By JOHN T. WARD

Mark Lockwood spent the night on his boat at the Shrewsbury River Yacht Club in Fair Haven Friday, and woke to the sight of a Navesink River gone brown. The worst kind of brown, he thought.

Though it didn’t smell, it appeared to be human waste, he said.

“It was disgusting,” he told a Fair Haven police officer who’d come to the club to investigate Saturday evening. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been on this river all my life.”

Ben Hamilton, whose home abuts the club property, said he had never seen anything like it, either.

But whatever they saw, it wasn’t from the town’s sanitary sewer, said an official with the regional sewerage authority that serves the borough. And it may have been pollen.

“We can guarantee that the Two Rivers Water Reclamation Authority pipe isn’t leaking,” TRWRA commissioner and yacht club member Bill Baarck told redbankgreen Saturday night, referring to a waste pipe that runs just beneath the Navesink River shore from Gillespie Avenue east to the yacht club, where it meets a pumping station.

“But we can’t guarantee that tides and winds haven’t brought in pollutants from elsewhere, over which we have no control,” he said.

Though he said he had not seen the brown tide himself, other recent reports of human waste — one on the Metedeconk River, and one at a location he could not immediately recall —  turned out to be vast collections of dead pollen on the water, Baarck said.

An authority inspector investigated the Navesink report and found no sign of leakage along the beach, either from the buried pipeline or the several manhole-topped access holes along its length, he said.

The entire stretch of pipe, which is about 40 years old, is scheduled to be replaced soon, with heavy construction equipment slated for delivery to the beach via the yacht club’s ramp as early as Monday. Baarck said the work is preventative.

Mayor Ben Lucarelli tells redbankgreen that a recent video inspection of the pipe found river water infiltrating the system at the foot of Gillespie Avenue, but that no sewage was getting into the river.

“It’s in weak condition,” Baarck said, and was one reason the authority sought and obtained state Department of Environmental Protection permits to replace the piping with a new system.

The new pipes will be laid next the existing pipes and, when completed, a cut-over from old system will be scheduled for the middle of the night to prevent any waste from getting into the river, he said.

Lockwood and Hamilton said the brown stuff appeared to have come from the west, based on Saturday’s winds. Baarck said that while the authority ruled out the Fair Haven system as its source, he could not rule out the possibility that it had come from the Red Bank system.

Lockwood and other club members said they sometimes see post-storm waste from the Middletown side of the river, where mansions along Navesink River Road are not hooked into a sewer and rely instead on septic tanks. But Saturday’s brown blob was far larger, they told redbankgreen.

By JOHN T. WARD

Kathie Panepinto was leading a tour of the Red Bank Primary School property and lamenting the heavy growth that hides an adjoining pond Monday when groundhog that had been sunning itself in the grass scooted across her path and into the brush.

“Oh, look at that,” she said said excitedly, noting that up-close sightings of deer and other wildlife are common at the school, which sits on landfill in a former wetlands abutting the Swimming River.

It was the kind of moment that for decades has inspired talk of the school’s potential as natural sciences learning center. And it underscored the value of ongoing efforts by Panepinto and other volunteers in their most ambitious effort to date: creating a permanent physical link between the school and the inaccessible pond.

A concept plan shows a walkway out into the pond that the foundation hopes to win funding for. (Click to enlarge)

Since its revival from dormancy four years ago, the nonprofit Red Bank Borough Education Foundation has focused its efforts on small-bore projects: leading cleanups of the 17-acre primary school property, lending a hand and a few dollars to installations such as a butterfly garden, a small greenhouse and a human sundial clock.

Now, though, the all-volunteer group is raising its sights with a proposal to build an outdoor classroom in the form of a pier and observation deck on the pond. The structure would enable students at the K-3 school to see land and aquatic habitats up close, and “to do wet and muddy samplings,” said RBBEF member and Councilman Ed Zipprich.

“Most folks don’t even know there’s a pond back there,” said member Susan Berke.

