Embattled River: The Hudson and Modern American Environmentalism

By David Schuyler

In Embattled River, David Schuyler describes the efforts to reverse the pollution and bleak future of the Hudson River that became evident in the 1950s. Through his investigative narrative, Schuyler uncovers the critical role of this iconic American waterway in the emergence of modern environmentalism in the United States.

Writing fifty-five years after Consolidated Edison announced plans to construct a pumped storage power plant at Storm King Mountain, Schuyler recounts how a loose coalition of activists took on corporate capitalism and defended the river. As Schuyler shows, the environmental victories on the Hudson had broad impact. In the state at the heart of the story, the immediate result was the creation in 1970 of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to monitor, investigate, and litigate cases of pollution. At the national level, the environmental ferment in the Hudson Valley that Schuyler so richly describes contributed directly to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the creation of the Superfund in 1980 to fund the cleanup of toxic-dumping sites.

With these legal and regulatory means, the contest between environmental advocates and corporate power has continued well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, as Embattled River shows, the past is prologue. The struggle to control the uses and maintain the ecological health of the Hudson River persists and the stories of the pioneering advocates told by Schuyler provide lessons, reminders, and inspiration for today's activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501718069

Book preview

Embattled River

The Hudson and Modern American Environmentalism

David Schuyler

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Kenneth T. Jackson

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Battle over Storm King

2. Politics and the River

3. Pete Seeger and the Clearwater

4. The Fishermen and the Riverkeeper

5. The Continuing Battle against Power Plants

6. Scenic Hudson’s Expanding Mission

7. Linking Landscapes and Promoting History

8. A Poisoned River

9. A River Still Worth Fighting For

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. Schematic drawing of the pumped-storage power plant at the base of Storm King Mountain

2. Schematic drawing of the powerhouse, tunnel, and reservoir at Storm King Mountain

3. Pete Seeger performing in a fund-raising concert for the Clearwater

4. The Clearwater on the Hudson

5. Fishing Station.—Sturgeon, Shad, Bass

6. Art Glowka and Robert H. Boyle

7. Launch day for the Fishermen’s Association’s first patrol boat

8. Riverkeeper’s patrol boat, the R. Ian Fletcher

9. Photograph with superimposed drawing of the proposed Greene County Nuclear Power Plant, Cementon site

10. Photograph with superimposed drawing of the proposed Greene County Nuclear Power Plant, Athens site

11. Environmental Management Plan showing the proposed nuclear reactors for the Lloyd-Esopus site

12. Athens Generating Plant, Athens

13. Poets’ Walk Park, Red Hook

14. Kayak Pavilion at Long Dock Park, Beacon

15. Daylighted Saw Mill River, Yonkers

16. Hudson River Valley Greenway map of proposed trails

17. Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area guidebook

18. General Electric’s Hudson Falls facility

19. Train carrying Bakken shale crude oil down the Hudson

20. Schematic showing the impact of the proposed LG office tower atop the Palisades

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Franklin & Marshall College for the sabbatical during which I wrote most of the pages that follow, and also for the college’s support of my research and teaching over the course of thirty-eight years. During that time many F&M students have helped me in my research on different scholarly endeavors, largely through our wonderful Hackman Scholars program, endowed by alumnus William Hackman, which supports students in collaborative research with faculty. In writing this book I have been fortunate to have two Hackman Scholars work with me. Molly Cadwell helped with the research at the beginning of this project, and I am proud that she transformed what she learned into a superb honors thesis on Storm King’s significance to American environmentalism. Wyatt Behringer also contributed to the research and was instrumental in the early stages of checking the text and notes.

For financial support in conducting research I am indebted to the Archives Partnership Trust, which enabled me to conduct research in the New York State Archives, especially the records of the Hudson River Valley Commission, and to the Rockefeller Archive Center, where I consulted the Hudson River Valley Commission records and, more revealingly, two boxes of Laurance Rockefeller’s papers that had not been cataloged. I am grateful to archivist Monica Blank for finding and making accessible the Laurance Rockefeller papers relevant to this book, and to Jim Folts for his help during my visit to the state archives.

