Two organizations involved with interpreting the rich Hudson River maritime tradition and culture have found each other. It looks as though they’ve decided they want to live together. For each, it could be a remarkable step forward.

Almost a year in the making, the new partnership elaborated upon late last week between Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and the Hudson River Maritime Museum (HRMM) was unequivocal about both organizations’ intention to establish the Rondout Creek in Kingston as the sloop Clearwater’s home port. The far-reaching agreement between the two tax-exempt non-profit educational groups looks forward to a Clearwater presence in Kingston that would enhance the HRMM’s existing assets and develop new ones. A long-term Clearwater presence could be transformative in enriching the local vision of the Rondout Creek as a successful and authentic waterfront experience, the hub of the maritime revival of the Hudson River.

The agreement is both comprehensive and non-specific. The boards of directors of both organizations have committed themselves to a partnership that will develop plans for what they call Kingston Riverport. Their partnership promises to work together on seven specific subject areas: to improve visitor and education facilities; to establish boat-repair and educational boat-building capabilities; to establish improved full-year, climate-controlled museum exhibit space; to provide for winter docking, periodic seasonal docking and crew-support facilities for the Clearwater; to further develop support for waterfront activities; to enable the port to serve as a hub for environmental justice and river-based youth programs up and down the river; and to carry out all improvements in a manner consistent with a green-facility goal. 

According to Russell Lange of the HRMM, the partnership is intended to further each organization’s ability to serve the public and fulfill its mission as an educational institution. He said that the agreement significantly enhances HRMM’s plans to transform the waterfront. Joint meetings between the two entities are developing the organizational structure, specific plans and designs that will support these initiatives, he said.

Clearwater as an organization was born 45 years ago; its sloop was launched in 1969. Clearwater has become the most visible and most widely recognized symbol of the environmental movement in the Hudson River Valley. The HRMM, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, is the only museum in the state dedicated to preserving the maritime history of the Hudson River. Both membership organizations espouse regional educational and environmental missions. The difference in age is not expected to affect the relationship.

Both also see themselves as leaning on each other for support, a strong point in the success of many a relationship. At the very least, Clearwater gets docking space at the museum, and HRMM gets the most tangible expression of its goals possible.

As assemblyman Kevin Cahill, a supporter of the project and a participant in its evolution, succinctly put it, “They have a boat, and we have a dock.”

At the HRMM’s Pilot Club dinner last Saturday, Russ Lange highlighted the complementarity of the two organizations. “We have a story to tell,” said Lange, “and they have a song to sing.”

What each organization can get

“We have been nomads, we have been beggars,” explained Clearwater board president Allan Shope. “We are proud and excited about this initiative. We haven’t met the first person who doesn’t like the idea...The adventure needs to begin somewhere, and this is the unfolding of what it will be like.”

Clearwater doesn’t have the endowment support of a Scenic Hudson, nor does it enjoy the benefits of having a moneyed and powerful board of directors. Its sloop is expensive to operate and expensive to maintain, and its educational mission brings in limited revenues. The sloop has overwintered in Saugerties for many years, but Clearwater has never tried to raise capital funds for a more ambitious facility there.

The Clearwater board, Shope explained, began some time ago to look at alternative locations in the mid-Hudson region to dock and maintain the sloop. It had to be a sheltered place, there shouldn’t be a problem with ice, and there needed to be reasonable security for the sloop and particularly its crew. 

The only three places in the region with protected ports were Catskill, Saugerties and Kingston. The Rondout rose to the top of the list. For a Hudson River maritime presence, there were no real competitors.

The HRMM had evolved from collections and exhibits contributed by the Kingston version of the Greatest Generation, seafaring men like Roger Mabie and Bill Spangenberger who had worked on the tugs, steamboats and barges and in the shipyards of the Rondout. The artifacts, exhibits and pictures the museum presented were but a pallid reminder of the rich experiences these now-vanishing river people remembered. The HRMM struggled to find new ways to convey what this remarkable and increasingly long-past Kingston world was like. Fortunately, congressman Maurice Hinchey has been working to connect the HRMM with federal support for museums. Three or four years ago, he was able to match a $250,000 state grant to HRMM with an equivalent amount of federal funding

Clearwater has a two-million-dollar annual budget, according to development director Heidi Kitlas. It has only a small endowment, which Kitlas hopes to increase. Clearwater’s membership is now over ten thousand.

HRMM has a $200,000 annual budget, says Russ Lange, who is a volunteer who serves as director. Its membership has doubled in the past five years, and now stands at 460.