“The idea is to make access to the pond not just for science, but for reading, writing, art,” said Panepinto, an RBBEF officer.

No cost estimate for the project has yet been worked up, and foundation members don’t even know if they would need and might obtain permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection for the structure, which may be subject to limitations on building in coastal areas.

Still, they’ve begun the process of trying to win a grant for as much as $460,000 from the National Science Foundation, said foundation president Doug Winning, an architect. “We’re going for the full enchilada,” he said.

Meantime, the organization has raised about $10,000 in each of the past two years through art auctions held at the Atrium at Navesink Harbor. This year, no such event is planned, though members hope to put together an Antiques Roadshow-type event for 2013.

Meantime, the group has produced a reusable canvas shopping tote featuring Red Bank student art that will soon be available around town for $5. For $10, residents get the tote and membership in the RBBEF.

“We’re still taking baby steps at this point, but we’ve got momentum going, and that’s the important thing,” said Zipprich.

By JOHN T. WARD

For six months, Salt Creek Grille owner Steve Bidgood has watched with guarded optimism the progress of work to replace the 100-foot-long bascule on the Oceanic Bridge over the Navesink River.

Denied since October the benefit of traffic the 72-year-old bridge was built to carry between Middletown and his side, Rumson, Bidgood’s foremost concern has been that the job wrap up, as advertised, by the start of the busy summer season – Memorial Day weekend.

“I’d love to see them do it,” Bidgood told redbankgreen this week, eyeing the elegant bridge framed by the restaurant’s windows. “If they do, I might even buy them dinner.”

It’s looking as though Bidgood will need to reserve a large table.

Monmouth County Engineer Joe Ettore, whose office is managing the project, tells redbankgreen that the Oceanic’s target reopening date remains Thursday, May 31.

An earlier reopening is possible, he said. But don’t count on it.

“We are doing everything we can, working with the contractor, to come in with the best possible date for reopening,” Ettore said Wednesday. “But there is critical work that remains, and that critical work has to by necessity take place at this late point in the project.”

Eighty-five-to-95 percent of the structural work is done, he said, but critical testing of the electrical and mechanical systems remains.

Ettore said the project “had a very tight window in which to complete a substantial amount of work” on the moving parts of the 2,752-foot-long span – by far the county’s longest. The timetable was designed to minimize the adverse economic impact on businesses that are reliant on bridge traffic, he said.

Aided by a snowless and unseasonably mild winter, it appears not a day of the summer season will be lost, Ettore said.

“The fact that we’re on-schedule is a real good sign, and we’re very happy with the contractor’s performance,” he said. The contractor on the $3.6 million job is Iron Bridge Group of North Brunswick.

Funding for the project came from the state, which prohibits early-completion incentives, Ettore said.

The repaired bascule is expected to have a useful life of 20 years, he said, but the long concrete approaches to the bascule are already overdue for replacement, a project that’s not expected to get into construction for at least three more years.

Local and county officials are hoping to persuade the federal government to fund another low-level drawbridge, rather than a high-arc, fixed span that area residents say would adversely affect property values and the aesthetics of the river.

The opening of a new bridge “is at least six years away, and it’s not inconceivable that it could be 10,” Ettore said.

Documents explaining the repair job can be found at the engineering department website.

By JOHN T. WARD

Community garden proponents assailed the Red Bank council Wednesday night for what they termed its “because-I-said-so” opposition to the creation of a farm plot at a borough-owned Navesink River site.

Revisiting the council’s 2011 rejection of a proposal for a pilot garden behind the borough library parking lot on West Front Street, residents challenged elected officials to articulate their opposition to the plan, and left as frustrated as they were going in.

“What we have a hard time understanding is that we haven’t really heard a good reason why not,” Locust Avenue’s Kathleen Gasenica told the governing body.

“It’s very simple,” replied borough Administrator Stanley Sickels. “The council doesn’t share your vision for a garden there.”

