A fitting memorial for a Hudson River legend? Pete Seeger, 1919-2014
The Pete Seeger Tappan Zee Bridge? One municipal official in Westchester County thinks it’s got a nice ring to it.
The death Monday of Seeger, the folk musician and long-time political activist who founded a Poughkeepsie-based, river-sailing environmental group to advocate for an unpolluted Hudson River, has inspired a proposal to name the in-construction new Tappan Zee Bridge after the music legend.
Seeger, 94 and a resident of Beacon for more than six decades, died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, according to a family member quoted in published reports. Seeger, who in the late 1940s built a log cabin on his 17-acre property overlooking the Hudson in Dutchess County for which he reportedly paid $100 an acre, was said to have been chopping wood at his home just 10 days before his death.
A leading figure in the American folk music revival in the decades after World War II, Seeger wrote songs that became anthems of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, including “We Shall Overcome,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “If I Had a Hammer.”
An undaunted activist who wove political statements and social justice messages into traditional folk lyrics, Seeger in the 1950s was blacklisted from performing on television and in commercial concert venues for his left-wing politics and affiliation with the Communist Party. His 1961 conviction on contempt of Congress charges was later overturned by an appeals court.
Seeger in 1969 launched the Clearwater, a 106-foot sailing sloop built at his expense as a crusading vessel for the cleanup of the industrially polluted Hudson. He founded the nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a leading environmental organization in legal actions and public education efforts to clean up the river and protect its ecology.
For that effort, Seeger should be honored with his name on the new Tappan Zee Bridge, Feiner said Tuesday.
Feiner said he will write to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and members of the state Legislature to urge them to consider naming the new Tappan Zee bridge in Seeger”™s memory. The nearly 60-year-old existing bridge in 1994 was renamed in honor of the late Gov. Malcolm Wilson, a Yonkers resident who served 15 years as the state”™s lieutenant governor under Nelson Rockefeller.
“Pete Seeger was a leader in environmental causes,” Feiner said. “When one thinks of the Hudson River and the environment one of the first names we think of is Pete Seeger.”
“A world class new bridge should be named for a world class environmentalist who made our region a better place.”