Much as the Clearwater liked Kingston, there was a problem finding a specific location. Because Clearwater’s mast is 108 feet high, Shope explained, it wouldn’t fit under the relatively new Koenig Boulevard highway bridge. So the number of potential locations on the Rondout creekfront was limited to Robert Iannucci’s properties from the historic Cornell building eastward, the Steel House, Rosita’s and the HRMM. The fact that the HRMM building was so close to the foot of Broadway, where the road meets the river, was potentially of great value. Co-locating there, Clearwater would be cheek-by-jowl with the heart of the Rondout,

Both Clearwater and HRMM proved open to the idea of collaboration between them. A long-term partnership made sense to both of them, and talks between their leaders built trust between them. Congressman Hinchey, assemblyman Cahill and Kingston mayor Jim Sottile were enthusiastic and helpful.

Both organizations had reasons to want to publicize their developing relationship, but also not to overstate it. Looking toward the long term, Clearwater would like to raise funds to use to purchase another creekfront property, for which an option to buy would be helpful. But the organization’s board ultimately decided its alternatives both on the creekfront and off it were numerous enough that it could proceed with the HRMM partnership without securing another property.

Beggars can be choosers

The August 2010 issue of the HRMM’s Fo’c’sle News, not exactly a widely distributed publication, contained a picture of the sloop Clearwater. The news accompanying it presented the concept of the partnership-to-be, but didn’t say much about what it might do [punctuation is changed]:

”On the museum’s docks located creekside at June 5’s observation of River Day, HRMM’s executive director, Russ Lange, and board president Steve Digilio joined Clearwater executive director Jeff Rumpf and board president Allan Shope, along with local politicians and dignitaries, in a joint public announcement regarding a proposed partnership between the 30-year-old maritime museum and the well-known Hudson River Clearwater organization. A perfect blend of two worthy educational entities, this strategic partnership would further fortify the Clearwater’s existing plans for a winter port in Kingston. In turn, the museum’s profile and the public’s awareness of HRMM will be further enhanced.”

This cautious message reflected the state of the incomplete negotiations at that time. The parties are becoming increasingly more specific about their joint plans. When Maurice Hinchey was honored at the HRMM Pilot Club dinner last Saturday night at the Wiltwyck Country Club in Kingston, the Clearwater connection was all the buzz.

Twelve people from Clearwater were at the dinner to support the new relationship. Maurice Hinchey was the first recipient of the new Roger W. Mabie Award. Mabie, one of the last generation of Hudson River steamboat captains, was as close as one gets to being the patron saint of the HRMM. Mabie had another connection to the evening of which Hinchey reminded Lange. Democratic minority leader in the very first Ulster County Legislature, Mabie was an early political mentor of Hinchey and a close friend.

Mabie’s picture was on the award Hincehy received. His wife and son were in proud attendance.

For Clearwater, Hinchey has now attained the legendary status that Mabie enjoys within HRMM. In an interview this week, the congressman, long the undisputed political leader of efforts to protect the river, explained the vital part Clearwater had played in the campaign to rescue the river from over a century of pollution and degradation. “They drew attention to the need to clean up the river and once again make it the magical piece of history that is our heritage,” said Hinchey. “They’re a very strong organization.”

A new adventure

Shope describes the process of what happens next in Kingston as akin to putting together a puzzle. One part is that Clearwater would very much like to educate more schoolchildren than the hundred schoolchildren during the 200-day sailing season that can now be served. Large numbers of schoolchildren in the region are missing out on the opportunity to experience the river. If there were two or three boats instead of one, Shope asked expansively, what would they use for docks?

Another goal is to find crew quarters (which don’t have to be on the water). Clearwater is starting to look for a building that could serve that purpose. “They’d find a Rondout location,” reported Cahill. “They’re looking to buy.” Cahill said he’s found a pot of state money that could be used to contribute to that purpose, but he won’t say what it is.

Common goals between HRMM and Clearwater are quite evident. As an example, Clearwater is looking to establishing a wood shop to help maintain the sloop. Similarly, the HRMM has had an expanded educational boat building shop as part of its long term “Kingston Riverport” plan to support an inner city youth boatbuilding and education program. Shope said there are no current plans to move his organization’s headquarters, moved to Beacon from Poughkeepsie a couple of years ago, to Kingston.

Clearwater, which is spending this month downriver in the New York City area, will always belong to the entire river. Like the Hudson River sloops of the past, Clearwater is compelled by its mission to a nomadic existence, going from one episodic adventure to another. As seafaring stories from the classic epic of Odysseus to the sagas of the American whaling fleets celebrate, though, excitement and danger become more poignant when there is a home to remember, a destination to try to get back to. A home port. And that is what Kingston could be for Clearwater.

The adventure begins.