OUT THERE--SWIMMING IN THE HUDSON, THE HIGHLANDS CURRENT

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Out There: Swimming in the Hudson

BRIAN PJ CRONIN

As an environmental reporter, the most common question I get asked — right after “What animal did this?” followed by an emailed photo of a pile of scat — is, “Is it safe to swim in the Hudson?”

It depends on what you mean by safe.

In the 19th century and early 20th century, that question would have seemed preposterous. Millions of people cooled off with a dip. But as factories were built on the Hudson, the river became an open sewer. Paint poured in from the General Motors plant in Tarrytown, oil from railroad repair facilities in Croton and human waste from Manhattan. A resident who taught himself to sail along the Peekskill shore in the 1960s told me that anytime he fell in, he had to wipe sludge from his clothes.

But you can’t swim in the same river twice, and a lot has changed in 50 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, which required municipalities to upgrade their sewage treatment plans and tightened the regulation of industry pollution. Folk singer Pete Seeger...MORE AT  https://highlandscurrent.org/2022/06/17/out-there-swimming-in-the-hudson/