Many people in the Hudson River Valley have also been extraordinarily helpful. I am deeply indebted to Thomas Wermuth, dean of the faculty and director of the Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College, where I was the first Barnabas McHenry Visiting Scholar during the fall semester of 2015. I am also indebted to John Ansley and the staff at Rare Books and Special Collections, James A. Cannavino Library, especially Ann Sandri, for making its terrific Hudson River environmental collections accessible. Harvey Flad, a friend for many years and now retired after a distinguished career at Vassar College, generously shared his research files on the Cementon case, gave me the benefit of his encyclopedic knowledge of other environmental battles in the valley, and commented on a draft of this book. Ned Sullivan and Reed Sparling of Scenic Hudson have done so as well. Paul Gallay of Riverkeeper welcomed me to his office and answered innumerable questions that helped me frame that chapter. He too commented helpfully on an earlier draft.

I could not have written this book without the help of many individuals in the Hudson River Valley who shared their knowledge of important developments. J. Winthrop Aldrich, now retired but the longtime deputy commissioner for historic preservation in New York, knows most of these issues firsthand, as he was involved in many of the conservation and environmental battles I analyze. Wint answered innumerable questions as I was struggling to understand those issues, and also commented on the entire typescript in draft. I had never met Albert K. Butzel, who is one of the individuals most responsible for the development of U.S. environmental law, but when I sent him an e-mail he responded welcomingly, and since that first exchange his thoughts have guided me as I have written many of the pages that follow. Al also read a draft of this book, and I am indebted to him for his thoughtful, constructive criticism. John Cronin shared with me his vast knowledge of many of the organizations and issues I have written about, and commented helpfully on an earlier version of this book. Adam Rome’s reading of a draft challenged me to place the environmentalism of the Hudson River Valley into a national context. Tom Daniels and Steve Schuyler also read this in draft and helped me in many ways.

Betsy Garthwaith, formerly Clearwater’s boat captain and now president of the organization’s board of directors, read the Clearwater chapter and helped me when I was assembling the illustrations; Karl Beard and Barnabas McHenry offered sage advice on the Greenway and NHA chapter; and John Mylod shared his recollections of the years in which he was executive director of Clearwater and offered helpful comments on that chapter.

Others who have helped include Mark Castiglione, who for many years headed the Hudson River Greenway / Hudson River National Heritage Area; John Doyle, formerly director of the Heritage Task Force of the Hudson River Valley; and Frances Dunwell of the Hudson River Estuary Program. Maynard Toll put me in touch with his old friend Leon Billings, who gave me invaluable insight into the politics surrounding adoption of the National Environmental Policy Act. Conversations or correspondence with Hayley Carlock, Carl Petrich, Tom Whyatt, Frederic C. Rich, and Loretta Simon were very helpful in my understanding of important issues I have written about. Sam Pratt’s knowledge and advice helped me analyze the St. Lawrence Cement controversy, as did conversations with Sara Griffen. Peter Brown shared with me his copy of Nuclear Power in the Hudson Valley: Its Impact on You.

My colleagues at Shadek-Fackenthal Library were enormously helpful in my research, especially Meg Massey and Jenn Buch in Interlibrary Loan. American Studies colleagues Louise Stevenson, Alison Kibler, Carla Willard, and Dennis Deslippe were supportive in many ways during this scholarly journey.

I spent most of the fall of 2015, when I was at Marist, as a guest of my oldest brother, Barry, and his wonderful spouse Jodi. They gave me their extra bedroom and a smaller one where I hooked up my computer and worked many nights. They have also welcomed me on subsequent research trips as well as visits home for the holidays. Their house overlooks the Hudson just north of Newburgh, the same vista, looking east toward Mount Beacon and south toward Storm King and Breakneck Ridge, that I came to love as a child. Visits to their home, and their welcoming embrace, as well as the scenery so remarkable from their windows and porches, remind me of why I still, after so many years away, consider the Hudson Valley home.

To all I am deeply grateful.

Introduction

Since 1962 the Hudson River Valley has been a key battleground in the development of modern environmentalism in the United States. What began with a small group of individuals opposed to Consolidated Edison’s plan to construct a pumped-storage power plant at Storm King Mountain, the northern gateway to the Hudson Highlands, quickly attracted supporters in the region and across the nation. That small group organized as the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference and successfully waged a legal and public relations campaign against the powerful utility that established the foundations for environmental law. Other groups organized as well, sometimes in response to a specific threat, at other times with a broader mission to defend water quality, such as Riverkeeper, or to promote environmental education, the replica nineteenth-century sloop Clearwater’s mission. Through their collective efforts, these organizations have defended the valley’s environment and worked to promote the quality of life and the economic vitality essential to its residents.

