Webster once taught school and the blue limestone spire of First Presbyterian Church is the tallest structure for miles. Until the late 1970s, when the racetrack ended betting, Goshen was a destination on the harness racing circuit, where weekend crowds numbered in the tens of thousands.
Nick Gallo and Sandra Rothenberger are vocal opponents of the Legoland theme park in Goshen, N.Y.
Rising up over this, on a hill that was previously woods and farmland, is Legoland, the first new major outdoor theme park in the Northeast since Great Adventure opened in Jackson, N.J., in 1974.
The park has pitted neighbor against neighbor, spurring accusations of self-dealing and anti-Semitism and driving people, many in their 70s, to become
first-time activists. Since 2018, state inspectors have cited Legoland for 67 environmental violations and fined it more than $600,000.
“Legoland divided this town,” said Sandra Rothenberger, 73, who remains one of the park's vocal opponents. “Goshen was a really nice town. Everybody knew everybody, everybody would help you, people said hello to you
on the street.” Now, she said, any conversation might turn nasty.
When the project was introduced in 2016, battles began almost immediately — over traffic and the environment, over a threat to the small town's character. Scare talk spread, ungrounded: that if the town did not approve Legoland, the site would instead become highdensity housing, possibly
for Hasidic Jews like those who have formed enclaves in the area.
For now, the park presents a balancing act among competing values: tourism revenue versus environmental preservation and traditional small-town character.