Daily News from New York, New York • 274

The town continued from paga 16 city had a right to fill up to grade, but that the excess fill must be removed from the homeowners' properties and a drainage ditch be provided along Hunter and Stillwell Aves. The people started digging themselves out almost immediately, and bulldozers accomplished the rest. "But we had to fight like hell to get them to dig a drainage ditch which we needed badly," says Politzer. They removed the sand all right, but then they deposited it in a place that just happens to be one of the two drainfields for the village. This broke the pipe and caused flooding problems along the railroad tracks and at our egress road on as sett Ave.

It also undermined the supports for the existing ramp off the New Adeline Pavelka came to Bay-chester in the late "20s as a child. "We'd camp out in Campbell's Island. It was a German and Czech resort then. You'd rent a boat, load up with jugs of water from the spring well, then go over to the island for the day or weekend." There "were five boa thou ses then, with more than 300 boats to rent, beach houses lining Givan Creek and three boardwalks. William Kruger's father drove a horse and wagon for the Dittmar Dynamite Co.

which had its storage cave and stables in the village. "I was bom in the room upstairs," says Kruger, a sandy-haired man in his late 40s who cnce drove an electric truck for the dynamite company but is today in the insurance business. He married a neighborhood girl and brought up two daughters in the house his father built. on Co-Op City. Alex Politzer, president of the Village of Baychester Civic Association, recalls the mammoth structures going up in the distance: They were building west of the Hutchinson River Parkway and we didn't pay too much attention to it.

Then they started filling in the waterfront for the last section, right near us. Barges kept corning upriver endlessly, pumping in sand to fill in the whole area so that we were landlocked." One morning the contractor came in with a long string of trucks. Huge amounts of sand were dumped on Hunter Ave. The sand piled high over the lawns along the street. "People woke up and found themselves unable to get out of their doors.

They had to climb out the back windows. One old man had a heart attack and had to be rushed to the hospital. He thought they were going to bury him alive. We had to get a bulldozer from the contractor to clear a path for the ambulance." Less than two days earlier, city engineers had visited people whose property fronted on Hunter Ave. They handed out notices stating that Hunter Ave.

was to be filled in up to grade, that people would get a chance, at their own expense, to connect up with the sewer system in Co-Op City, that the city would provide a staircase so that each property owner could have access to Hunter Ave. If the homeowner did not sign for this staircase, the city would fill in hisher property up to the grade and put a hen on the property for the cost of the fill. The owners had all signed for the staircase because they were not. organized or legally sophisticated and saw it as the better deal. They were afraid of having their properties filled in because they were eight feet below grade.

The engineers pressured them to sign immediately although the notice gave them 48 hours to make a decision. Only the Eastern Orthodox Church on Hunter Ave. signed for the sewer connection. Before the 48 hours were up, the trucks came in to fill up Hunter not eight feet as the people expected, but 12 feet, and right up to their property lines. Since there was no retaining wall built, this resulted in landslides which spilled into their homes.

At that point, the villagers got together, formed a civic organization, and sued to have the fill removed from their properties and from Hunter Ave. The court ruled that the Iheresa Laub first saw Bayches-ter 63 years ago as she sailed into Eastchester Bay on a barge carrying landfill. Her father was the barge captain and they lived first in a shack on the barge, then in a shack on a pier over Hunter Ave. Finally, her father bought a piece of land and built a house. The tiny bungalow still stands at the corner of Hunter and StiUwelL The magical Campbell's Island which they all remember is no more Co-Op City exists on it today.

Ida CasteHano is one of the few who remembers the family for whom the island was named: "Old man Campbell had two daughters who went to work in the city every day in a canoe. They'd paddle it in to shore here, then take the railroad downtown. The day Campbell died they had to bring the coffin over to the mainland in a row boat." Their paradise started falling away when Webb Knapp bought land from private sources and filled it in with the intention of building a marina, a plan which was upset when the company went bankrupt. The Webb Knapp landfill took away our boat basin but it still left us our swimming hole," says Ida. "But we had to get rid of our boats and that was hard.

If we'd been organized then, we would have taken them to court because they were tak- -tag away public waterfront." Soon after, construction began 28 Alex Politzer (above, with wife Helen) led the villagers in their fight for survival. NEW YORK SUNDAY NEWS JANUARY 2, 1977.