The Hudson is a comparatively short river. It flows south from Lake Tear of the Clouds on Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks, for 315 miles until it reaches the Atlantic Ocean. It flows by the Catskills, which attracted the first generation of artists who defined an American landscape tradition, named after the river itself, as well as the Highlands, a visually spectacular fifteen-mile stretch where the river courses through the mountainous Appalachian spine. It broadens into a bay three miles wide at the Tappan Zee, memorialized in Washington Irving’s prose, and flows past the Palisades and New York City before reaching the sea.

Writers and policy makers trying to explain or analyze the Hudson often divide the river into two, sometimes three, stretches: the upper Hudson, from its source to the Federal Dam at Troy, and the lower river—itself sometimes divided into a lower and middle river—from Troy south to the Atlantic Ocean. I have accepted what might be called the two-stretch river, as the Hudson is navigable as far north as the dam and is a tidal estuary for much of that distance. Each section has experienced different stages of economic development, urban growth, post–World War II decline, and, in most places, a revival in recent years. The human presence along the river—the buildings, factories, extractive industries, and pollution—has affected its ecosystem as well as the lives of residents in the valley.¹

Although environmentalism is a relatively recent development, the Hudson planted the seeds for an appreciation of the natural world throughout much of its history. In the nineteenth century it claimed a powerful hold on the American imagination. Our national sense of the importance of landscape and scenery began in the Hudson River Valley. A group of landscape painters, led by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic E. Church, captured the beauty of the valley on their canvases, many of which now hang in the nation’s foremost museums. Engravings after drawings by William Henry Bartlett, originally published in American Scenery, which disproportionately represented the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills, were frequently framed and graced the walls of parlors throughout the nation. So were lithographs published by Nathaniel Currier and James Ives. These images helped make the valley the archetypal American landscape. The writings of Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and others also contributed to the widely shared recognition that the Hudson River Valley was an iconic place. Through the memory of the importance of the valley in the American Revolution and the beginnings of historic preservation in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Hudson was a key in fostering a sense of national identity.²

Generations of residents—fishermen, swimmers, recreational boaters, hikers, and those who appreciated its scenery—have developed a strong attachment to the Hudson River, which has resulted in the widely shared belief that the valley is a special place and has led many who grew up along the river or lived on its banks, over more than a half century, to defend the landscape. As the rising generation of environmentalists discovered in the 1960s, the work of artists and writers who a century earlier had painted, written about, and cherished the Hudson River Valley became a foundation for their efforts to preserve the landscape. These efforts have helped establish the modern environmental movement.³

In this book I focus on a number of the major conservation and preservation battles and initiatives that have taken place in the Hudson River Valley since, in 1962, Consolidated Edison proposed that pumped-storage plant at Storm King Mountain. In a previous book on the Hudson, Sanctified Landscape, I organized my interpretation of the emergence of the Hudson Valley as iconic landscape in the nineteenth century through the role of individuals such as Cole, Andrew Jackson Downing, and John Burroughs. Here the focus is on the organizations that have rallied to the defense of the river, who used the courts, legislation, and public opinion to challenge threats to a landscape their members cherished. Even before Scenic Hudson’s momentous Peace Treaty with Con Ed in 1980, other battles were under way, including opposition to nuclear and conventional power plants and Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s proposed expressway along the east bank of the river. In more recent years environmentalists have challenged what they considered the ineffective role of federal and state agencies in protecting the environment and struggled to force General Electric to clean up the PCBs it dumped into the river, an effort that is ongoing. Other organizations have promoted the construction of greenways to link parks and other open spaces throughout the valley, or have advocated heritage tourism as the new driver of the region’s postindustrial economy.⁴

Most important, in its legal challenges to Con Ed’s plan, Scenic Hudson won a critical victory: in 1965 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Con Ed and the Federal Power Commission and stated that Scenic Hudson had standing in the court, which Con Ed had challenged, and which opened the federal judiciary to citizen suits involving the environment and a host of other issues. The court also chastised the Federal Power Commission for not considering scenic, cultural, and historic concerns in its decision making, and it effectively required the first environmental impact statement. Each of the significant points in this decision became the heart of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the foundation of modern environmental law.⁵

Although I devote attention to water quality, the fisheries, and the most appropriate development along the river’s banks, in the chapters that follow I attempt to tell the most important stories about how a number of organizations have fought to protect the Hudson, and the significance of those fights for American environmentalism. The Scenic Hudson decision is surely the most important of these developments, as it has shaped environmental law and policy nationwide. The battle over a proposed nuclear power plant at Cementon is also crucial: for the first time, the staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended the denial of a license for a nuclear power plant to the Power Authority of the State of New York and based its determination on aesthetic considerations. The visual impact analysis presented by Carl Petrich, Harvey Flad, and Richard Benas in the Cementon battle, and by Flad against the proposed nuclear plant at Lloyd-Esopus, established the foundation for visual impact analysis that has been adopted by New York and other states and has been important in conservation and environmental battles elsewhere.

