Between viewings of cosmic collisions in a space-age spheroid amphitheater and rollicking, psychedelically backlit evocations of our hairy-breasted ancestors, the millions of annual visitors to the recently jazzed up American Museum of Natural History in New York City can still spend time ruminating upon a quieter, more old-school section of the museum that has resisted updating. This venerable throwback, the Felix M. Warburg Memorial Hall, a.k.a. the New York State Environment exhibit, is in fact dedicated to dispensing all there was to know about the Pine Plains area, from time immemorial to around 1950, when the beautiful, meandering, diorama-packed display hall was being built. As a unifying feature of nearly every diorama, a hazy rendering of whale-shaped Stissing Mountain – an ancient and formidable relic of the Ice Age plopped onto what has eroded over the eons into a pool-table-flat, soil-rich farm topography – looms in the background.
That little in Pine Plains has changed between 1950 and 2007 is nothing short of astounding, especially as the town, nestled in the northernmost reaches of booming Dutchess County, has been dragging its feet into the modern land-use era and still doesn’t have a zoning ordinance.
But all that’s about to change, as the first of four significant developments has completed wending its way through the cumbersome, state-mandated State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) process and is under construction. The largest of the four projects, which all by itself will double the size of Pine Plains, is the generically-named “Landmark Land” project, a 951-unit behemoth proposed by the Durst Organization, the corporate incarnation of a powerful, multi-generational Manhattan real estate family. On 2,200 acres in the towns of Milan and Pine Plains, it’s the latest version of a long-ago proposal by the gravel-voiced ice cream magnate Tom Carvel of Cookie Puss and Fudgie the Whale fame, who in 1966 built a championship-style 18-hole golf course with its own exit off the Taconic parkway but failed to get the accompanying golfers’ luxury home paradise built. Critics say that the current proposal is never going to get approved either at its current size, primarily due to the fact that Pine Plains is finally working on a zoning law and a building moratorium is in place.
Others note that Carvel – whose body remains interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County despite the protracted efforts of his niece and stymied heiress, Pamela Carvel, to have him exhumed to check whether or not he was murdered by people trying to steal his fortune – knew ice cream but not land development, while the current applicant, Durst, is a power broker’s power broker with all the time in the world to wait out the opposition. The Durst portfolio includes the new Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square, widely touted as the city’s first “green” office tower. The company’s co-president, Douglas Durst, has already put down roots in the area and owns McEnroe Farms, one of the largest – and apparently smelliest – organic farms in New York State.
The three other projects in the Pine plains pipeline are:
• Town Centre, which is already approved and under construction. The 13.69-acre project, located on the north side of Route 199 between the entrance to Stissing Mountain High School and a BP gas station, features a Veterans Administration clinic and a Sharon Hospital-affiliated medical facility, behind which are to be 48 attached, one-story prefabricated condominium units with frontloaded garages for buyers age 55 and above. Six one-bedroom, one-den units are finished and are on the market starting at a supposedly “affordable” $249,000 – reduced from $279,000 – which according to longtime resident Maureen Lonczak is well beyond the means of any senior citizen currently residing in Pine Plains. When half of those units are sold, construction will begin on the next section. The remaining acreage is slated for an as-yet unapproved future commercial development that will include a two-story, 10,000-square-foot building and a replacement for the gas station;
• Village Green – for which the developers (Richard Lewis and Thomas Slutsky, a.k.a. Tom/Lew and Dale Mitchell) have yet to submit their Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) – includes a total of 267 attached housing units (110 apartments and 157 town houses) on 85 acres on the field behind Stewart’s convenience store on Route 82. The project also includes a 35,000-square-foot grocery store, a 15,000-square-foot pharmacy and smaller shops and offices. Part of this project is located over the wellhead protection area for the town well;
• The Parkview development near Stissing Lake received a positive declaration by the planning board under SEQRA and the developers are busy working on their DEIS which will, due to the planning board’s decision, require a much more lengthy review. It’s a 40-house (five models of two-story prefab houses to choose from) subdivision on a 28-plus-acre flat field that borders on the town’s recreation park. The developer, Robert Housmann, has an option on the property. Jim Murphy and Lynden Chase are the owners. The project languished before the planning board for a year, as the board repeatedly requested modifications and the developer returned with changes that made them angry. The developer sued the town requesting that the positive declaration be voided and the moratorium not apply to this development, and lost.
The big enchilada
The Durst effort, although more than 10 times larger, will probably have a more gracious reception. The company is being aided and abetted by a local who’s who of development teams, including Beacon-based Matthew D. Rudikoff Associates to handle environmental, planning and permitting matters; the ubiquitous Chazen Companies of Poughkeepsie, which will handle the engineering and provide environmental services; and the Poughkeepsie law firm of Corbally, Gartland & Rappelyea, which will function as project counsel. In addition, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the involvement of which has lent unimpeachable green credibility to large projects including environmental do-overs of the White House and the Pentagon, a Lucasfilm complex at the Presidio in San Francisco and, not coincidentally, the Durst Organization’s signature green skyscraper, 4 Times Square, has been pressed into service to host a “green charette,” among other things.
