Bill Schultz grew up at the lower end of the Raritan River in Perth Amboy. He narrates his life relative to the water that was around him, and also reflects on the important interactions with water that shaped his relationship to water preservation now. After several moves around the country, Bill came back to the area and spent twenty-nine years in public services. He founded the Raritan RIVERKEEPER program in 1998. Bill discusses his role as a Raritan Riverkeeper, and how he would like people’s perceptions of the Raritan River to change.

ANNOTATION

Annotations coming soon.

TRANSCRIPT

Interview conducted by John Keller

New Brunswick, New Jersey

September 13, 2019

Transcription by Chrissy Briskin

00:00

Great, so this is John Keller, with coLAB Arts and the Rutger Oral History Archive.  It is about three o’clock on Friday, September 13th, we are located at First Reformed Church at the coLAB Offices in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey and we are interviewing today:

Bill Schultz, Raritan Riverkeeper.

Excellent. Bill, it is great to just start at the beginning, where were you born, where are you from originally?

Perth Amboy, the lower end of the river.  

Yeah, and, uh, when you were, uh, when you were born were you living in, which section of Perth Amboy?

Um, well I got to be water-related so down by the coal docks on the Arthur Kill was my neighborhood when I was growing up and, uh, between that and, um, the area around what used to be the Chesebrough-Pond Company on the Raritan River side of the city, so come from a city with water on three sides of it, so naturally I had to take up something to do with the water.

When you were a kid, or when you were– are there any– what was your family set up, what was your family structure, kind of, growing up?

I was an only child, my parents had a little candy store, confectionary store, um, so no siblings, um, a lot of, well there wasn’t much time for recreation, a lot of it was based around a family-owned business, um, get out whatever I could, typical 1950’s, 1950’s, late 1960’s kind of, that kind of an era, so that was back when, uh, before pagers and cell phones, if you got out, you got out and ran around until the street lights came on and then it was time to go home, so that was the way it was.  

When you got out and were able to have some free time, what kind of stuff would you do? Were you staying in Perth Amboy mostly or–

Yes, um, well our area was, again, um, residential, small businesses and railroad tracks and coal docks, so we were at the end of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and at the time, this was when coal was slowing down, railroads were now more freight than coal, and, um, the docks were falling apart, all sorts of stages of dishevelment, uh, a lot of mischief for kids to get into–

Like what?

Well, we were, you know, fishing, crabbing, and swimming, that type of thing, monkeying around in the wetlands, um, and one of the outstanding things that sticks in my mind – a typical question people will ask me being a riverkeeper is, “Well what got you into this kind of thing?” and, um, it didn’t dawn on me that there was a problem with our local waterways until, um, oh I was maybe in my early teens, very early teens, maybe twelve, thirteen years old, my grandmother took me on a vacation to Wildwood, and this was the first vacation resort kind of thing I went to, and oh gee I was with a cousin of mine, and first thing, you gotta run to the ocean, jump in the ocean and swim around. We come back and I’m looking around and I found a maintenance guy and I says, “Hey where’s the kerosene?” “Kerosene?” “Yeah, I was just in the ocean, where’s the kerosene?” ‘Cause in my mind, if you went down to the water, you came back with oil spots, you find the kerosene, and scrub off the oil spots. 'Cause you couldn’t go in the Arthur Kill at that time, you couldn’t go in the Arthur Kill and not get tar or oil on you and that was my mind set forever and this guy was like, I had to explain to him, and the tar, I’m looking, “Oh wait a minute, there’s no tar spots.” And as a kid I was thoroughly confused, I was like, “Geez, my water’s really screwed up.” That’s the first thought I had, the first time I realized we had a problem. From then on I started looking, I says, “Oh my gosh. What are we doing to ourselves?”

5:17

And what did that, so you had that experience, what was kind of your next step in finding out information or–

Well it was the first time I began to understand there was a problem. Now can anything be done? At the time, you know, this is before all the legislation, the Clean Water Acts, um, my gosh, back then, now I realize how bad things were. We were building bulk oil storage tanks with no floors, um, yeah. I see the eyes go up. Yeah we had bulk oil storage, you know, the Chevron, all these refineries and companies that were around us at the time, a lot of those tanks never had floors in them, 'cause, well what could you lose? One percent of your product soaking into the soil? And the dirt’s only going to get so saturated with product before it, you know, it won’t take, you won’t lose anymore, and that was the accepted way we treated oils, and if you start, if you look at some historic photographs of the area, you start realizing all the oils and of course getting really historic, it all came out of Pennsylvania, from Pennsylvania, this was your port. The Port of New York. Everything came through here, um, you’ve got Bayway Refinery, oh gee, it was probably twenty some odd years ago, I was on a tour of Bayway Refinery and they were bragging then that they were a hundred years old. So the oil in this area is, you know, has been forever, basically.

