2025 marks the LRWP’s 10th year as a non-profit. Our dedicated board has worked hard to implement a strategy to ensure we can continue watershed stewardship for the next 10 years. We look forward to sharing more on what our stewardship vision looks like in coming months. For now, we are pleased to share a snapshot of recent grant awards and partnerships we look forward to building on:
The Borough of Highland Park renewed our lease for the 101 Raritan Avenue Boat Shop through the end of December 2027. This extended lease lends certainty to program delivery, and we will soon revamp the space to accommodate a greater variety of activities.
Environmental Endowment of New Jersey granted $7,000 to support “Advancing Climate Vulnerability Assessments at Superfund Sites for the Lower Raritan Watershed.” This will allow us to improve Community Right To Know (CRTK) outreach regarding environmental hazards in our communities.
Mohawk Canoe Club granted $10,000 to support development of a Raritan River Access Guide and to expand our paddling program. In addition to FREE public paddles scheduled June 14, July 3, and August 30 we will host on-water events for Highland Park Summer Camp and “pop up” paddles on hot summer nights. Stay tuned!
New Jersey Department of Education granted $15,000 to support delivery of Professional Development for K-12 educators, focusing on place-based and case-based watershed curriculum. This grant, through the Climate Change Learning Collaborative, will allow us to share lessons in how to conduct eel and stream habitat assessments, water quality monitoring and more with teachers throughout New Jersey.
Arts Institute of Middlesex County granted $5,000 for EcoArts programming.
Arts Institute of Middlesex County granted $20,000 for “Heritage Hydrology Mapping & Research for the Lower Raritan Watershed.” This will support archive and annotate historic map sources that show streams/hydrology in six Middlesex County municipalities to better understand transportation and other infrastructure failure risk related to buried and culverted streams.
Co-hosting a June 2025 Conference for Mayors focused on the New Jersey State Development and Redevelopment Plan – in partnership with the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, the New Jersey State Planning Commission, and the New Jersey Conference of Mayors.
By Danielle Bongiovanni, LRWP 2025 Science Communication Intern
The Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership (LRWP) is overwhelmed with gratitude for everyone who helped raise over $3,500 at the “Run Off” 5k on Saturday, March 29 at Washington Memorial Park. Whether you were one of the 108 registered racers, bought tickets for the gift basket raffle, or simply came to learn the importance of keeping the Raritan Watershed clean, we were happy to have you there.
The “Run Off” would not have been possible without sponsorship from NJ American Water, Crunch Fitness of Green Book and the Borough of Dunellen. The Middlesex County Office of Emergency Management, Dunellen crossing guards, and volunteers from SEWA Central New Jersey and the LRWP ensured the event’s safety.
Grant funding was provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund. For information on events, go to MiddlesexCountyCulture.com.
“The Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership has been a grantee of ours through our program grants for arts, history and culture for years, doing either an arts project or a history project and intersecting that with the environmental issues they work on through their nonprofit. They’re one of a few environmental groups that receive arts, history and culture funding, so we love getting involved with them,” said Manda Gorsegner, the Division Head of Visual and Performing Arts at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County.
The Institute assisted with event planning by rallying visual and performing artists to bring attention to conservation through creativity. Gorsegner said, “Using arts, history, and culture to engage the public in environmental and social issues is really impactful and a unique way to talk about these stories and the importance of how we all intersect culturally and socially.”
Such conversations abounded as attendees visited tables set up by event partners. Spectrum for Living, a non-profit serving people with developmental disabilities, provided googly eyes, fake feathers and colorful paper squares for decorating wood cutouts of green herons. Crafters took home a reminder of who else depends on clean watersheds.
Independent artists Kate Eggleston and Lisa Bagwell repurposed litter into art supplies. Eggleston created plates for collagraph printmaking, while Bagwell used it as filling for a sculpture of a glass eel, a juvenile stage of the American eel.
Bagwell was in her element. “I do a lot of cleanups on my own, so making a sculpture out of collected trash is what I do,” she said. The completed sculpture will be toured across schools by the Hudson River Foundation’s NY-NJ Harbor & Estuary Program to raise awareness of waterway pollution.
Music poured from the pavilion, courtesy of the talented New Jersey Brass Band, part of the New Brunswick Jazz Project, and by jazz vocalist Audra Mariel.
One performer took his music to the streets instead. Dave Seamon, better known as the Trash Troubadour, performed his song “Miracle Mile” as he led attendees favoring a slower pace on a “Trickle” from the park to the Green Brook. There, LRWP Board Member Anton Getz and LRWP Community Outreach Coordinator Dr. John Meyer discussed the litter trap and the eel monitoring program.
The litter trap, nicknamed Bandit, was installed in the Green Brook as part of the Cornell-Dubilier Electronics Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration (NRDAR) Restoration Plan. The Cornell-Dubilier NRDAR Plan is an example of how the nation’s strong Superfund Laws truly hold polluters accountable for environmental damages in our communities. Cornell-Dubilier Superfund Site Trustees include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The location of the litter trap, almost exactly at the intersection of Union, Middlesex, and Somerset Counties, is a pertinent reminder of how polluted water flows without regard for man-made borders. When the Dunellen Department of Public Works empties Bandit, Dunellen is not the only community benefitting.
The beneficiaries are not limited to humans! Getz recalled discovering a three-foot-long American eel hiding inside a tire during a cleanup of the Green Brook. “Those chemicals are leaching into its water, leaching into its environment, so it needs to find a better hideaway,” he said.