Douglas Durst purchased the land from the Carvel estate for $12 million in 2003. Included in the mix are a nine-hole addition to the golf course and a proposed 388 units of attached housing, with two, six or eight units in each structure. The remaining 563 units will be single-family homes, of which some 475 houses will have average lot sizes of less than two acres; 62 lots will be three-to-five acres and 27 lots will be five acres or more. There are also approximately 90 previously approved building lots on the land that will be built upon as part of the project.
The site can be accessed directly off the Taconic Parkway at Ferris Road where the Carvel golf course was created in the 1970s. It is surrounded by rolling hills, ridges, old farm meadows and fields returning to thick forest. About 10 percent of the land, or 200 acres, consists of environmentally sensitive state and federally protected wetlands, and seasonal wetlands that cannot be impinged upon.
The land straddles scenic state Route 199 from the Lafayette State Multiple Use Area in Milan to just west of Cedar Knolls in Pine Plains and has rolling hills and ridgelines from which on clear days one has a view of the Catskill Mountains.
Supporters say the project can be built in an environmentally sensitive way that does not harm the view shed and will bring an economic boost to the area. Critics say it is too large a project and will change the character of the small towns in ways large and small.
The Pine Plains building moratorium is scheduled to lapse in January of 2008. The Carvel/Durst project is on the second pass of its DEIS, with the planning board continuing to entertain the process through a series of meetings, even as new zoning is being considered in a two-track process that seeks to minimize delays arising from the moratorium. The zoning being considered by the town is something of a wild card, since a current draft of the law could reduce the number of units allowed on the Carvel land by almost two-thirds.
Like déjà vu, but different
“It’s a lovely little town and I hope we can keep it that way, at least, within the realm of progress,” said former town supervisor Jerry Stuetzle, who was the head honcho for three decades and is still active in the fire department.
Stuetzle was the supervisor almost 40 years ago, when Tom Carvel walked into a Town Board meeting to present his own diorama of a 1,000-unit development he wanted to build on the land he had purchased with his soft ice cream fortune. Not only were Carvel’s plans sidelined, but even without zoning – or perhaps because of a lack of zoning – very little of any impact has been proposed or approved since then, even as developers’ presentations changed from dioramas to diagrams and PowerPoint presentations with high-resolution graphics.
“Pine Plains hasn’t changed,” said Stuetzle. “It hasn’t had any major changes. The only thing that has happened is we lost some dairy farms, but as far as any major changes, you couldn’t see them and pinpoint them. An awful lot of the people are old-time people who have been here for quite some years with their families. And I think that’s one of the things that make it so attractive to people. It’s a small-town attitude and people are there for each other.”
Deck the hall
Felix M. Warburg, a big-time financier in early 20th-century New York, was not one of these small-town people. He was a member of the founding family of M.M. Warburg & Co., a large Hamburg, Germany-based private bank. He was a partner in the influential investment bank, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and was an early advocate for a federal reserve banking system in the United States.
A real attraction in its day, the hall that bears his name was dedicated with a speech by the Pulitzer Prize-winning scientific farming pioneer, Louis Bromfield, and spiffed up by a live CBS radio broadcast by Lowell Thomas, doing a precursor of what the folks at the Today Show and its imitators do for similarly high-profile events nowadays. The hall was really the baby of the museum’s director at the time, Dr. Albert E. Parr, who wanted to give Manhattan school kids a vivid example of a surviving natural landscape close enough to the city that they might actually want to visit it someday and continue their scholarship. He and a large team of scientists, architects, artists and other specialists toiled for almost 10 years in planning the hall, aided by Dr. Henry K. Svenson, then chairman and curator of the museum’s department of forestry and general botany, who conducted years of field research in the Pine Plains area, and by Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, a summer resident of the town who was responsible for devising the large sectional agricultural mural at the westerly entrance to the hall, depicting the effects of the onslaught of human activity on once pristine forest lands.
Children of the corn
Dr. Parr’s dream of attracting urbanized children to the geologically unique rural agrarian paradise that is Pine Plains seems to be coming true, although probably for reasons antithetical to the intent of his pet exhibit. Indeed it seemed last Friday that Carmen Jackson of Pine Plains and Aurora Kearney of Stanfordville, both seniors at Stissing Mountain High School, stepped right out of a Felix M. Warburg Memorial Hall diorama as they came ashore after paddling about in the shadow of their school’s towering namesake in a rubber dinghy – even though neither had ever heard of their region’s dedicated wing in the American Museum of Natural History. Jackson and Kearney consider themselves “minorities,” outsiders from the local mainstream. Jackson, a five-year Pine Plains resident by way of Brewster and Palo Alto, Calif., hears a lot about the current state of Pine Plains – her mom, Margo, is on the zoning commission. Her view of her adopted hometown has changed over time as a result. “When we moved here I didn’t like Pine Plains at first. I was saying, ‘Why don’t we just put a mall on top of it?’ But now, I feel like it’s unique; you can come here and there are places that don’t exist anywhere else – the mountain, the lake – I think they should just keep it the way it is. If I want to live somewhere else, I’ll just move.”