Did you have a– when you were a kid, so your parents were running the business, was there, what was kind of like, what was your social network of who you were hanging out with? Other kids from the neighborhood mostly?

Yeah, I was lucky enough to get involved in Boy Scouts, so we sort of had our own little gang and, uh, held true to the Boy Scout spirit and we weren’t illegally mischievous, but if you asked our parents, I’m sure they weren’t happy with all the things we were getting into, but, um, that was the gang we ran around with.

And were you spending a lot of time in the water? You mentioned going swimming in the Arthur Kill. Did you do that a lot or–

Well summertimes were seasonal, but yeah, spent a lot of time on the water. Um, my father had a little sailboat, my uncle had a little motorboat, sixteen foot, eighteen foot, that area, so there was a lot of fishing, sailing, um, not a lot of other stuff, really, since we had a little business. Small family businesses become the lead activity for a small family.

Did you have an extended family around you?

No.

You mentioned your grandmother–

I had one grandmother, actually, my grandparents were the ones that started the business, my parents inherited it.

Were you parents from the area originally? 

Grandparents were Eastern European on both sides and parents just stumbled into the family businesses.

9:30

So did that experience in Wildwood, was that a turning point for you in some way in terms of your curiosity about all that stuff?

It sparked a curiosity, um, a certain amount of aggravation, and then that interest remained dormant for a couple decades until I started realizing that there is something that can be done. And just got aggravated that there was not a lot of people that were trying to improve the waterways. And you start seeing things, changes, some changes in wildlife, that things were not getting better and I guess that’s what sparked my interest in trying to make some changes.

Where did you go to school? Where did you go to elementary, middle, and high school?

Well grade schools and all were through Perth Amboy school system.  When I went to college, I bounced all over the place, started out in Kansas, that was horrible, too far from water. Bounced over to Tennessee, ended up in the mountains of North Carolina. Then I came home and got involved in public service. Got in a fire department. Spent, uh, twenty nine years there.

In Perth Amboy?

Yes, in Perth Amboy in a career fire department. Prior to that I was involved in volunteer services, volunteer fireman, first aid squad, all that kind of stuff. Spent a good part of my lifetime involved in public service.

When you were in school as a kid, were there certain subjects that interested you more than others?

No, I wasn’t really a, no, I wasn’t really studious.

What made you hesitate?

I was trying to think of the right way to phrase it [laughter]. I don’t want to come off like a dummy in this interview, you know, no, um–

You made the comment that Kansas was too far away from water, did you always– was that like a recurring thing in your life, that you always felt like you needed to be near–

For some reason, yeah, um, I don’t know why, it was just, um, I’ll take a stab at it, you know, you’re brought up in a city with water on three sides of it, what the hell do you expect? And then you go out to the middle of Kansas and it’s like, whoa. Get on a train, well I flew into Kansas City and the school was in the middle of the state, so it’s like, get on a train, and you’re on a train for an hour or two– oh now it’s different, we’ve changed from corn to wheat, oh now we’ve got an hour of wheat. It’s like, you know, my background was this area, Central Jersey, you’re forty five minute drive from mountains, a half hour drive from the biggest city, um, you’re a half hour drive from beaches, we got everything here. You get out to the middle of the country and it’s like, “Want a hot dog kid? Yeah? Let’s get in the car and we’ll drive for two hours for a hot dog.” I couldn’t handle that. 

What attracted you to the fire department?

Um, I got home from college and I needed a sense of direction. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was, you know, God, there’s no more school. What do I do? Where do I go? And again, previously, in my time with Boy Scouts, that got me involved with first aid and volunteer fire service, and somebody said, “Hey kid, the test is coming up, take the test, you’ll get a job.” So that’s where I went and it turned out to be something that I really took an interest in and I retired as a shift commander, so I was happy, it was in my blood. Retirement sucks. [laughter]

14:45

I would combat that and say you’re retired in quotes, but then you obviously have a very active life doing this kind of work, so was there a transition? How did you find yourself in the current position that you’re in?

