A Little Restraint
One would have to be made of stone not to sympathize with the Emerson’s ownership over the loss they’ve suffered. It is indeed a tragedy, and if it was arson then it was also attempted mass murder. Heady stuff this, not a subject to be kicked around lightly or make public accusations about in the midst of an investigation. But some it seems, just can’t resist.
The Emerson Inn will be sorely missed. Not just for the jobs it created, and not just for its ability to draw to the town visitors that otherwise the town wouldn’t draw. It’ll be missed because it represented the kind of small to mid-scale commercial development we desperately need here: sustainable businesses, appropriate in scale and tone and everything else to our town’s and our region’s long term viability. We’re disappointed its owners don’t appear to intend to rebuild on the site. We think we understand why, though it doesn’t quite line up with what’s been said in the regional press of late.
As it happens, The Emerson wasn’t located in a very good spot for a $600 a night B & B. On a stretch of state highway that’s seeing car and truck volume increase 7% a year, traffic noise, based on complaints from guests, was a serious problem. “This is costing me $10,000 a weekend!” Mr. Gitter told Shandaken officials in 2003, explaining why he needed to build an 18 foot-high poured concrete wall around the Inn. That’s not a little solution to a minor problem; it’s a huge solution to an enormous one. Our town’s zoning enforcement officer even got calls from the Governor’s office to try and expedite the erection of the giant, concrete sound barrier that ultimately wasn’t built around The Emerson.
So one could certainly see it as a stroke of good fortune - a silver lining in a dark cloud for the Inn’s owners - that they’ll soon have the opportunity to take their insurance settlement and rebuild in a place where guests won’t be constantly demanding their money back because of the traffic noise. We wish Mr. Gitter and Ms. Fisher well with their rebuilding project wherever they chose to do it. We applaud their plans to open a restaurant in Woodstock and provide continued employment for some of their staff.
But we do wish Mr. Gitter hadn’t commented to the effect that people in Shandaken didn’t want the Emerson here because it’s not true, most people did.
In fact we have never heard from anyone known for opposing the Belleayre Resort, a single negative word spoken about The Emerson Inn or its owners’ other businesses in Mt.Tremper. Indeed, a recent press release issued by the groups opposing the resort’s DEIS, called the Emerson “a model of sustainable economic development.” We think just about everybody in Shandaken understood that.
We also wish Mr.Gitter would in future refrain from publicly suggesting that someone who lives around here and doesn’t like the idea of the proposed Resort, has expressed that sentiment by burning The Emerson to the ground and trying to kill its guests and staff. We are aware of no evidence to justify such inflammatory speculation. And let’s remember that the last time unnamed people in our community were loudly charged with eco-terrorism, the State Police investigators concluded it was the cold Catskill winter that “sabotaged” the water system in Pine Hill. We don’t know if Mr. Gitter’s capable of apologizing for an occasional poorly chosen remark, but we do know he’s capable of showing better judgement than to claim, as he also did recently, that “incendiary language” concerning the proposed resort “contributed” to the fire at the Emerson.
We have covered the saga of the proposed Belleayre Resort for almost four years. Most journalists in the state regard this as the newspaper of record for the project and many contact us or utilize our website when they need to cover major developments themselves. In all these years the most “incendiary” language any of us have heard was at a public hearing last year where one of the Catskills’ most respected elder statesman suggested that Crossroads should sell its landholdings to the State of New York. That was, far and away, the most extreme solution we’ve ever heard proposed, publicly or privately.
By unfortunate contrast however, “incendiary” doesn’t do justice to Mr. Gitter’s language directed at people with misgivings about his resort project. On the scale of combustibility, that language tends to fall somewhere between napalm and tactical-nuclear. Mr.Gitter has attacked the level of spiritual development of those with concerns about his project, he’s called the leadership of half the environmental groups in the state “jihadists…with apologies to the Talliban.” He’s even attacked the state’s SEQRA process, and just barely steered clear of attacking the judge presiding over his project’s review. We’ve all read the papers these past 5 years, these are just the tip of the iceberg. So on the subject of incendiary language connected with the resort, Mr. Gitter has been the primary if not the sole source of combustible material. Fortunately for the most part, his comments have been met not in kind but with more measured responses.
We think it’s time for everyone to chill a bit, and try and keep the more wildly speculative and less than fully baked ideas in circulation to a minimum. We all await final results of the Emerson Inn fire investigation; let’s see what they say. Typically such investigations don’t yield much more than we know now, particularly if a “professional” arsonist may have been involved. Many of us await determinations soon on the possible next phase, adjudication, in the resort’s review process; let’s see what’s said there. The Emerson folks have their hands full with a new venture in Woodstock; let’s wish them well. Shandaken’s got plenty of things to figure out in the coming months, and we think it would be helpful to keep the public dialogue as focused, constructive and reality-based as possible.