Other developments are also important. Pete Seeger preached a gospel of populist environmentalism, and the Clearwater, the sloop that he did so much to create and sustain, has become a symbol of a greener future and has emphasized environmental education. Riverkeeper has been a staunch supporter of clean water, and has courageously investigated and litigated to force elected officials and regulators to comply with the Clean Water Act. It has also successfully campaigned to ban hydraulic fracturing—fracking—in New York State. Scenic Hudson has evolved from its beginnings at Storm King Mountain to become a land conservation organization that has also developed riverfront parks and has made many other contributions to the quality of life in the Hudson Valley. Scenic Hudson has also been an effective and innovative restraint on inappropriate commercial and residential development along the river and has championed farmland preservation. All three organizations, though they have different emphases, have united in demanding that federal and state officials enforce the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts and have fought hard to hold General Electric accountable for the PCBs released into the upper Hudson, mostly illegally, with devastating consequences for the river, today the largest Superfund site in the United States. Other efforts may seem more prosaic in comparison, but they too are important. The Hudson River Valley Greenway may not own an acre of land, but as Barnabas McHenry, the longtime chair of the Greenway Council, has observed, it is an umbrella under which New York can promote, fund, but not enforce, conservation. Other, smaller groups have been essential in preserving land or in addressing pollution or other environmental issues.⁶

In the pages that follow I have departed, admittedly somewhat uncomfortably, from my usual perch in writing about American cultural history in the nineteenth century. Here I have felt it essential to address policy and politics as they are unfolding presently. I hope that I have succeeded in using history as a foundation for analyzing contemporaneous conditions and also presenting my concerns for the future as the second decade of the new millennium nears it close.

The Hudson River’s renaissance—significant improvements in water quality, stronger regulations to make development along its banks appropriate while preserving public access, the many thousands of newcomers who have found the valley a desirable place to live—is still a work in progress. There is still too much poverty in its cities, too much suburban sprawl that is consuming valuable farmland, too much inappropriate development.

Other problems persist. Construction of sewage treatment plants has dramatically reduced the amount of pollution flowing into the river, with the result that the Hudson’s waters are cleaner today than at any time since the beginnings of industrialization in the valley in the mid-nineteenth century. But the water itself is poisoned, not just by PCBs but by many other chemical micropollutants that aging sewage treatment plants were not designed to treat. Moreover, those treatment plants, most of which have combined sewage and stormwater pipelines, overflow during periods of heavy rainfall or snowmelt, and pour billions of gallons of untreated sewage and polluted stormwater into the Hudson each year. Much of the middle stretch of the river is now safe for swimming, though because of PCBs and other pollutants its fish are not safe for human consumption. Moreover, as Riverkeeper has demonstrated, some areas at certain times of the year are perilous for bathers, and a more effective and frequent water sampling program is essential.⁷

In addition, as the Clearwater organization, Scenic Hudson, and Riverkeeper have argued, the Hudson needs much more effective oversight, and policing, by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Those agencies have at times been remiss in enforcing the Clean Water Act, as amended in 1972, and have occasionally been an obstacle to rather than a strong advocate for environmental protection. The Hudson River Estuary Program is a welcome addition to the state’s efforts in protecting the river and environs. Under its energetic director, Frances Dunwell, who is a longtime advocate for the river and author of two excellent books on the Hudson, the Estuary Program promises to be precisely what the Hudson needs—a holistic, interdisciplinary agency that protects the river and its many tributaries. But the Estuary Program is a state agency, which leaves it vulnerable to the changing political climate and gubernatorial priorities in Albany.⁸

The work of Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper, and the Clearwater organization has been essential to the recovery of the river. Scenic Hudson and Riverkeeper are led by talented and dedicated individuals, Ned Sullivan and Paul Gallay (Dave Conover, the acting executive director of Clearwater, has been a terrific educator, but staff turnover and divisions within the board in recent years demonstrate that the organization needs stability at the top and an effective board committed to fund-raising). Fortunately, with former boat captain Betsy Garthwaite as president of the board, Clearwater appears to be sailing on an even keel once again. Ultimately, these organizations are collections of individuals who support their missions, and the Hudson River has benefited from the efforts of numerous individuals. The eight people who met at Carl Carmer’s octagonal house in November 1963 took on one of the most powerful utilities in the nation; they succeeded in protecting Storm King Mountain and in the process revolutionized American environmental law. Seeger’s populist environmentalism was based on his belief that individuals working within their own communities were a powerful force for social change, and the Clearwater has become the symbolic flagship of the environmental movement. Riverkeeper has been the strongest advocate for clean water in New York State. Other, smaller groups have successfully opposed nuclear power plants at Cementon and Lloyd-Esopus. Citizens often mobilized into groups such as the Mid-Hudson Nuclear Opponents or Hudson River GREEN. These and other organizations, and the passion of the thousands of citizens who joined cleanups organized by Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper, and Clearwater, and who contacted their state and federal legislators, or wrote letters to the editor, have defended the Hudson River Valley they cherish. These are individuals who care passionately about the big stream, as Carmer once described the Hudson.

A panel discussion organized by the Olana Partnership in 2012 featured three of the environmentalists who successfully challenged construction of the proposed nuclear power plant at Cementon, at a majestic bend in the river and in the viewshed of Olana, the landscape painter Frederic Church’s spectacular house and grounds, which had become a state historic site in 1966. One of the panelists, J. Winthrop Aldrich, described the Hudson River Valley as the great national arena of the battle between the engineer and the poet in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aldrich, one of the most important leaders in conservation and historic preservation in New York over the last four decades or so, was describing the long-standing and ongoing battles between those who cherish and want to preserve the valley for its scenic beauty and those who propose nuclear power plants and other new construction that would promote economic development yet potentially threaten the valley’s scenic attributes. Other than omitting the numerous individuals defending the river who don’t write verse, Aldrich was absolutely correct: the Hudson River Valley has been arguably the most important arena in the battle between conservation and development in our lifetimes. Beginning in 1962, the valley has indeed been the place where many of the most important environmental battles of our time have been fought, on the ground, in the legislature, and in the courts.⁹

1

The Battle over Storm King

On September 27, 1962, the New York Times reported that Consolidated Edison, the electrical utility that provides power to New York City and Westchester County, was planning to construct a pumped-storage power plant at Storm King Mountain, on the west bank of the Hudson River fifty-five miles north of Manhattan.¹ In a remarkable coincidence, that same day Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, her scientific study of the consequences of pesticides, especially DDT, for animal populations.² These two developments profoundly shaped modern environmentalism in the United States. Carson’s book demonstrated the importance of scientific research and helped popularize the nascent environmental movement. Opponents of Con Ed’s proposed plant, led by the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference, litigated the licensing of the plant in federal court and in so doing established the foundations for environmental law.

Storm King Mountain faces Breakneck Ridge on the east bank, where another utility, Central Hudson Gas & Electric, proposed locating a second pumped-storage power plant. Together Storm King and Breakneck are the northern gateway to the Hudson Highlands, a fifteen-mile stretch where the Appalachian spine crosses the river. The Highlands constitute what is undeniably the most impressive river scenery in the eastern United States. While numerous foreign and American writers waxed poetic about the beauties of the Highlands in the nineteenth century, perhaps none were more discerning than Washington Irving and the Yale theologian Timothy Dwight. Irving, whose fertile imagination invented much of the folklore of the Hudson and environs, explained in Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York that the Hudson was once a vast lake, dammed at the Highlands, that extended some forty miles to the north. The mountains were one vast prison, within whose rocky bosom the omnipotent Manetho confined the rebellious spirits who repined at his control. There, bound in adamantine chains, or jammed in rifted pines, or crushed by ponderous rocks, they groaned for many an age. Eventually, the waters of the lake broke through the mountains and flowed south to the ocean, along the way freeing the spirits once imprisoned there and leaving the Highlands as stupendous ruins. According to the venerable Knickerbocker, those spirits continue to dwell in the Highlands and cry out in haunting voices that reverberate through this stretch of the river.³