“That doesn’t really answer the question,” Gasenica said.

Marked by sharp exchanges and several instances of gavel-banging by Mayor Pasquale Menna, the hearing pitted gardening enthusiasts against council members they feel have irrationally dug in their heels against a spot proponents consider ideal for a garden.

The site, with ample upland area, is “underutilized” by the public that the council professes to want to keep it open for, said garden movement organizer Cindy Burnham, of Fair Haven, who previously led the push to save nearby Maple Cove from sale by the borough.

But officials questioned whether the site might be within the purview of the state Department of Environmental Protection, which borough Engineer Christine Ballard said has jurisdiction over all development within 300 feet of waterways – an assertion that prompted mutterings from the audience that gardening is not “development.”

Officials also questioned how the plots would be apportioned among residents who want to raise vegetables and flowers at the site; where gardeners would park without taking spaces reserved for library patrons; the accessibility of the site to handicapped; and plans for the restoration of a deteriorated bulkhead, possibly this year, that might require the destruction of the garden.

In the past, officials argued that the waterfront site should be preserved for use by all residents, and not the select few.

The session kicked off with councilmembers Kathy Horgan and Ed Zipprich offering a compromise, one they said they had arrived at after visiting every borough-owned parcel of vacant land over the weekend: Marion Street, near Eastside Park, the site of an old pump station.

“It seemed, in our uneducated opinion, to be the ideal spot,” Zipprich said.

But the suggestion elicited a welter of complaints by Burnham and others that the site could hardly be less centrally located for the use of all residents, a requirement that some on the council itself had insisted on last year.

“Marion is as far out on the East Side of Red Bank as you can get,” Burnham said. She said nearby residents are likely to oppose having a community garden next door, “and I don’t blame them.”

Horgan also suggested the gardeners approach New Jersey Transit about creating a plot on a triangular lot outside the train station on Monmouth Street, arguing it was unlikely to be vandalized because of the number of passersby. But she also wondered aloud whether an alternative offered by the proponents, at Maple Cove, might not be right for the same reason.

“There are a lot of people around. It could get destroyed,” she said.

Environmental Commission chairman Andres Simonson told the council that it was “missing the boat” by rejecting the library site. “What a great beacon that would be” for the town’s commitment to the community gardening concept, he said.

The sharpest attack of the night was leveled by Ernest Anemone of Riverside Avenue, who singled out Zipprich for what he and others called the council’s “because I said so” rationale for opposing the library site.

“This town doesn’t need to impress you,” he said. “You need to impress this town.”

By meeting’s end, the council had approved a resolution approving the Marion Street site, but leaving open the possibility that Maple Cove might be farmed for a year – even though farm engineer Tony Sloan, appearing on behalf of proponents, said the site would require “itty-bitty plots and itty-bitty walkways.”

“There’s no money for business interruption,” says Red Bank Marina owner Steve Remaley, below, who also stands to lose land on both sides of the bridge. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

Steve Remaley is about to get it from all sides.

As Monmouth County nears its long-overdue replacement of Hubbard’s Bridge between Red Bank and Middletown starting early next year, the owner of Red Bank Marina is facing:

• the loss of a large parcel of land, opposite his shop on West Front Street, where many of his customers park their vehicles and boat trailers

• the loss of a strip of land on the marina’s main property for the creation of a new pedestrian and bike path to Shrewsbury Avenue

• up to two years of diminished business, including a stretch of at least three months during which bridge traffic will be shut down entirely.

And that’s the best-case scenario.

“I have no idea what I’m in for,” Remaley tells redbankgreen, leaning on a boat being readied for spring and summer use. “This could be the best thing to ever happen to me, or the worst.”

A 2008 plan showing the new bridge, in red. (Click to enlarge)

The new, permanent bridge is expected to cost $12 million and will replace the “temporary” steel span in place since 2004. But unlike the straight path followed by the existing bridge, the replacement will take an arcing sweep toward the north, anchoring at the same points on either side of the Navesink River where it becomes the Swimming River.

