Re Mr. John Samatulski’s May 13 letter, “City needs to protect Riverside Park”: Riverside Park is of great import to everyone who lives along the Mohawk River in the Stockade section of the city.
When I lived in the “historic” section of the Stockade, I and many others helped to update the park to what it is today — the promenade and cannon serve as a focal point to the end of Ferry Street.
Trees have been cut down or back depending on their condition. Goals of new kid’s play equipment have been realized. Doggie bags align the water side for the city’s pooper scooper law. New benches are throughout the park, and so forth.
However, the city’s pump station was a blighted building and dated of its use 21 years ago when there was a freak January 1996 flood. Years of talk have been ongoing one way or another for a new system to pump sewage out where it belongs — not ending up in one’s basement, as Hurricane Irene taught us five years ago. Its usage, when updated, will bring in a pump station that protects all from a major health threat when there is flooding — and there will be.
So, let’s not take a step backward. Let us, as citizens, be more concerned with graffiti vandalism, vacant buildings, substandard housing and blight that dot our city landscape for which there is much in the Stockade district.
We should let the engineers do what they know best — build.
Gerald Plante
Schenectady
Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion
