[BwayDems] sad news Cy Adler passes

[Noah Kaufman]

Our condolences to the family and friends of Cy Adler,  a friend of the
Broadway Democrats.  - Noah Kaufman


https://
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/obituaries/cy-adler-dead-shorewalkers.html

Cy Adler, Pied Piper of Manhattan’s Piers, Is Dead at 91

Cy Adler in 2008. He began the Great Saunter, an annual 32-mile walk that
circumnavigates Manhattan.
CreditCreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

By Sam Roberts <https://www.nytimes.com/by/sam-roberts>

   - Oct. 19, 2018
   -
      -


Walt Whitman hailed “Mannahatta” as “the place encircled by many swift
tides and sparkling waters,” and Herman Melville wrote that even when New
York City was belted by working wharves, deskbound crowds gravitated to
“the extremest limit of the land” in order to “get just as nigh the water
as they possibly can without falling in.”

About a century later, Cy Adler started his Great Saunter
<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/nyregion/19circ.html?_r=1&module=inline>,
an annual signature walk to promote his vision of a shoreline green ribbon
encircling Manhattan, and to remind its residents that they inhabit an
island. Mr. Adler, a mathematician and oceanographer by training, became
the pied piper of the piers.

His group tours circumnavigating Manhattan and his books on the environment
promoted the potential to transform the docks into parks, even before they
had devolved into derelict victims of the high costs of labor and ground
transportation and the shift to containerized cargo, which doomed shipping
from Manhattan, where there was less storage space adjoining the piers.

Mr. Adler and others also started the Offshore Sea Development Corporation
<https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/26/archives/why-my-technology-company-failed-to-survive-government-is-urged-to.html?module=inline>,
which patented techniques to avert oil spills when unloading oil tankers,
and to plant oyster beds more efficiently.


Shorewalkers <https://shorewalkers.org/about/>, the irregular group of
peregrinators that he founded in the early 1980s, announced that Mr. Adler
died on Sept. 27 in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 91. His son David Adler
said the cause was a stroke.

Mr. Adler’s Great Saunter,
<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/nyregion/19circ.html?module=inline> held
on the first Saturday in May, has become a rite of spring for many.

It began in 1982 with an advertisement in The Village Voice and grew into
an annual 32-mile, 10-hour hike through Hudson River, Riverside, East River
and a dozen other littoral parks as well as barricaded, abandoned and
bedraggled railroad yards and other tracts that, while not actually parks
at the time, could have been linked in a verdant belt around Manhattan some
day if he had mustered enough public support.


The walker is the supreme conservator; he does not add pollution to the air
or water, he does not waste natural resources, he destroys nothing,” Mr.
Adler wrote in “Walking Manhattan’s Rim: The Great Saunter” (2003). The
tours have since expanded into Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Cy Adler discusses the origin of Shorewalkers.CreditCreditVideo by Will
Sanchez

“Cy’s greatest legacy will be as an inspiration to civic engagement,” David
Hogarty, the organization’s president, said in an email. “Cy was a great
illustration of what it means to be undaunted.
“If he saw an issue like inaccessible waterfronts,” Mr. Hogarty continued,
“Cy would just tackle it directly by literally getting boots on the ground
to recognize the issue and then organizing to address it. He was
unstoppable, always in forward motion.”

Cyrus Adler was born on Sept. 18, 1927, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, near
Gravesend Bay, to immigrants from Romania, Harry and Sarah (Iolis) Adler.
His father was a book salesman.

After serving in the Army as a military police officer from 1944 to 1946,
he graduated from Brooklyn College with a bachelor of science degree and
earned master’s degrees in oceanography and applied mathematics from New
York University.

In 1952, while living on the Lower East Side as an N.Y.U. student, he grew
restless for the sea and joined the crew of a Norwegian freighter bound for
Manila. Returning to California on an American ship, he worked in the
engine room.

His marriage to Patricia Murphy ended in divorce. In addition to their son
David, he is survived by another son, Peter Anastasio; five grandchildren;
and a brother, Leonard.

Mr. Adler taught physics and math for the City University of New York at
its City College and Borough of Manhattan Community College campuses and at
the State University of New York Maritime College, the New School, Long
Island University and the Merchant Marine Academy. He also taught in the
New York City public school system.
Image

Participants in this year’s Great Saunter north of Riverbank State Park.
The walk, held on the first Saturday in May, has become a rite of spring
for many New Yorkers.
CreditRobert Wright for The New York Times


He addressed the risks that developing technology posed for the biosphere
in another book, “Ecological Fantasies: Death From Falling Watermelons”
(1973).

“In the world of the next 200 years, governments will have to work together
to manage social institutions and natural resources,” he wrote in a 1973
Op-Ed article
<https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/29/archives/something-really-new-to-worry-about.html?module=inline>
in
The New York Times. “And those few persons given to thought will continue
thinking, while the vast majority of mankind will continue to live
intuitively — as has always been the case.”

Mr. Adler, whose Upper West Side apartment overlooked the Hudson River,
retired as the president of Shorewalkers last year.

In 2006, he told Gothamist
<http://gothamist.com/2006/05/05/cyrus_adler_pre_1.php>that his favorite
shore walks were Inwood and Highbridge Parks in Upper Manhattan, that
Inwood Hill Park was his favorite hideaway, and that someday he hoped the
underappreciated waterfront would be transformed into a Harlem River park
and a 330-mile Hudson River Trail to the river’s source, at Lake Tear of
the Clouds in the Adirondacks.



He elaborated on this in 1997 in the book “Walking the Hudson, Batt to Bear
(From the Battery to Bear Mountain),” which he wrote as Cy A Adler, with an
introduction by the folk singer Pete Seeger. (Mr. Adler also wrote books
under the name Peter Agnos.)

“Walking around the edge of a big city
<https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/16/arts/around-manhattan-step-by-step.html?module=inline>along
an unknown path can change you, expand your horizons, knock you around for
a while,” Mr. Adler wrote.

He told The Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/09/nyregion/exploring-the-city-around-its-edges.html?module=inline>
in
1984: “You see things on these walks you wouldn’t see anywhere else in New
York. We saw cows in Staten Island, oysters in the Bronx and pheasants
above the George Washington Bridge. We saw dead chickens hanging from trees
on the Harlem River that looked like they had been part of a voodoo
sacrifice.”

“Should you get lost,” Mr. Adler added, “consider yourself lucky.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 20, 2018, on Page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline: Cy Adler, 91, Environmentalist Who
Led New Yorkers in ‘Great Saunter,’
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