Meyer assured attendees that the litter trap did not hinder migrating eels. Bandit’s buoyant arms catch floating trash, but fish can easily swim beneath.
Back at the park, Green Brook Middle School students presented posters created in collaboration with the LRWP and New Jersey Watershed Ambassador Brianna Casario. They shared facts about the American eel’s life cycle and discussed the importance of citizen science.
The event concluded with the winners of the gift basket raffle, whose prizes were generously donated by local businesses. Congratulations were also awarded to the fastest 5k runners. Dunellen residents took first in the male and female divisions, with Matthew Clemente recording a chip time of 21:27 and Lisa Shultz recording 27:16.
At the core of the “Run Off” 5k was the theme of connection. Attendees from across New Jersey supported conservation through the arts, sciences, and athletics. It proved how, regardless of your preferred discipline or your location, there is an opportunity for you to fight for healthy watersheds, and the LRWP would love to help you find it.
Warehousing, apartments, shipping centers, federal highways changed my world. It was a natural world I discovered that was available to everyone, with few takers, now lost to the ages. Whether warehousing or condos, both are poison pills being offered as a palatable option.
The end of my world began when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Bill on June 29, 1956, three months short of 100 years after Henry David Thoreau left his footprints along the north shore of the lower Raritan River.
My world began at the end of my dead-end street and the Lehigh Valley Railroad tracks which bordered the vast abandoned clay banks, dotted with flooded clay excavations, swamps, streams and woods stretching to the Raritan River. The railroad tracks were my equivalent of the St Louis Gateway arch, a monument to the westward expansion of the United States into the unexplored territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.
Like the early days of frontier travel, the tracks and clay banks were said to be fraught with existential danger. Bums and hobos were the hostiles parents warned about, if that failed there was the quicksand and bottomless mud which would swallow a kid, never to be found. The real threat was from the ‘big kids’, defined as any kid who was bigger than you. Often, they would intimidate younger kids to extort any change they had, or otherwise physically intimidate them. So, the rule was, you saw a big kid, you ran away as fast as you could. And then there were the trains. The tracks stretched perfectly straight for a mile of more, so you could see it coming a long way off. Problem was if a kid was so occupied, the train could easily sneak up on him.
We learned that if you went deeper into the wilderness, there were rarely any human encounters, as the travel was difficult and muddy and held no specific area of interest. Forays into the wild were pure exploratory expeditions or in my case, a safe place to shoot my bow and arrow. High banks of soft clay let the wooden arrows live longer. The real beauty was the ability to draw back the bow and aim at the sky to see how far an arrow can fly. There was something about watching the arrow ‘escape the surly bonds of earth’, as you became the arrow. Surely some paleo bowman was inspired by his arrow’s high arc to imagine the possibility of human flight. Inspiration to fire the imagination was everywhere you looked.
Being a transition zone, many plants typically found in south Jersey could be identified, sheep laurel, green briar and odd oak species. Spotted turtles were quite common and gray fox dominated the area. There were American bittern, gallinules, night hawks, rose breasted grosbeak, indigo buntings, rufous sided towhees, brown thrashers, short eared owls and even a rare Boreal owl, native to the arctic regions was documented. The variety of colorful bird life brought my Golden Guide Book to Birds to life as the birds seemed to fly off the pages into the surrounding trees.
A short eared owl sits on a vent pipe in the area seen on the cover image. A boreal owl, native to the arctic region, was documented in the dame area. Its presence validates the importance of the Raritan River off ramp of the Atlantic Flyway.
The event of that June day in 1956 had no direct impact on my wilderness until the late 60s when flimsy tan stakes, flagged with orange ribbons, started to appear throughout my territorial claim.
The clay banks marked the reach of the ancient sea floor, characterized by sandy, clay soil, interspersed with smooth cobble, that stood in sharp contrast to the dark brown soil and New Brunswick shale found across the tracks and up-river. This land was caught between the terminus of glacial expansion and the reach of prehistoric seas.
The intersection of soils, blessed with a marriage of fresh and salt water, set along the Atlantic flyway, an ancient bird migration route, and the presence of a major inland river off ramp, makes this area one of the most environmentally diverse, along the east coast. The bay and river are a gathering place for migrating striped bass, shad and alewives, who have retained evolutionary migration patterns to conquer time and impediments, to fulfill their ancient upstream journey.
Before long, the significance of the flagged stakes driven into the heart of this unique parcel was realized, as machinery began to carve paths and straightaways to accommodate interstate 287. Eventually all that remained of the clay banks were a gulag of islands interspersed among the on and off ramps, dominated by sweet gum, pin oaks and green briar. An apartment complex replaced the small isolated cattail swamp which supported a population of black muskrat.
Aside from the overflowing natural treasures, are the memories of freedom and seemingly unrestricted travel and discovery which led to a lifetime of curiosity of all things wild. Even though the change was personally disruptive and unwelcome, the clay banks served their purpose to set a course through life that never wavered from the affiliation with the natural world. Good for me, sad for future generations who will never share that experience.
Author Joe Mish has been running wild in New Jersey since childhood when he found ways to escape his mother’s watchful eyes. He continues to trek the swamps, rivers and thickets seeking to share, with the residents and visitors, all of the state’s natural beauty hidden within full view. To read more of his writing and view more of his gorgeous photographs visit Winter Bear Rising, his wordpress blog. Joe’s series “Nature on the Raritan, Hidden in Plain View” runs monthly as part of the LRWP “Voices of the Watershed” series. Writing and photos used with permission from the author.