The new alignment improves sightlines and safety for motorists, said county Engineer Joe Ettore. It also, coincidentally, allows for construction of most of the new structure without impacting traffic, except for the anticipated three to four months that will be needed to tie the bridge into the landing points, Ettore has said at two presentations on the project.

But it also means that Remaley will lose some 17,000 square feet of land, 12,000 of it underwater, on the north side of West Front Street. What’s not taken by the bridge will, along with a house acquired by the county at Rector Place and West Front, be deeded over to Red Bank for recreational use.

Remaley, who bought the marina in 2007 after years of running one in Oceanport, uses the parcel for boat storage, but the riparian rights he has there allow for the potential expansion of his operation, including the installation of a dock. In compensation, he’s getting a small amount of land on the south side.

“It’s not a fair exchange,” he said. “Everything I can do on this piece of property I can do over there. I can’t stop them from putting in a bridge, but marina properties are very valuable,” and he’s concerned he won’t get a fair price for the balance.

Remaley is also concerned, he said, about the sidewalk that will be built on the southern edge of the bridge. The county plans to acquire a strip of his property adjoining the New Jersey Transit railroad for the construction of a path to connect the bridge to Shrewsbury Avenue, south of the railroad grade crossing.

The existing bridge has a sidewalk only on the north side, and Remaley questions the logic of building one on the new structure, noting that the western terminus of it, near Chris’ Landing, does not meet a sidewalk, so pedestrians will be forced to cross to the north side anyway.

But Ettore said the new sidewalk, in addition to giving Middletown residents more direct access to the Red Bank train station, enhances safety for the marina’s customers.

Without the sidewalk on the south side of the bridge, “there’s no convenient place for someone to get access to the marina” from the northern side, said Ettore. “This way, there is complete access, safe access.”

Ettore said the southern sidewalk, estimated to cost about $750,000, “absolutely has a major functional purpose, which is to avoid a mid-block crossing, where there’s limited sight distance. And quite frankly, the old bifurcation of the marina property, almost necessitated that marina patrons who chose to park on the north side would have to cross mid-block.”

Remayel is worried, though, that the additional sidewalk there will now be more people crabbing from the bridge, and leaving trash behind. And while the bridge is under construction, he’s hoping that the boating channel to the broader Navesink remains open, or his business will suffer yet more.

“There’s no money for business interruption” in the sums that the county is offering in ongoing negotiations, he said.

Despite his many worries, though, Remayel said he’s not dead-set against the bridge.

“Maybe I won’t be affected that much,” he said, acknowledging the county’s goal of limiting the traffic shutdown to winter months, when his business is slow anyway.

And the new bridge will mean no more of the constant clanking of metal parts on the existing structure, he said.

“I’ll be glad because it won’t be so noisy,” he said.

The agenda for the bimonthly meeting of Red Bank’s council Wednesday night is a busy one.

On the docket:

• Red Bank RiverCenter comes in for approval of its annual budget. No details have yet been provided. Last year’s spending plan, like the two that preceded it, totaled $512,000. The business promotion agency, which manages the borough’s state-chartered Special Improvement District, is funded by a surtax on commercial properties within a defined zone and gets no money from borough coffers.

• Proponents of a community garden, who were shot down repeatedly last year in their request to farm a portion of the public library property overlooking the Navesink River, return to renew the plea, this time with a twist: that the town allow it for just one growing season.

• There’s an ordinance up for introduction to amend the rent control ordinance. There’s no information on the borough website, or the agenda itself, explaining what this is about.

• A bond ordinance to cover the costs of installing artificial turf fields at Count Basie Fields is up for final vote.

The council meets at 6:30 p.m. in the first-floor council chambers at borough hall, 90 Monmouth Street, corner of Maple Avenue.

Here’s the full agenda: Red Bank Council Agenda 032812

By JOHN T. WARD

An opponent of a planned hotel at the foot of the Route 35 Cooper’s Bridge made his fullest case yet Thursday night that the building violates Red Bank’s height limits.