Well, um, again, the interest in the waterfront goes back to my childhood days. When I got involved in the emergency services, um, I’m in a city, again, I keep going back to it, surrounded by water, and, uh, very little attention being paid to the waterfronts, so I was like, come on people, let’s wake up, what are you doing here? You know from the city-wise, it was like you’ve got an ideal location, you’ve got assets that are totally unrecognized, how come this town isn’t being looked at like, like a Williamsburg, Virginia for its historical factors, or like an inner harbor Baltimore for its fantastic waterfronts, or Annapolis, or Savannah or any of your waterfront towns? And, uh, I said somebody’s got to start pointing these things out and taking advantage of it. Well you can’t really take much advantage of it ‘til we make some changes. Um, like water quality and the insults that were done by the industries. That’s got to receive some attention, so I started looking into things like that, you know, what are we doing? Are we going to keep on the course we’re at or, you know, are we going to do– somehow start making some improvements and start realizing the value that we had. The natural values that God gave us. 

Um, what kind of activity– you’re talking about getting individuals to recognize those things and make some changes, what kind of activities were you participating in to try to help facilitate that?

Pointing out the problems was the first thing. And that’s, I guess about the time New York/New Jersey Baykeepers started to be formed–

When was that?

Oh thirty years ago, so I started doing stuff with Baykeeper and I kept coming up with stuff that was on the Raritan River. So basically I became the biggest pain in the ass they had in the organization on the volunteer side, and I mean they were trying to cover all the bays and rivers of New York Harbor with one boat and a couple people and I said, “Well, when’s the last time you went up the Raritan? Do you know what this company’s doing, do you know what that company’s doing, where’s this machine coming from?” And, like I said, I sort of became the biggest volunteer pain in the ass they had. So they said, “Alright, this is too much, we’ll have to start a program for the Raritan.” So that’s when I started the Raritan RIVERKEEPER program, started looking at what are we dealing with? It’s an eleven hundred square mile watershed. That’s a bit daunting, but we’ve got some good, even back a few years ago, a couple decent watershed associations working within the watershed doing good stuff. So I said I don’t wanna duplicate that but there’s nobody really looking at the lower Raritan. Then Judy Shaw came up with her sustainable Raritan Conferences. And at the first conference, one of the outstanding things that came out about the Raritan is that there’s no data. Whenever you talk to learned individuals whether they are engineers or scientists, um, you talk to people, “Come on take a look at my river.” “Okay, you talk a good line, kid, show me that data.” “Oops, there is no data.” 'Cause the lower part of the Raritan River nobody ever looked at. It’s an industrial garbage can. Everybody accepted it as an industrial garbage can and there was just no data. You talk to people even at Judy Shaw’s conference, “Raritan River, the only thing there, Rutgers, and that silly Staten Island Ferry that’s next to the Turnpike. I see it everyday.” “Do you know about the Raritan River?” “Sure, I drive over it everyday.” “How would you get to that ferry boat?” “I have no idea.” “Where’s the river come from?” “That way.” “Where does it go?” “Well, I guess it eventually goes to the bay, and it’s Raritan Bay so it must be the Raritan River.” That’s the logic. And I says, oh my God. There’s a big hole. There’s a big hole in people’s interest, again the lack of data and the lack of general knowledge about the lower part of the river. So I said, well alright I’ll start from the confluence, the north branch and south branch up in Branchburg, I’ll take it from there to the bay. So myself and a friend of mine, we start going any place we found a stream, where does this stream go? Does this stream have a name? Is it Green Brook, is it any of the numerous streams that feed into the main stem of the Raritan. How close can we park to it and let’s go paddle. There were times I called my girlfriend, “We’re not going to make it back to our cars, you’re going to have to pick us up in the middle of nowhere, but we found a parking lot and we’re even stopped.” So we started aimlessly traveling the waterways and we found a lot of interesting areas, a lot of interesting things going on, but nobody knew it. How do you get in there? Where would you go? So I made a map. I published an access map. And again, just me and one or two friends went out and started making notes. Where can you get in, where can you haul out, made an access map and found a grant that would print it for me, you know pay for the printing, and a year or two later I had to print it again because I was out. Everybody wanted it. Now people are coming down to the river, now people are actually, “Oh I can go from point A to point B?  It’s right down the end of my street. I own a canoe or a kayak, I always wanted to go but I didn’t know where I could get out.” Once they knew, now, there’s a lot of people paddling on the Raritan. You’ve got people paddling, fishing, a lot of people using it now that didn’t a dozen or fifteen years ago wouldn’t think of it. So I’m happy. 

