Scenic Hudson Receives Awards for Foundry Park

Exec named to board of national conservation group

Scenic Hudson has received two awards honoring the organization’s success in protecting and connecting people to the remains of the West Point Foundry—one of America’s most important 19th-century ironworks—at its West Point Foundry Preserve in Cold Spring.

At a ceremony in Albany on Dec. 4, Scenic Hudson was one of seven recipients of a 2014 New York State Historic Preservation Award, given annually by the State Historic Preservation Office, a division of New York’s Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. On Oct. 14 the organization received the 2014 John Augustus Roebling Award from the Roebling Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology for its work at the 87-acre preserve. Past recipients of the Roebling Award include Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park and the High Line in New York City.

Both awards honor the completion of a $3.6 million construction project to stabilize the substantial foundry ruins and provide new trails and interpretive features, creating an “outdoor museum” that enables visitors to understand West Point Foundry’s importance. Funding came from public and private sources. New amenities recount the foundry’s contributions to the Industrial Revolution — it manufactured some of the nation’s first locomotives, steamships and pipes for New York City’s water system; its role in the Civil War, producing Parrott guns — cannons credited with giving the North a decisive edge; and the land’s remarkable ecological renewal.

In other news, Steve Rosenberg, Scenic Hudson senior vice president and executive director of the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, has been named to the Board of Directors of the Land Trust Alliance. The Alliance, which is based in Washington, D.C., and has several regional offices, works to save the places people love by strengthening land conservation across America. For more information, visit scenichudson.org.

Photo courtesy of Scenic Hudson