Small businesses pilot Peekskill’s future on the Hudson
At the start of a new season on the Hudson, Capt. Mary Pat Driscoll eased her cruise boat Evening Star against a floating pier at the city dock in Peekskill”™s Riverfront Green Park. Her passengers, students and chaperones from a high school fishing club, disembarked as Peekskill Mayor Mary Foster watched from the landing.
With a large bay and three coves, “Our goal has been to have a lot more boating activities on the riverfront,” from kayaks to yachts, Foster said after greeting the students, whose chartered fishing cruise was a first for the riverboat captain. “So this is really exciting to us.”
As part of that effort, the city plans to build a floating pier in the river channel for historic tall ships. “We”™re really trying to bring in tourism and visitors,” said the mayor.
The city has welcomed Driscoll”™s Trinity Cruise Co. as the first river tour line to be based in Peekskill. The company operated there for its first full season in 2012. ”We know if you have one boat, it attracts more,” said Foster.
“It sure does,” said Driscoll.
Working as a captain at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan, Driscoll with her husband bought the Evening Star, a former Coast Guard buoy tender that was last in service on the Erie Canal in 2011. “When the opportunity came up to buy this, we picked Peekskill as the perfect home port,” she said.
The company”™s cruises to West Point attract city dwellers taking advantage of discount train and boat packages for which Driscoll teams with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She and her husband have moved from New Jersey to Peekskill, where the 46-foot Evening Star is docked at Charles Point Marina. Last year the getaway cruises were sold out every Sunday in a season that runs from late May to October, she said.
The cruise company”™s owners are part of a new wave of entrepreneurs in the wake of the recession that are remaking Peekskill”™s economy and extending the range of the city”™s restaurants and small businesses from downtown to its postindustrial waterfront.
Across the Metro-North Railroad tracks from Riverfront Green on Hudson Avenue, the owner of The Quiet Man Public House, a popular 2-year-old Irish pub in downtown Peekskill, this spring opened the Yellow Brick Café in a long-vacant retail space. At the renovated Metro-North station nearby, the MTA in June is expected to announce a new restaurant operator for the former MTA ticket office, Foster said.
About two blocks north of the train station, owners of Peekskill Brewery last December reopened their brew pub in a four-story building at 47 S. Water St.
“The brew pub, in terms of economic development, is one important piece of critical mass here,” said Patrick J. Garvey, chairman of the Lincoln Depot Foundation. The nonprofit group expects this fall to reopen the city”™s former train depot on South Water Street, where President-elect Abraham Lincoln stopped to address Peekskill citizens in 1861, as the Lincoln Depot Museum (see related story, p. 31). The museum and a planned city-operated visitors center there also are elements of the city”™s waterfront revitalization program that aims to link downtown and waterfront development along Central Avenue.
At the city”™s south end, a 76-room Holiday Inn Express hotel is under construction on John Walsh Boulevard and is expected to be completed by this fall after a three-year delay when the developer was unable to obtain financing for the project.
And Foster said developer Martin Ginsburg, whose planned condominium development on South Water Street was to be a central piece of the waterfront revitalization plan, but was shelved in the recession, could bring plans for residential development on another site to the city early this summer.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency”™s remapped flood plains along the Hudson River in the wake of Hurricane Sandy would put Ginsburg”™s previous proposed development in the flood area, Foster said.
The new entrepreneurial activity on the city”™s waterfront has been confined to the east side of the Metro-North tracks, leaving intact Peekskill”™s roughly four miles of riverfront parkland. It is the largest stretch of parkland on the Hudson in Westchester County, and the city is both preserving it and encourage its use by building connecting walkways and shoring up eroding shoreline, Foster said. She said the city redirected part of an $8 million state grant awarded before the recession by Empire State Development Corp. to the parkland work.
The mayor credited the vision of the city”™s master planners in the 1970s who laid out a scheme for Peekskill”™s postindustrial waterfront “that was both ecological and had economic development. You can do both. You don”™t have to do one or the other.”
“It is a model for what you can do with waterfront property,” she said.
Both downtown and on the waterfront, the city”™s youthful entrepreneurs have been developing a local model for business collaboration.
“We have a large group of people under 40 opening up restaurants and businesses,” said Foster. “It”™s a collaborative spirit, not a competitive spirit.”
On the Evening Star, Capt. Driscoll offers weekly wine tasting cruises in partnership with the owner of Dylan”™s Wine Cellar, a 2-year-old family business at 50 Hudson Ave. across the railroad tracks from the city dock. It is also a short stroll from the Metro-North station, where about 2,000 commuters pass through daily, noted the wine and spirits shop”™s co-owner and operator, Steven Zwick.
A 33-year-old Peekskill native, Zwick lives within walking distance of his business at Riverbend Peekskill, another Ginsburg project overlooking the Hudson. A former retail branch manager at Citibank, he abandoned that career in the financial crisis.
“My wife and I were looking at starting up a store like this,” he said. “It was an opportune time to get out. I have my second career at an early age.”
“We all kind of work together,” Zwick said of the city”™s small business owners, “so we get overflow from the Yellow Brick Café and the brewery.”
“We”™re all in it together, that”™s the good thing about the businesses in Peekskill. We all work together.”
“River towns 50 years ago were driven by large industry,” Foster said. “We still have large industry, but now we”™re driven by small businesses.”