23:40

Do you think that it’s, you were talking earlier, people weren’t really interested in the Lower Raritan Watershed because people just accepted it as an industrial wasteland and that was the accepted idea of it, so I’m wondering have you seen a change, the access thing is very specific, 'cause that’s like, if people can’t get, if they’re nervous about accessing it or they don’t know how to then they’re not going to change their perception of it, but how do you battle the perception thing? The accepted–

A-ha! One of my favorite terms.  Perception. People have this perception. I hate– I’ve grown to hate the term perception, 'cause, I see it so much, 'cause I’ll go someplace to a civic group and I’ll do a presentation, you know my River Keeper presentation, I’ll talk about the history of the river, where it’s been, um, the status of it now, the possibilities of what could be in the future, that kind of thing, and I try to throw out, “What do you think about swimming in the Raritan or boating down the Raritan?” And I just hate that mother who grabs, “My child will never touch that water. I don’t care what you say, my child will never touch that water.” It’s like talking to a mother of an infant in Newark today. “My child will never drink that water again.” Well that’s the attitude that people have about our river. “I’ll never touch it.” “I’ll never go in it.” “Well, why?” “I heard stories of what happened in it before.” “Yeah, well that’s fifty years ago, in some cases a hundred years ago.” “Well that stuff is still there.” “Do you know that it’s still there?” “Well it’s gotta be.” It’s all perception. People have their minds made up and it’s a hard battle to change people’s minds, but I’m trying.

So access is one way–

Public access is another, you know, booger in the back of my mind, 'cause again the river has this industrial footprint for, God, a couple hundred years, and it served its purpose well as an industrial garbage can. You know if you think back to the through the 1800s and through the 1900s, if you had an industry that created a liquid waste that you had to get rid of, you built your industry near a major river, and in our case it was the Raritan, and industries just gobbled up the riverfront. Especially in this case. The Sayre and Fisher Brickworks in Sayreville was at the time, it was the largest brick manufacturer in the world. So think about how many miles of riverfront it took to support that industry, um, Sayreville, South River, um, you know a couple of the municipalities like that were settled because of sand and clay mining. So again, vast amounts of property that were gobbled up by a single company to support whatever that product was. Um, Woodbridge, Perth Amboy, that area more for the clays and terracotta, and terracotta was a big industry. You had kilns on what is now the Keasbey section of Woodbridge, Perth Amboy on the Raritan, um, into, uh, not on the Arthur Kill, but a few blocks in from the Arthur Kill you had these huge kilns baking the terracotta products that indeed embellished many of the famous buildings in Washington, D.C. that came from this area. Um, public access, you know one of my favorite terms, one of my favorites to throw stones at is Edison Township.  Edison Township, seven miles of riverfront property, there is almost a hundred yards where you can go down and touch the water out of seven miles. Of course you’ve got what used to be the Raritan Arsenal, then you’ve got that period we went through with ILR, Industrial Landholding Resources which is just a dump. Edison Municipal Dump, Kin-Buc which is one of the worst superfund sites in the country, they’re all dumps. Like I said, it was an industrial garbage can. So much so that when scientists started looking at our waterways they didn’t bother testing anything. That’s why we have no data on record. It came out in Judy’s early conferences. No data. 'Cause everybody just wrote it off.

29:57

So what’s the– what’s the other side of that coin? If that was the perception, where are we heading to, or what are we striving for?

Well, um, let’s let nature tell you where we’re going. So we went from, um, I like looking at birds 'cause birds basically are so mobile and now we’ve got bald eagle nests along the river. I’m monitoring for the state threatened and endangered species program. I monitored twenty eight osprey nests from the west end of Raritan Bay up to Edison. Um, and this is an area where these animals were all but extinct and they’re coming back like crazy. Like I said I’m monitoring all these osprey nests and we’re fledgling chicks every year. So, you know, the osprey, the other term for the osprey is a fish hawk. They almost exclusively feed on fish, they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have food. The species of fish that are coming back is changing. We’ve got more numbers and different species of fish now than this river has seen in over, probably close to two hundred years. My gosh, this year we’ve got constant sightings of humpback whales in Raritan Bay. Dolphins in Keyport, Keansburg, these are species that, dolphins, geez if you saw one once in your lifetime that was amazing. Now you see them, I see them almost half the time that I’m out in the bay. humpback whales are not unusual, we’ve got studies that are being done on humpback whales, on New York Harbor humpback whales. We’ve got pictures of humpback whales by the Outerbridge feeding on bayfish. There’s several reasons for it, some legislative, more I think is the water quality and things are improving. Things are definitely getting better. Everybody’s rediscovering waterfronts now, double edged sword. We’re losing waterfront business, but everybody wants to live where they can see the water. So maybe we have a chance at changing the perception.

Are there any areas where we’re not getting better or where more attention needs to be paid?