Kearney, who lived a good part of her girlhood in Venezuela, moved here seven years ago because she had an aunt in Millbrook who touted the area to her mother, who was looking for a place to settle her down in the States for a year to improve her English. They ended up staying. Both girls think Stissing Mountain High could benefit from an infusion of new blood in the student body. “They call it Pine Box because nothing gets in,” said Jackson. “It’s just so closed; I wish there was more diversity.”
Green paradise or suburban sprawl?
“There’s a lot of people that are a very, very concerned that it (the Durst proposal) will take away the rural character of Pine Plains,” said Stuetzle. “Would it have an effect? Absolutely. Would it have a drastic, chaotic effect? I don’t know. I don’t think so. If we can believe the people who present the plan, it will be a progressive type development.”
The Dursts themselves say they understand the concern, but intend to proceed. “There’s no doubt the development is going to impact the town, but it’s a question of what those impacts are going to be,” said Douglas Durst’s son Alexander, 37, project manager for the Carvel lands proposal. He said the idea is for a second-home community that will not import a lot of schoolchildren and permanent residents into the town, thus adding property tax revenue without requiring services.
But critics assert that such a rosy scenario misrepresents what the project will actually bring to Pine Plains. Rather than a second-home community for wealthy residents of New York City, critics say, it is just as likely to be a development of primary residences for those who buy in to the project – and that, in turn, will force property and school taxes higher.
Opponents cite maps presented by developers showing the current planned layout, saying it shows a sprawling housing development that is laid out along traditional suburban lines, with over six miles of new road.
“The problem is, they want to put so many units on the property they are forced to do a standard subdivision layout,” said Jane Waters, a member of the group Pine Plains United, and a skeptic regarding the project she says is being oversold as a green idea.
She called the Durst Organization “a terrific green company” in terms of materials and energy initiatives on their buildings in New York City. But she said the project planned for the Carvel land “is not a green development. They do have plans to use green (building) materials. But in terms of the layout it is not green because it occupies way too much of the land.” In illustrating her point, Waters produced a map that lays out homes almost from the edge of the Taconic Parkway nearly all the way eastward into the hamlet of Pine Plains, cutting roads and housing lots into both sides of what is now a scenic stretch of state Route 199.
“What they are calling open space is mostly backyards, utility lots and the wetlands that you can’t build on anyway,” she said. As has been mentioned, there is also a private golf course already on the land, which the builders plan to upgrade and expand to 27 holes.
“The main concern about the current idea is it is too dense in terms of number of units for a town in rural Dutchess County,” said Waters. “Milan is the same way – a very rural area – and both Milan and Pine Plains have stated clearly in their comprehensive plans that we want to stay rural.”
Waters said it would be unrealistic to believe that so many new homes sited near the Taconic Parkway would only be purchased as second homes, and said the town tax base would suffer from the need for new services for new full-time residents.
If the Durst development is built as conceived, she said, “We expect that, given that the homes themselves will be expensive, our guess is the buyers are much more likely to be people who have sold a house in Westchester for a lot of money and moved up here, where they can still commute to their jobs, because it is right on the Taconic.”
“We do get this second-home question frequently,” allowed Durst. “These are going to be homes that have a lot of value. The property will have a golf course, playing fields, nature trails; they are going to be very valuable. Having something within a two-hour drive of New York City – we’re going to market it as something that is very valuable.
Zoning in?
The current zoning regulations being presented by Pine Plains’s hired planning consultant could reduce the number of allowable units to as few as 391. The zoning scenario is far from being approved however, and according to Waters, over the years “at least a couple of different town governments have fallen in Pine Plains on the issue of zoning.”
The current five-member all-Republican town board and supervisor have strongly supported the current zoning initiatives. The supervisor, Gregg Pulver, is unchallenged in November’s election, but the two town board seats are being contested. Waters was cautiously optimistic that the forces supporting zoning will win out and the town will adopt zoning early next year. Pulver did not return calls seeking comment.
Alexander Durst was asked about the implications of a possible zoning law. “We think we have something excellent to offer Pine Plains and Dutchess County,” he said. “And if they want to get something that will have the benefits we are offering, the zoning (that is eventually adopte) will allow for a project that will be similar to what we propose. And if they don’t allow it, then they won’t get the benefits.”
Sitting firmly in the catbird’s seat, Durst could afford to affect an attitude of nonchalance about the whole affair. “That’s one of the benefits of working in a multi-generational family business,” he said regarding the specter of a protracted battle over zoning. “We can afford to be patient. We are patient and we are convinced we are going to do the right things.”