But after two slow-moving, trial-like hearings before the town zoning board, the lawyer for the hotel has barely begun to put on his defense, and no resolution of the dispute is likely for at least another month.

James Freeman, an engineering consultant and witness for objector Stephen Mitchell, identifies the proposed hotel site on an aerial photo. (Click to enlarge)

In one of the more bizarre building requests to confront town officials in recent years, Rbank Capital LLC’s plan for a six-story, 72-room Hampton Inn hotel is the subject of two simultaneous hearings, both involving the same opposing lawyers and battalions of engineers and land-use experts.

The first, underway at the planning board since August, concerns whether the hotel can be built as described.

The other, at the zoning board, is solely about the interpretation of the height restriction in the waterfront development zone in which the hotel property lies, and ultimately, whether the planning board is in fact the proper venue for the plan.

The matter is critical because zoning boards are generally believed by land use experts to present tougher hurdles for applicants.

Stephen Mitchell, of Prospect Avenue, maintains that the hotel violates the zone’s height limit, defined as 50 feet above the nearby Navesink River at a point on a line drawn between the river and the nearest street parallel to the river.

Through his lawyer, Ron Gasiorowski, Mitchell also contends that because of an error by borough Engineer Christine Ballard, of T&M Associates, in applying the ordinance a year ago, the case was improperly sent to the planning board.

With his fees being paid by a previously undisclosed hotel-owning group out of Tinton Falls, Gasiorowski called two witnesses Thursday night – engineer James Freeman and planner Gordon Gemma – who testified that while the ordinance is vague on some of its terms, the Hampton Inn, at 82.25 feet above the nearby Navesink River, exceeds the height limitation by more than 32 feet.

Gemma said he examined the town’s 1995 master plan, as well as a waterfront “vision plan” that preceded it, for guidance on  the intent of the ordinance.

Clearly, he told the board, “the purpose of what you wanted to do was to make sure that there weren’t big buildings that close to the river. The whole point is to have a step-back from the river” to enable passersby to enjoy the sight of the river.

Noting that a corner of the proposed hotel is bisected by a line drawn between Rector Place – one of only four streets named in defining the landward edge of the zone – and the rive, Gemma testified: “That portion of the building that is above 50 feet doesn’t belong there.”

Hampton Inn lawyer Marty McGann, whose verbal clashes with Gasiorowski have previously been a hallmark of the planning board hearings and have continued here, drew a loud objection from his adversary when he suggested that Freeman had “willy-nilly, without any basis or semblance of authority,” chosen where to measure the height of the hotel.

Gemma has already been tripped up on his testimony twice: once, by Ballard, after he said that in the ordinance, “height” and “elevation” are synonymous, and later by McGann, who challenged Gemma’s assertion that he had attended all of the planning board hearings on the matter. Pressed under cross-examination, Gemma acknowledged that his may have missed “one or two” of the hearings.

The zoning board hearing was scheduled to continue April 19.

Wednesday was the first day of the outdoor season for members of RFH Rowing, the sculling crews of Rumson and Fair Haven teens. 

The kids spent the session on dry land, at the club’s home next to Rumson’s Victory Park, where they rigged shells with oarlocks and other equipment – duties they’re required to perform before and after away races. “It teaches them responsibility,” said assistant coach Dan Murphy. “They take ownership of their boats.” (Click to enlarge)

Local-history librarian Elizabeth McDermott, below, with a custom-branded Eisner lightbulb in the second-floor New Jersey Room of the Red Bank Public Library, once the home of industrialist Sigmund Eisner. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

On April 15, 1937, the Red Bank Public Library – for decades an itinerant but growing collection of books and archival material – finally found a permanent home, relocating from a downtown storefront to a mansion at 84 West Front Street.

