(erielack) Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: Tilting at Windmills, Only This One's a Bridge

["Gary R. Kazin" <gkazin_@_yahoo.com>]

Tilting at Windmills, Only This One's a Bridge
July 1, 2002
By KIRK JOHNSON


POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - About a decade ago, Bill Sepe uncorked
a doozy of an idea. The old Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge -
an engineering marvel in 1888 but a delinquent eyesore ever
since a spectacular fire closed it in 1974 - should be
transformed, he said, into a pedestrian skyway over the
Hudson River. 

The old rail bed, wrapped in its Victorian-era lattice of
steel, 200 feet above the water, would get a second life,
he and others said, as strollers and bikers thrilled to the
view and the history. 

Central to the walkway plan was its seize-the-day
enthusiasm. The bridge's owner at that time, in the early
1990's, had not paid taxes for years, and that made it an
abandoned structure, according to Mr. Sepe, then a
self-employed handyman. He began leading volunteer crews
out on the rail bed to see what could be salvaged. Local
politicians and business leaders, envisioning hordes of
weekenders with bulging wallets, cheered the effort on. 

"He had that dream, and he infected people with it," said
Robert Shepard, town supervisor in Lloyd, N.Y., on the
bridge's western side. "I believed in it." 

Today Mr. Sepe (rhymes with peppy) is still living the
dream, but it is an increasingly lonely one. The old bridge
sits silent behind a chain-link fence, locked in legal
limbo. Many of the volunteers have drifted away. Some local
officials have begun worrying that pieces of rusting steel,
unpainted for three decades, could fall into the river.
Developers of a network of hiking trails being built on old
rail lines were planning a link to the bridge, but they
have plotted out an alternate route. 

Mr. Sepe said he blamed narrow-minded politics for the
impasse. Other people, including even some of his ardent
admirers, said the problem was that the bridge's fortunes
became bound up too much with the vision, and the foibles,
of Mr. Sepe himself. Although the dream is not dead, people
on both sides of the river agree that what eventually
happens will depend less on rusting rivets than on the
temperament and tactics of the man who would be the walkway
king. 

"The bridge is his life," said Dick Coller, a retired
electrical engineer who has worked closely with Mr. Sepe
for years and once led tourists out on the bridge to the
viewing platform that the volunteers helped build about
1,200 feet from the western side. "But he wants to do it
his way." 

Town officials in Lloyd are more blunt. "The man is an
idiot," said David L. Butler, supervisor of the Building
Department and its chief code enforcement officer. 

He and other town officials say they have spent $30,000 in
legal fees just for an unsuccessful effort to force Mr.
Sepe's group, Walkway Over the Hudson, to comply with
building and zoning regulations for the structures that
were built within town boundaries. 

"If anybody else was running that organization, there would
have been people walking on that bridge three years ago,"
Mr. Butler said. 

Mr. Sepe, now 54, said there was no doubt that the walkway
consumed him and that he made some mistakes. Bridge affairs
took over his home - filling up his living room, then his
dining room and his garage with files, posters and donated
office equipment. It cost him his handyman business, he
said, because customers objected to his running off for
meetings. He has since taken jobs serving legal papers,
driving a bus and most recently operating a tractor at a
gravel mine in Rhinebeck three days a week, all to
accommodate his bridge duties. The project was bad for his
health, he said, as he gained weight from the stress. 

But he said he believed, whatever the cost and however sour
things have turned out, that the original vision was right.

He insisted almost from the beginning, for example, that
building the walkway would be a community affair - a
self-financed, volunteer effort that would not take a dime
of government money. The government, Mr. Sepe preached,
always takes control of what it pays for; conversely, any
community that creates something through sweat and
dedication will value it more, he said. 

That idealistic view got hundreds of people involved in the
early days, but later it came to seem quixotic, some
volunteers said, as the dimensions of the project became
clearer. Mr. Sepe said he thought a walkway could be built
for $2 million; some experts have said it could cost $30
million just to paint the bridge. 

Mr. Sepe's freewheeling philosophy also ran afoul of local
zoning laws after his group gained legal title to the
bridge in the late 1990's. 

He refused to post a $1,600 escrow payment for an
engineering inspection, saying the bill was padded. Then,
in the middle of the litigation, in 2000, a volunteer was
seriously injured in an electrical accident while working
on the bridge, and an angry State Supreme Court Justice
said he'd had enough. The judge slapped a permanent
injunction on Walkway Over the Hudson, barring any tours or
repairs. Mr. Sepe appealed the injunction in May. 

Standing on the unfinished walkway, Mr. Sepe said that if
he lost the appeal, a civil disobedience campaign could be
the next step. He might simply go back to work on the
bridge anyway - court injunction be hanged - along with any
volunteers who care to follow him. 

"I won't be bullied," he said. Mr. Sepe said he believed
that town officials in Lloyd had a political agenda behind
their lawsuits and court orders. 

"To me, this is a right everybody has - not to be harassed
to take public money," he said. "Politicians would take
money from soup kitchens. We've got a soup kitchen right
here in Poughkeepsie that doesn't get adequate funding, and
yet they would put money into this bridge." Town officials
in Lloyd said taking the walkway group to court was simply
a last resort. 

"We think it's a great use for the bridge and have always
been in favor of it, but we also have a responsibility to
the general public to protect life, safety and welfare,"
said Mr. Butler, the code enforcement officer. 

Many people in this part of the Hudson Valley, about 90
miles north of New York City, can claim an emotional
ownership of the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge. For some, it
stands for the days when Poughkeepsie was on every
freight-hauler's map, linking New England and the Midwest.
For others, it's a poignant symbol of the economic hard
knocks that had begun even before the fire, as the heavy
industries that once sent their freight clattering across
the river faded away. It was the first bridge across the
Hudson south of Albany, and for a time - if its approach
system is counted - was also the longest in the world, at
6,768 feet. 

Judy Moran, a retired elementary school teacher, said the
bridge was a link to her childhood and to her father, who
worked as a switchman on the Poughkeepsie side. She was a
member of Mr. Sepe's group and led walkway tours in the
mid-1990's, before dropping out about three years ago in a
disagreement with him over the issue of public financing. 

Mr. Shepard, the town supervisor in Lloyd, was a volunteer
firefighter on May 8, 1974, when the blaze that closed the
bridge broke out. It was a scary night, he said. Working
high over the river, the fire crews had to tear out the
oil-soaked railroad ties, which had been ignited by sparks
from a train, and each tie that was removed left less for
the firefighters to stand on as they worked. 

Several members of the walkway group say that part of the
story of the stalled walkway comes down to the question of
who will, in the end, be the bridge's master. 

"Bill just doesn't want to lose control of it," said one
person in the group who would speak only on the condition
of anonymity, since he wants to be part of the project,
which he believes will eventually resume. 

Mr. Sepe agreed that perhaps control was an issue, but he
said the project was not about him. 

"I'm willing to give up control if somebody shows the
commitment and wants to do it," he said. "My fear that if
we give up, we'll lose the whole thing, that it'll be
erased, it'll be something completely different than what
we wanted. I want it to be something we did ourselves,
something that we did."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/nyregion/01BRID.html?ex=1026528729&ei=1&en=e7fbf474250f5bf9

© Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company


=====
Gary R. Kazin
DL&W Milepost R35.7
Rockaway, New Jersey

http://www.geocities.com/gkazin/index.html

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