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Tribute to a Rowing Legacy: Nereid Club
August 25, 2018 @ 1:00 pm
Meadowlands Museum to Present “Tribute to a Rowing Legacy: Nereid Club, 150 Years on the Passaic River” on Saturday, August 25, 2018 at 1pm, at the Meadowlands Museum.
Speakers will include award-winning photographer and writer Mark Hillringhouse and longtime club member Erik King. Hillringhouse will lecture on the Passaic River and its history of rowing activities and rowing clubs. King, a club co-refounder with his wife Cheryl in 1990, will discuss the club’s recent history.
Hillringhouse is widely regarded as a photo historian of the Great Falls and the history of Passaic River boating. His “Passaic River Journal,” which was published in 2010 in The American Poetry Review, is a well documented history of boating and boating clubs on the Passaic River. He has been called the Philip Levine of photography and the Walker Evans of poetry.
The Nereid Boat Club, which is located in Rutherford, traces its legacy to April 17, 1868, the year five rowing enthusiasts succeeded in having the New Jersey Legislature establish the Nereid Boat Club of Newark, New Jersey. The club was active over the years, staging regattas from its former boat house in Belleville. Its present facility was built by Clarence Harding in 1928 according to the design of architect Louis B. Huesmann. In 1992, Willard Reenstra and Ella Fillapone of the Passaic River Coalition joined with Nereid Boat Club members in the successful effort to restore the old boat house. In addition to its adult members, Nereid has growing and vibrant junior rowing programs for middle school and high school students and hosts the highly successful varsity rowing program of Montclair High School and the nascent varsity program of Seton Hall Prep.
The celebration, which is being co-sponsored by the museum and club, will include a display of artifacts from the boat club. The event also highlights the upcoming formal dedication of the Willard and Marjorie Reenstra Riverside Park on September 15. The Reenstras, now deceased, were central to efforts to save and preserve the boat house, a significant historical landmark.