Um, yes. More attention, yes. I think we’re on the right course of action, it’s just that it’s taking time, it’s taking a long time. I just lost one of my major funders because he says that he’s been pumping money into the Raritan for a dozen years and the last thing that they did was this foundation hired a group from Rutgers, I don’t know which school it was 'cause Rutgers confuses me with their organization these days, but, um, they did some water quality testing throughout the river system and he says, “We’re not seeing any improvements chemically when you get down to the analysis, and in this foundation’s opinion, the minute improvements we’ve seen don’t justify the expenditure of the amount of money they were putting into various programs working on the Raritan,” and they’re taking their funding and going someplace else. I said, “What?” He said, “We consider the Raritan River as a lost cause.” You know, just okay, cut my heart out and step on it which is essentially what he did. So to me that just means we have to work harder.

35:17

What’s the argument against it being a lost cause? I mean what would be your response to the argument that the Raritan is a lost cause?

If you look at just nature itself, nature if left alone, if we would stop screwing around with it, will recover. It may not be next week, it may not be next month, but eventually nature is going to recover. If we want to live here, we gotta either allow nature to take its course or help it along. Obviously I think probably, maybe the best course of action is to let nature take its course. It’s hard to stop industry from what they’re doing, stop production or move their production. We can regulate it, but again that’s counting on trusting industry. I don’t know about that, they always find ways of getting around, but, hmm, if I say anything more I’ll get in trouble.

So what is the, in terms, maybe it’s like to take a step back too– what is your day to day? What is the function of a riverkeeper on a day to day basis?

Um, I think of it as a neighborhood watch on the water. Keeping an eye on your own backyard, eyes, ears, and noses out on the river. You don’t have to be a scientist, you don’t have to have all the fancy letters after your name, but you know when there is something wrong. When you get out and there’s an oil slick here that wasn’t here yesterday. Where is it coming from? It doesn’t belong. Like I said, eyes, ears, and noses. There’s dust blowing around, okay, here’s the construction site, and now you get to look at it, oh they don’t have silk fencing up, they’re not controlling their run off, they’re not controlling stormwater, this needs an enforcement action. So somebody’s got to make the actual phone call that brings the authorities in. 'Cause we’re at a point now, especially recently, by recently maybe the last decade where our government agencies– everybody screams about taxes, they don’t want to pay for these enforcement actions and they don’t have enough people around so somebody has to call their attention to things that are wrong or illegal. And I think that’s one of the things that we can do. Eyes, ears, and noses out on the water. People come up to me, “How can I help?” “Go out on the water!” When you’re out there fishing, don’t just scan over and say, “Gee look there’s a new construction site,” give me a call. Then we can look at it and say well, maybe you don’t know silt controls or storm controls, but we’ll find out. And riverkeepers will put the time in to look at these sites and maybe they’re up to snuff, maybe they’re doing everything legal and maybe they’re not, but somebody’s got to be out there looking. If nobody is out there looking and keeping an eye on things, people will do, especially when you get to business and industries where everything is profit margin, they’re going to get away with whatever they can.

What would you say if you had to categorize it between things, and maybe you don’t want to make a formal recommendation and maybe you do, but outright pollution is obviously something that you don’t recommend, that’s not a recommended usage of the river, but what would be the other things that you would say, “No this shouldn’t be usage of the river, but this should be usage of the river.”

Well right now, especially on this river system we’ve gotten to the point where most of our– most of– almost all of the water-dependent industry has left the area, whether it was by moving product or by process, most of those industries have left, so we’re stuck with this legacy of pollutants. It’s what’s in the sediments, in the soils, so now what do you want to do?  Let’s take this industrial site and make it residential 'cause people wanna, there’s a market for it. Can you do it safely? You know is there proper procedures that can be followed, um, and then, see it’s nice when you talk about eyes and ears on the water, that’s the good part of the job, but then you get into the other side and it’s like yeah I’ll sit down at the planning board meeting and explain to the zoning board why you need stormwater controls or, um, sit down with a code enforcement officer and say, “You know that silk fence is going to blow over in the first wind and it’s not really adequate.” And that’s one of the worst parts of this job, sitting at these boring meetings and listening to all the nonsense and some of the stuff that people propose, it’s like, “Really? You want to do this?” Some of it gets interesting, but most of it is boring. 

42:15

If you were to kind of like set a road map, you know of the next– one of the things you talked about was this kind of change around thirty years ago kind of like this shift of like real energy towards getting data, towards like organizing and all that kind of stuff, if you were to set a road map for like the next shift should be towards, what would it be if everyone was to listen to your perspective on what direction everyone should be moving in?

