Clifton Looking to Spruce Up ‘Paradise’
By JENNIFER H. CUNNINGHAM, STAFF WRITER
CLIFTON It’s a bucolic oasis, surrounded by urban sprawl and just a stone’s throw away from Route 21.
But if the city can get some financial help, the Dundee Island Preserve will become a natural recreational spot with a space for environmental conservation education and a boat launch for the city Fire Department.
The preserve 7.5 acres of green space in Botany Village bordered by Route 21, the Passaic River and the Dundee Canal is the city’s only tract of woodland on the banks of the waterway. Its small forest is a haven for wildlife and boasts panoramic views of the Passaic and nearby Dundee Dam.
“It’s like a little paradise in Clifton,” said John Biegel, the city’s health officer and a member of the environmental commission.
Most residents don’t know the Dundee Island Preserve exists, and Biegel is trying to get the word out in a big way. He has applied for a $25,000 open space grant from the Passaic County Open Space and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund to repair flood damage there from the nor’easter of April 2007.
The preserve is not open to the public.
“Right now, it just sits out here,” said Joseph Labriola, another member of the commission.
Biegel said the grant money would be used to repair and extend a walking trail, replace invasive Japanese Knotweed plants with native trees and shrubs, and install signage, benches and garbage bins.
“Little by little,” Biegel said, “we’re making progress.”
The City Council has thrown its support behind the preserve’s restoration and will hold a public hearing on the grant application at its meeting tonight at City Hall.
“We don’t want to destroy it,” Biegel said. “We want to spruce it up.”
The city bought 4.25 acres of the Dundee Island Preserve (it’s actually a peninsula) for $1.6 million in 2006, using state and county grants. Clifton leases the rest of the land for $1 a year from the state Department of Transportation.
The nor’easter of April 2007 and the flooding it triggered damaged the wildlife sanctuary before it was set to open to the public. The floods uprooted several trees there, washed away parts of a walking trail and left debris strewn across it.
Ella Filippone, executive director of the Passaic River Coalition, a non-profit group that advocates for the waterway, lobbied city, county and state officials to preserve Dundee Island when the site was threatened by development. She said she supported the commission’s grant and was working with the river’s former polluters to pay for more environmental upgrades, like planting more native species, to make the area look more natural.
“It gives limited use to the people of Clifton, and that’s a good thing,” she said, “but we want to make this into a more-meaningful experience.”
Dundee Island’s history stretches back to before colonial times. As early as the 1600s, explorers were using it as the site of a trading post, where they bartered with the local indigenous people, the Leni-Lenape.
The preserve also lies parallel to the last remnant of the Dundee Canal, which was completed in 1861 to allow boats to pass around the Dundee Dam.
“The preserve is a wonderful capture of history in the community,” Mayor James Anzaldi said Monday. “I was in awe when I had first gone down there.”
More recently, the preserve also has been eyed by developers as a site for high-rise condominiums. In 2003, Town and Country, a Woodcliff Lake-based property developer, proposed building 390 one- and-two-bedroom apartments there. But the developer abandoned the plan following community outcry and zoning changes by the City Council.
“We’ve been able to preserve history here,” Anzaldi said. “It’s such an aesthetically pleasing place.”
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E-mail: cunningham@northjersey.com
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