Re: RFP for West Point Foundry Masonry Ruins

Subject: RFP for West Point Foundry Masonry Ruins

I was just checking the ONVIA guide that lists new proposals and saw that Scenic Hudson has issued a RFP for architectural/engineering services to stabilize masonry ruins at the West Point Foundry Preserve.

You can access it at: www.scenichudson.org/foundryrfp

I printed the map.

I still don’t understand the ownership of the property.

-Nancy

Well (looking at Lucien Freud's paintings on Slate he's 82! S. Freud's grandson escaped to England in 1933 from the Nazis) "synchronicity" the former President of the Psychoanalytic Society Carl Gustav Jung, (MD too a "German" in Switzerland) wrote about it, like us with the same email time on two very different messages. I began with Joel Grossman on that there was a map of architects that had hillside motel/hotel that is the earliest recent (1971) map from a firm in Chicago (the Chicago Bridge and Steel Co., may have owned it? One swing bridge from Cold Spring still swings in New Jersey I think for a RR. They and another were THE primary suppliers to bridges around the world according to SIA, the other I think Bear Mountain Bridge. However: "In 1896/97 J. B. & J. M. Cornell took over the iron foundry at Cold Spring, N. Y. on the Hudson River. The foundry was known as the West Point Foundry Works. These facilities are discussed in the magazine, The Successful American, Vol. III, No. 4, April 1901, p. 202, which also illustrates the extensive works at this location." Later fires at Foundry Cove seem to been disastrous, one of the "Bridge Shop" in 1913. One reportedly, burned for 24 hours and required hundreds of firefighters, of pool chemicals, in the extant concrete "platform". They wanted to open the site to visitors and tours (Brill and Associates hired E. Rutsch et al) and then we also heard of another owner who held Envirosphere to task for not saying acid could recycle the cadmium, and they responded yes but it would require pure sulphuric acid. However I heard it as "the owner said he could do that in his garage and make a bit of money recovering cadmium".

Stony Brook University has a strong (politically too) geology dept. at "Earth and Space Sciences" and hold in study on a 99 lease the "Flax Pond" nearby on Long Island Sound. I recently heard that they were looking for a comparative study and happened upon the Foundry Cove. Then they discovered however that the previous Army Corp of Engineers cleanup had not done a very complete job. Also the Fed "exposure level" was twice the amount the NYS DEP had from lab studies and then the story was clean it up and we'll do it again after the Feds are gone. When we showed up the building was used as a new school book repository and I'm not sure what they did with the pallets of books but the rest of it is gone along with the "vault" they put the first dredging in from the marsh, a concrete catchment behind the factory where closed then probably open cell nickel cadmium batteries were made for the NIKE anti-missile system that once guarded cities here and in Europe during the Cold War. Except it was everywhere not just the marsh at the foot of the drainage. I don't know the particulars the EPA still permits a level of cadmium per year discharged into the environment.

There's always more to the story...

George

and maybe I'll remember it!