Mmm. Definitely increased recreational use of the river, which is what we’ve been seeing. Um, one of the outstanding things that has occurred in the last dozen years or so, we removed a bunch of dams and the increase in fish migration is actually surprising, the changes in water quality in the areas where we have done dam removals is somewhat amazing. Um, just on dam removals, when we started– when I started getting involved with– basically we built almost like a coalition, um, we got state partners together with an outstanding engineer John Jengo who actually led the charge and he built this coalition of partners, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, State DEP, and nonprofits, he got a handful of nonprofits involved, okay let’s tackle this thing. And the outstanding thing he did, he picked up a client who had, who was facing substantial natural resource damage claims. So all these dams were removed with no tax-payer monies, he worked a deal with the state instead of going to court and fighting for years and years and years to come up with a big pot of money that you’re going to throw into the watershed, how about letting this business and maybe a couple other businesses that know they’re going to be faced with, writing a large check down the line, start paying off in little increments. And those little increments were enough to get these dams removed. And when we started the experts were all telling me, “Yeah we’re looking at least five years before we see a discernible difference.” One of the dams we took out up in, um, the Robert Street dam, the Raritan Boro area, um, I went up there the season after the dam was removed and what before was just clogged up with weeds, excessive weed growth, very low oxygen levels, very little water flow, um, just a horrible situation, took the dam out and go back the next season the footprint of the dam is covered with small river stone and yes the river is a little narrower, because it formed its own channel, it found its own way through, and I looked down and between the rocks there’s this tiny little fish   I’m talking maybe an eighth of an inch, quarter of an inch, you could hardly see them. It’s like we created a nursery. I’m like holy crap! This is fantastic! And that’s the shot in the arm you need sometimes. That’s what’s going to make the difference. The fishermen are going to see more fish, different fish, now we’ve got the migrating fish that are coming back that haven’t been here in over a hundred years and I’m not exaggerating because they have the documents of these dams that were removed that were over a hundred years old. And, you know, some of them had never served a purpose.

I was going to ask, what was the original purpose of some of these dams, or what was the intention?

Well, one of them was, this was a good one, The Calco dam built by The Calco Chemical Company, this is, it was maybe what a half a mile below the confluence of the Millstone and Raritan Rivers, right in Franklin Township, right up the street. And the dam was actually just a big pipe that came out of the chemical company with laterals, it was a large pipe with three inch laterals that came down under the pipe so that they could release their chemicals, this was all legal at the time. And one of the things they were proud of was there was so much water agitation coming over the top of what they called the dam, there was so much water agitation that if you were, I forget what the, somebody told me one time, if you were fifty yards away from the dam you couldn’t smell the chemical. As horrible as the chemical was they were dumping willfully and legally dumping in the river, you couldn’t smell it if you were fifty yards away 'cause they created the device that created enough aeration and agitation to disperse the chemical. [laughter] Um, in one case one of the dams was owned, they could never establish who built it, but it was owned by the county, it failed in the ‘60s, they could never determine why it was built, I mean some of them were built adjacent to a mill so it was a power for the mill, um, some were built for hydroelectric power, some were built to create a small impoundment or a lake, this one was what they called a run of the river dam. The water was basically the same above and below, it didn’t create any lake-like thing, they didn’t know who built it, the county took ownership of it, and in the ‘60s it failed and the county rebuilt it. It’s like, “Why did you rebuild it?” “Oh it seemed like the thing to do. We owned it, it failed, we had to fix it.” “No, you could have taken it out.” Well in the ‘90s, we took it out a hundred years later. Well in that case, it wasn’t that old, but some of the dams we took out were a hundred years old. So it’s easy to throw the term oh you have better water flow than you’ve had in a hundred years. It’s no bullshit, it’s true. Some of the dams were built in the 1930’s WPA, what’s that the Work–