Three months earlier, the heirs of Sigmund Eisner – mass-manufacturer of uniforms for the Army, the Boy Scouts and other organizations  – had donated their late father’s mansion overlooking the Navesink River to the library.

The shared hope of H. Raymond, Monroe and J. Lester Eisner was that the house would provide a warm and dry place for reading, but also that it would function “as a bit of a museum, too,” says local-history librarian Elizabeth McDermott.

Next month, the library will celebrate its 75th anniversary in the house with museum-like displays that highlight Eisner and his transformative impact on Red Bank as an industrialist and philanthropist.

The event, says McDermott, “is completely about” Eisner.

The ornate first-floor parlor of the Eisner mansion, above, and an undated photo of Sigmund Eisner, below. (Click to enlarge)

Valued at $25,000 at the time, the house was donated partly furnished, according to a Red Bank Register account of the opening. Wicker chairs provided welcome indoor seating overlooking the river.

The house had been home to Eisner and his wife, Bertha Weis, a member of a well-established Red Bank family. An Eastern European immigrant who “came to Red Bank as a peddler,” Eisner set up a sewing machine in a rented house near Broad Street and eventually built an manufacturing empire that employed 5,000 people at its peak during the first World War, said McDermott.

Eisner’s complex of factory buildings at the West Front Street and Bridge Avenue was reported to be the largest uniform factory in the world, she said.

Some of that property is now the home to the Galleria at Red Bank, a collection of restaurants, shops and offices. Another portion, on the northeast corner of that intersection, is home to the Antique Center of Red Bank.

Antique Center owner Guy Johnson is lending some of his collection of Eisner and old Red Bank memorabilia to the library display, including uniforms and a lightbulb branded with the Eisner name, probably for use in the factory, McDermott said.

The event will also highlight the reopening of the library’s New Jersey History Room. For many years, an ornate front room trimmed in ornate Gothic woodwork served as the repository for reference and archival materials about Red Bank, Monmouth County and the state. But the rarity and delicate condition of some of the materials, including one-of-a-kind atlases and directories, called out for a dedicated, controlled-access space, said McDermott.

That space is now a second-floor room of several hundred square feet that is open to the public from 2 to 4 p.m. each Tuesday afternoon, and by appointment at other times. McDermott said it is available to anyone, and is particularly helpful to people interested in researching family and property histories.

McDermott herself has been immersed in the materials as she assembles the exhibit, she said. And one regular visitor, a volunteer in the effort to put together the exhibit, has been known to exclaim, while going through old photos, “Oh my god, that’s my great-grandfather,” McDermott said with a laugh.

The goal of the exhibit is to create “a kind of timeline” about Eisner, a philanthropist who left money in his will to his factory workers, as well as to a host of churches of various persuasions, said McDermott.

“He didn’t have any barriers,” she said.

The building got a $1.6 million renovation in 2007, reopening after a problematic 15-month closure in January, 2008. In the interim, the library operated out of retail space donated by Hovnanian Enterprises.

Here’s an article from the January 6, 1937 edition of the New York Times announcing the donation of the house to the borough: Eisners deed house to library

And here’s the announcement about next month’s event:

On Saturday, April 14, 2012, from 2 – 4 PM, the Red Bank Public Library will celebrate 75 years as the Eisner Memorial Library with a Ribbon Cutting and Reception in our newly restructured New Jersey History Room.

Our New Jersey Collection contains many unique and valuable items pertaining to the Library, the Borough of Red Bank, and Monmouth County. The Library building itself is a special place, having been previously the home of Sigmund Eisner, businessman, civic leader and philanthropist, and his wife Bertha, an influential businesswoman and civic organizer. Presented to the Borough of Red Bank in January 1937, the former mansion was opened as a Public Library on April 15, 1937, thanks to the generosity of the Eisner sons, Raymond, J. Lester, and Monroe Eisner.

Please join us on April 14, as we celebrate this historic anniversary in our beautiful building on the Navesink River. For more information, please feel free to contact the library at 732-842-0690.