Nancy Wallace, fervent rescuer of the Bronx River, dies at 93

Nancy Wallace, who toiled tirelessly to clean up the only freshwater river flowing in New York City, the Bronx, and reclaim it for recreation and as a natural habitat, died on February 15 at her home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. 93.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lane Wallace.

Ms. Wallace lived in White Plains, N.Y., in the 1980s and launched a broad campaign to save the river, then a 23-mile (37-kilometer) inaccessible watercourse that contained more wreckage, such as the carcasses of junked cars and rusted refrigerators, than wildlife .

The river is largely tidal and brackish from East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx to where Hunts Point meets the salty East River, but is generally considered fresh because it flows south from its source near Kensico Dam in Westchester County .

Although “naturally fresh” is a phrase not typically associated with the Bronx, New York’s only borough on the US mainland is in fact home to Pelham Bay Park, the city’s largest, as well as the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo. and the Hunts Point Produce Market – and a mainly freshwater river runs through it.

Mrs. Wallace, a career educator and civic leader, joined the board of the Bronx River Restoration in 1982. The following year, when the executive director left, she agreed to fill in temporarily. She held the job for 22 years until retiring in 2006 — a year before biologists at the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx reported their first beaver sighting in the river in two centuries.

Mrs Wallace almost single-handedly raised money from local authorities, charities and private individuals for the restoration; won the support of officials in the Bronx and Westchester County; persuaded local businesses to donate construction equipment and supplies; and recruited Boy Scouts and the City Volunteer Corps, among others, to assist with the cleanup and restoration.

“For the long term, the fundamental thing we need to do is change people’s attitudes toward the river,” she told The New York Times in 1988. “After all, it only became a problem because of what people did with it.”

The Bronx River Restoration and the Bronx River Alliance tried to turn an eyesore – for anyone who could find it along the Bronx River Parkway, the nation’s first – into a place where you can hike and canoe. Conservationists have reclaimed the riverbank to create unlikely oases Starlight Park, along the Sheridan Expressway near East 173rd Street. The city’s parks department now calls the park “a vital link along the Bronx River Greenway.”

Ann Seaver Coolidge Upton was born September 2, 1930 in Marblehead. Her mother, Anna (Pennypacker) Upton, ran the welfare department in Marblehead, and her father, Edward, was a lawyer. Ann was called Nancy, in keeping with a family tradition of giving children an informal name.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1951 and briefly interrupted her master’s studies to marry Bruce A. Wallace, a mechanical engineer, whom she had met while working with inner-city teenagers in Paterson, NJ.

She legally changed her name to Ann U. Wallace in 1977, when she successfully ran for the Common Council in White Plains, although she was still known as Nancy Wallace.

After teaching and traveling after her husband completed his service in the U.S. Army, the couple settled in White Plains in 1959. She worked with the local Parent Teachers Association on a plan to desegregate the local public school system and, as a member of the Common Council, led the city’s groundbreaking, anti-discriminatory Fair Housing Law.

In 1982, she was urged to join the board of Bronx River Restoration, which she immediately accepted.

“I have always been interested in environmental issues and causes; even my children learned to fold their paper lunch bags very carefully and take them home so we could reuse them,” she said in 2005.

In addition to her daughter Lane, Mrs. Wallace is survived by her husband; another daughter, Gail Wallace; a son, David; her sister, Lane Upton Serota; and three grandchildren. In 2012, she moved back to her hometown with her husband.

The river restoration project had been underway for nearly a decade before Ms. Wallace joined the board. It started as a partnership between Anthony Bouza, a Bronx police captain who wanted to divert teenagers from delinquency, and Ruth Anderberg, who had entertained the idea of ​​a restoration for a decade and eventually left her job as a secretary at Fordham University to help start it. to get going.

Ms. Wallace’s staunchest supporters included José E. Serrano, then a state commissioner from the Bronx before he became a U.S. representative; Bea Castiglia-Catullo, fellow member of the River Restoration Council; and then-New York City Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, who predicted in 1988 that the river would one day be “what it should be: a place for the modern Huckleberry Finns.”

In helping to save the river, Ms. Wallace combined political acumen, a talent for consensus building, and community organizing skills to find common ground between Westchester’s suburban towns and its less affluent towns. neighborhoods bordering the river from the Bronx border at 242nd Street to the East River eight miles south.

“We’re not hoping we’ll drink the water or anything,” she told The Times in 1988. “But we hope to get it clean enough that the fish will want to come back.”

They did, including American eel and the endangered herring.