In Yonkers, polishing a gem

Ken Dearden is sitting on a bench riverside at the Beczak Environmental Educational Center in Yonkers soaking up the sun and the stunning scenery provided by the Palisades across the Hudson.
The center is sandwiched between two ends of the environmental spectrum ”“ the rough hewn Alexander Street and the natural splendor of the river. Beczak is an oasis among the warehouses, sewage plant and city jail that line the broken street.
From his bench, Dearden can see a crane poking up at the sky two blocks south on Main Street. It”™s his crane; well, it”™s his until its work is done on the eight-story structure Dearden is building across from Zuppa Restaurant. Dearden is a principal and founder of DW Capital Associates. He also has another venture, MetroPartnership, that he says is dedicated to building spaces designed for the “way people really live and work.” Kohl Partners of Teaneck, N.J., joined him in the business.
Dearden also has a pet project; it the Beczak Center.
Several months back, he, his wife and two children stopped to visit the environmental center. He was taken with the small, but education-packed place and learned things about the river that the Shrewsbury, Mass., native never knew about. He now can tell a visitor sharing the bench that the river is an estuary and has an ebb and flow as well as a salt line that can reach as far north as Troy.
He soon joined its board of directors.
The center has two main components; the environment and education for children. “If you can”™t support these two things, what can you support?”
By happenstance on this unseasonably hot spring day, his daughter is there on a class visit. He watches the schoolchildren walk back from the marsh to the center.
The tipping point for Dearden joining the board was the passion embodied by Kathleen Savolt, the center”™s executive director. He said with her leadership, the center should grow and flourish. The center, he said, is well positioned in the heart of developments that are going up or about to rise along the river. Drawing on his knowledge as a real estate investment banker at JPMorgan, as well as extensive real estate mergers and acquisitions experience, including evaluation of real estate portfolios and capital structures, Dearden said Beczak is sustainable. He is working to attract more funding for the center”™s operation and maintenance. He said the struggle is to find a way to continue to provide programs to the Yonkers public schools, which don”™t have money to financially support the programs as private schools can.
Dearden said the center acts as a steward to the Bronx and Saw Mill rivers. The Saw Mill, formerly known as the Nepperhan River, flows under parts of the city until it merges with the Hudson near Larkin Plaza. Last month”™s major rainfall exposed the river in front of the train station when a large sinkhole formed.
The plan of developers of the city”™s downtown is to expose or “daylight” the river so as to make it accessible to residents as well as to create an amenity and an attraction.
Dearden said the undertaking will be expensive, since it”™s not just knocking out sections of city streets, but creating banks and restoring the ecology of the long-covered river.
He says once the river is uncovered, it will be an educational asset to the Beczak Center.
Dearden expresses the sentiment of the center when he says he cannot wait until an esplanade is built along the river that will connect the condominiums being built near the Yonkers Pier to the south and the proposed residential buildings near Point Street to the north. With each river town doing its part, eventually the thought is that one would be able to walk from Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan to Albany.
This past weekend, the Beczak Center, www.beczak.org, recognized the undertaking of the daylighting of the Saw Mill River at a fundraiser breakfast by honoring: Scenic Hudson Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to river protection and restoration; Groundwork Yonkers, whose mission is to leverage community resources via collaborative projects such as the Saw Mill River Coalition; and the city of Yonkers.
“The center is a gem most people don”™t know about,” Dearden said. But he”™s doing his part to change that.