50:20

Works Progress–

Works Progress Administration. Just to make work, to put people to work, so let’s build a dam. There’s a little stream, let’s build a dam, let’s make a lake. Does anybody need the lake? No. Does it serve any purpose? No. But it gave people work. Okay. Did you take it out later on? No. We’ll just leave it for the next sixty years. Nobody thought about fish migrations, well you have, you know, at the time you had so many fish in the river, nobody thought about it. What do you mean you’re going to stop the fish from migrating? Tens of thousands of fish move. Or in some cases, “We haven’t seen any fish here since that company came here, so what’s the difference if they can’t migrate up?” I talked to a guy one time, there was an old guy that was fishing up by the Island Farm Weir which is where the Raritan and Millstone come together, and, uh, I had a couple conversations with this old fella he said he went off to World War II, he got hurt very early, came home, couldn’t work so he fished everyday. Okay, good resource to get to know, and one of his things he says, “You can’t throw stones at all businesses and industries. They kept people busy, kept people working, you had good companies like Sherwin Williams over there.” “What made them a good company?” “They made sure that when they were shutting down for the weekend on a Friday afternoon, they made sure that the last batch of paint cleaned out was either a blue or a green so the river looked good for the weekend.  And if you lived local, you could go to the factory and they would sell you paint real cheap. They were a good company. They were good neighbors.” That was the attitude 'cause people had, industry had controlled the river for so long that people just accepted it. And they accepted the fact that, again, it was an industrial garbage can, what the hell. Nobody’s going to– if there happened to be a fish there nobody was going to eat it, nobody was going to touch it. Nobody would touch the river, nobody would willingly go into it so what the heck. That was people’s attitudes. Thank goodness that’s all changing now. People are looking for public access. People are starting to realize and we’re learning from some of the places, some of the waterfronts that already opened up. We’re starting to learn that you have to be cautious, you have to be a little cautious and careful how you do things. I mean I’ve grown to learn some terms that you have to look out for: the public esplanade. The public esplanade through a large residential project, that means a big chain link fence here and a big chain link fence here and a little public walkway that you can visualize the river through. “Can you touch the water?” “No you wouldn’t want to touch the water. You wouldn’t want to fish there.” “Yes I would.” “But we’ll give you an esplanade,” 'Cause to a developer– what’s happening is you get large tracts of land, it’s easy for the municipality, “Well here’s a large tract of land,” and Mr. Developer can come in and build 'cause they want the tax dollars. You lose the municipal control so, um, well maybe the corners are just enough of a radius to almost let a fire truck make a turn. Maybe the sidewalks are– do you really need to people to cross a sidewalk that wide, so let’s make them a little narrower 'cause every square foot has a dollar figure. I’ve reviewed projects where we talked about green space and the municipality had an ordinance about green space and the darn developer had a parking lot and the little strip of dirt where the street light goes? That was his green space, that little island that was two and a half foot wide and twenty foot long with the street lamp, that was his green space, so every square foot meant something. That’s the kind of stuff we gotta watch out for. 

56:07

What are your, like, I don’t know what the right question would be but this particular project–

By all means stop me if I start rambling, you’re getting me on some good subjects here and I’ll just ramble on. [laughter]

I was just thinking about, like, you know, um, the New Brunswick waterfront specifically, so you know there was– it follows that same thread of it being– it was all industrial for a period of, you know, the first half to the middle part of the last century at least, and now it’s– there’s this shift, and we see New Brunswick wrestling with this, trying to create green space, or trying to create public space along the waterfront, but then you also still see this tension between people who want to access the water and people who are still hesitant, and I will freely admit that tension between leaders in the community, some who want people to have more access and some who are still hesitant to encouraging anyone to go down to the water. I was just curious if you had thoughts about that conversation and that tension that exists in its own space.

