Profits & Passions Ken Dearden In Yonkers, polishing a
gem By BOB ROZYCKI
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.