Timothy Dwight repeated Irving’s account that the Hudson was once a lake. When he visited the Highlands in 1811 he described how the river, more than a mile wide at Newburgh Bay, narrows precipitously as it passes through the mountains. The grandeur of this scene, he wrote, defies description. The Highlands captivated Dwight, who struggled to find a vocabulary commensurate with the grandeur of the landscape. It is difficult to conceive of anything more solemn or more wild than the appearance of these mountains. After describing the forests whose deep brown hues he likened to universal death, and clouds at sunset that imparted a kind of funereal aspect to every object within our horizon, Dwight concluded by observing,

There is a grandeur in the passage of this river through the Highlands, unrivaled by anything of the same nature within my knowledge. At its entrance particularly and its exit, the mountains ascend with stupendous precipices immediately from the margin of its waters, appearing as if the chasm between them had been produced by the irresistible force of this mighty current, and the intervening barrier at each place had been broken down and finally carried away into the ocean. These cliffs hang over the river, especially at its exit from the mountains, with a wild and awful sublimity, suited to the grandeur of the river itself.

Dwight, an astute chronicler of the American landscape, was in his travels essentially seeking evidence of the progress of civilization in the United States, which he measured by the neatness and industry of residents and the settling of Protestant churches in small towns and villages. But the scenery of the Highlands inspired him in ways that no other place he visited did, just as it impressed so many others.⁴

The Hudson Highlands attracted the attention of nineteenth-century artists and writers whose work collectively sanctified the Hudson River Valley. Landscape painter Thomas Cole, for example, decried the cutting of trees and other developments that were defacing a landscape he believed all Americans should cherish. James Fenimore Cooper, whose fictional character Natty Bumppo described the view from the Catskill escarpment as embracing all creation, also lamented the wasteful ways of his contemporaries. Nathaniel Parker Willis gave disproportionate attention to Hudson River and Catskill landscapes in American Scenery, and painter Frederic E. Church, who lived in a house overlooking the Hudson, was perhaps the first to articulate the need to call for an end to the commercial development that was ruining Niagara Falls.⁵

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several villages grew up in the Highlands, and the state constructed a highway along the face of Storm King Mountain that opened in 1922, but to a remarkable extent the river scenery remained much as Dwight encountered it. Vincent Scully, an architectural historian at Yale University, thus described Storm King in his testimony before the Federal Power Commission (FPC): It rises like a brown bear out of the river, a dome of living granite, swelling with animal power. It is not picturesque in the softer sense of the word, but awesome, a primitive embodiment of the energies of the earth. It makes the character of wild nature physically visible in monumental form.⁶

Consolidated Edison’s plan for a hydroelectric power plant at Storm King was an attempt to meet New York City’s peak power demands. Overnight, when electricity demand was low, the utility would pump millions of gallons of river water through a forty-foot wide, two-mile-long tunnel to a storage reservoir at the top of the mountain. The reservoir, to be located just southwest of Storm King Mountain, would cover approximately 230 acres and hold 740 million cubic feet of water. During periods of peak demand the water would be released and, as it flowed through reversible turbines, generate some two million kilowatts of electricity for a city whose needs were increasing dramatically as more and more air conditioners hummed away on sultry summer days. It would be the largest pumped-storage plant in the world, and the Federal Power Commission and Con Ed anticipated it could be expanded to produce three million kilowatts. Con Ed conceded that it would take three kilowatts of energy to pump the water to the reservoir and generate two kilowatts of electricity upon its descent, but instead of seeing this as inefficient, the company presented it as a welcome use of its generating capacity overnight, when power plants were underutilized. The electricity generated by Storm King would also enhance the utility’s profitability, as the cost per kilowatt would be cheaper than that produced by older, less efficient plants. At the time of the initial announcement, the project had an estimated price tag of $115 million—a figure that would steadily rise in succeeding years. Con Ed’s chairman, Harland C. Forbes, described the Storm King project as a gigantic storage battery on our system. He stated that the utility would soon submit to the Federal Power Commission an application to approve construction and added, according to the New York Times, that no delays were expected. Con Ed filed an application for licensing to the FPC in January 1963.⁷

Predictably, elected officials and residents of Cornwall, the village where the plant would be located, embraced it as an economic boon, which would almost double the value of real estate taxes generated and enable the village to modernize its facilities without raising taxes on residents. Joseph X. Mullin, the mayor of Newburgh, a few miles north of Cornwall, supported the project, as did the Orange County Board of Supervisors and labor unions, which welcomed the construction jobs the power plant would create. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller strongly supported Con Ed’s plan, stating that "the