Well it’s interesting because New Brunswick is a river town and one of my favorite discussions for years whenever I would do a presentation, I’d pull up and scan the parking lot and look for one of those big red R magnets on the back of the car and say, “Oh I’ve got a target.” My argument was Queens College was specifically sited on the banks of the Raritan River in sixteen sixty something and at that point the university system turned its back on the river and you can’t tell me what’s happening. We’re that gob of spit that freshman spits out the river dorm window, and lands in my river, you can’t tell me where it’s going, or the quality of water it’s going into or anything about that river. And I think I said that too many times 'cause now we’ve got, Rutgers has two research vessels down at, working out in the bay and up on the river. They’ve got classes that are required to be, to do their field work on the Raritan, so I can’t use that argument anymore, but, um, you know the idea of changing, well two things. One: changing the use of a waterway is one thing, the other is changing the perception of that waterway, and what do people think of it. Um, the New Brunswick industry shunted people from the water for a long time and still does.  Look at all that property that J&J owns, not industrial but Route 18, Route 18? Did the same thing to New Brunswick now, well now, when they built Route 18, did the same thing to New Brunswick that the railroad did to Manville, Bound Brook, South Bound Brook that whole string of municipalities probably close to a hundred years ago, and that being that they came in and paralleled the river but a little bit inland. So what happens is people are shunted from the waterfront. People have been shunted from the waterfronts in these towns, including New Brunswick for so long, they don’t know they have a waterfront. I mean, you’ve got a beautiful park, Boyd Park, you know a wonderful waterfront, but you just can’t get there. Um, just the other day I was talking to people, yeah, um, Middlesex County Water Resources Association, um, I sit on that board and we approve new projects coming into the area where there is enough water and sewer to support the projects and stuff, water resources. After the meeting, I mentioned, I says, “Hey don’t forget! Raritan River Festival 22nd! Y’all come down to the festival and enjoy good time and appreciate the waterfront!” Two people came up to me after the meeting and they’re from Middlesex County and said, “You know I tried going there,” well one, “I tried going there last year but I couldn’t, there was no place to stop. I was on 18 and I thought I saw a parking lot, but, hey, I’m doing 45 miles an hour, boom it was gone, next thing I knew I was in Highland Park.” Okay. And the other was the lady who came up and says, “I would love to go this festival. Where can I park?” “Um, well, you can’t.” Welcome to New Brunswick. Again, it’s not just New Brunswick, I’ve got a couple municipalities here, either the highways or the railroads have shunted people from the waterfront. You get to a point after a generation or two, the people don’t know they have a waterfront. And then we hit that old perception, if they’re old enough to know that there’s a waterfront there, “Oh yeah that’s where that big pipe was that dumped that crap. Nah, I don’t want to go there.” “It’s a beautiful park.” “Nah, it can’t be.” And I’ve had people tell me, “Nah it can’t be. I know what–” And that’s their attitude. You get the wave of the hand, “Nah, I know what’s there. There’s shit.” But you know, a friend of mine, the Hackensack RiverKeeper, he works off of pontoon boats. He does a program with kids where he’ll go to cities, he found funding for a kids fishing program, so he goes to inner cities, inner cities, I don’t know if that’s the right term. Waterfront towns that are low income, basic municipalities, and he does a fishing program with kids. He supplies everything and takes whatever his boats will carry, fifteen, twenty kids, go out on the river and fish, um, one it gets kids to the waterfront, again he’s working in towns, Bayonne, Jersey City, all the other municipalities in that area, where kids will get there and every time he takes the kids out, somebody will say, “I didn’t know we had a waterfront.” People don’t know it. And of course if kids catch a fish then he gets into that good, he gets to give the speech about why you cannot eat that fish. That gets well into another subject, um, it’s amazing the number of people that live in these towns that don’t know they have waterfronts. And you know things like the Raritan River Festival, it’s a one shot deal. So they come down and unfortunately a lot of them, “Oh look at the games we can play and do this and do that,” in my opinion there’s not enough water-related activities to make them realize you’ve got a waterfront! Come down here more than this one-day festival and the Fourth of July to see fireworks. The river’s here all the time. It’s a change in mindset that we have to figure out how to, how do we change people’s minds. 

65:17

Is there anything that I didn’t ask that maybe you thought I would ask or expected to ask.

I had no idea what I was walking into when I came here. [laughter]

Is there anything I haven’t asked that you think you would be interested in articulating?

Well, hmm, perhaps one of the things if you are looking at some sort of depiction of your waterfront and certainly my river, um, there’s the industrial, we’ve gone through the industrial section, but prior to that, there’s great history here that goes back to the Revolution for chrissakes. Um, I don’t know if that plays in, or can play in to your story of the river, but, um, like old Mike Babcock before he passed away, his favorite story was that he had documentation of a fleet of British ships coming up from Perth Amboy to reinforce New Brunswick and they were deterred by cannon fire from the bluff above the city. And the returning ship, the documentation he had was the numbers didn’t match the returning ships then the ships that went up the river, so some ships were lost along the way, um, but again that’s during the Revolution. Who thinks about New Brunswick and the American Revolution? But there’s a great amount of history here. Um, you know, Landing Lane was the head of navigation where farmers would bring all their crops down and trade, um, you know, the stinky side of things. They traded their crops. For what? The big city had all this horse manure that was great for crops, that’s the stinky side of the trade. What do you do with it? You just, it had a value to the farmers, so they traded horse manure for the crops. That was, I thought that was a cute story but some, in my mind if you’re going to come up with a mural about the river, you also have to reach way back in history, um, you had commercial harvesting of shad up this end of the river, you had a historical significance in the American Revolution here, right here in New Brunswick. It’d be nice if that somehow figured into a story about the river. 

Anything else, any other thoughts?

No, like I said, I didn’t know you wanted so much of my stuff. It shouldn’t be about me, I’m only one small part of what’s going on here, but the river’s gotta be– the river has to be the main subject and the main thought process here, the good, the bad, the ugly, and where are we going? It’s gonna be better, in spite of what some funders might think. It’s gonna get better. It’s got to. If we leave it alone, it will improve.

That’s a good stopping point there.