Right now, as you read this, millions of striped bass are streaming up the Hudson River to spawn. Some weigh up to 70 pounds. The river you cross every morning on the GW or the Tappan Zee, the one most New Yorkers think of as scenery (or a reason to pay extra rent for a view, or just a hassle to get across), is the second-largest spawning ground for striped bass in the Northeast. Only the Chesapeake beats it.
Most people don’t know this.
Steve Liesman wants to fix that.
Liesman wears a few hats. He’s CNBC’s senior economics reporter, the guy you’ve watched explain the Federal Reserve for years. He sits on Riverkeeper’s board. And on Tuesday, May 12, he’ll be playing rhythm guitar for Hudson Valley-based Stella Blue’s Band at Free Dead in the Park, the seventh annual free concert at Central Park’s Naumburg Bandshell. Two sets. Free to the public. A fundraiser for Riverkeeper.
This year’s show carries weight. Bobby Weir is gone. According to Liesman, that’s exactly when this community shows up best.
But before Bobby, the river.
The Hudson Story
When I asked Liesman what he wants new Riverkeeper members walking out of the bandshell on May 12 to take with them, he didn’t pitch the river. He told its story.
“The story of the Hudson is one where we’ve made incredible progress, but with an enormous amount of work left to do,” he said. “Communities up and down the river get their drinking water from the Hudson. But parts of the river are still an absolute mess.”
He kept going. The Hudson runs through small towns up north, mid-sized towns mid-river, and a few cities that were great a century ago and have spent the decades since fighting their way back. PCBs (deposited by GE upriver and addressed through a court-supervised cleanup) have been substantially reduced in striped bass to the point where the fish are considered more edible than they used to be. Not all-clear. Better.
“The story of America is written on the shores of the river,” Liesman said. “And unfortunately, a lot of the story of America is written on the bottom of the river as well.”
A Living River
Riverkeeper’s old fight was water quality. That fight isn’t over (Liesman name-checked the Gowanus Canal as one of the most polluted stretches in the system), but the focus has expanded.
“We’ve turned a lot toward what lives in the river,” Liesman said. “Even if the river were beautiful and clean, if nothing lived in it, it would be a dead river.”
So: the striped bass. The sturgeon, once so plentiful they called the meat “Albany beef,” now barely hanging on, with reproductive cycles that don’t kick in until the fish are 7 to 11 years old. The Billion Oyster Project, which Riverkeeper supports. The shrimp, the crustaceans, the juvenile fish that need marsh and reeds to survive.
That last one is where Liesman got animated.
The transition zone, the marsh and reeds where a river meets the land, is the river’s natural filtration system. Pave a parking lot up to the water, and 500 cars drip oil into the river every day, with nothing to catch it. The juvenile fish lose their nursery. The whole system thins out.
“Wherever you see the riprap and the rocks along the train line, that’s all artificial,” Liesman said. “What you’re seeing is lost opportunity for life.”
He pointed to Piermont as one of the few places along this stretch where the transition zone still works the way it’s supposed to.
Then there are the dams. There are roughly 37,000 of them in this country, Liesman said, and most are useless. Many built in the 1800s for flour mills that are no longer there, still blocking fish migration, still creating unnatural environments in waterways that managed fine for millennia without them. Riverkeeper has removed several from Hudson tributaries. Each removal opens new habitat for fisheries.
“You’re fighting the railroad. You’re fighting landowners,” he said. The work is slow. The wins compound.
“The dam removal is some of our work that I’m most proud of,” Liesman said. “It’s slow, arduous, and expensive. We battle landowners for access and bureaucracies for permits. But it’s permanent, and we literally create habitat.”
It’s Not Just Upstate
Here’s the part most New Yorkers miss: Riverkeeper’s brief isn’t just the Hudson.
“We very much think of our brief as the watershed of the New York area,” Liesman said. The reach is staggering: seven communities (collectively known as the Hudson 7) draw drinking water directly from the river, and beyond them, Riverkeeper protects the upstate reservoir network that supplies water for roughly half of New York State, New York City included.
“In addition to the Hudson 7 communities, Riverkeeper protects the upstate network of reservoirs that provides clean drinking water for half the residents of New York State, including New York City,” Riverkeeper President Tracy Brown said. “When we have clean and free-flowing waterways, everyone benefits, the people, the fish, and the entire web of life that the Hudson supports.”
Gowanus Canal? Riverkeeper. New York Harbor? Riverkeeper helped fight off an Army Corps of Engineers proposal for a storm-surge barricade across the harbor that, in Liesman’s words, “would have killed the river.” East River? Riverkeeper. The shores along it, too.
“The whole thing, it all works together,” Liesman said. “You can’t segment these things.”
Liesman added that Riverkeeper works closely with other Riverkeeper groups, city, state, and federal agencies, local communities, fishermen, and Indigenous tribes. “Anyone who is a friend of the river is a friend of ours.”
If you’ve been thinking of the Hudson as something that happens north of the city, something that has nothing to do with you, that’s the assumption Riverkeeper is trying to dismantle.
What sets the organization apart, in Liesman’s read, is the philosophical posture. They don’t want humans out of the river. They want humans in it. “We want you to swim in the river. We want you to fish in the river. We want you to kayak in the river.” The river isn’t an exhibit behind glass. It’s a working ecosystem with millions of New Yorkers depending on the watershed it feeds, and Riverkeeper’s bet is that the way to protect it is to deepen the relationship, not push people away.
Save a River
I asked Liesman what’s keeping him up at night.
He didn’t go to nightmares. He went to Arlo Guthrie.
“You can’t save the planet, but maybe you can save a river,” he said. “If you think about Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ if 50 people start to save a river, then you have a movement. There are riverkeepers all over the country. Let’s just do it one by one. Take a slice of the world and make it better.”
The one practical concern he raised: federal funding. Some grants pulled, some partially restored. He’s hoping whatever happens at the federal level doesn’t bleed into local work.
Free Dead, Year Seven
The concert started in 2018 because a fan of Stella Blue’s Band remembered the 50th anniversary of the Dead’s 1968 Naumburg show. He pulled a $25 park permit and brought it to Liesman.
“I said, do you have any idea what it means to create a concert in Central Park at the bandshell?”
He figured it out anyway. Money got raised. The show happened. Seven years in, Free Dead in the Park is now considered the first outdoor concert of the Deadhead summer.
The event does two things for Riverkeeper. It raises money: for the show first, then surplus for the organization. The bigger function is awareness. New members. People in the city who didn’t think about the river yesterday, but do now. There’s a New Jersey crew that rents a bus every year and brings 50 people up. The community shows up.
“I’m deeply grateful to all our sponsors who make this happen,” Liesman said. “A collection of family, friends, Deadheads, music lovers, and environmentalists, and sometimes they’re some wonderful combination of all of them. It wouldn’t happen without their support.”
Worth noting for our readers in the industry: Riverkeeper has welcomed cannabis sponsors. Ben Kovler (founder and CEO of Green Thumb Industries, one of the largest cannabis operators in the country) was a corporate-level supporter for years and is still in the fold on an individual basis. Kovler’s philanthropy runs well beyond cannabis; his Invest For Kids forum has raised over $11 million for Illinois youth organizations since 2009. He’s the kind of sponsor Riverkeeper would like to see more of. If that’s you, the door is open.
Remembering Bobby
This year, the community is showing up for someone specific.
Liesman knew Bob Weir. They got friendly over a long stretch. “He’s the most extraordinary person you ever want to meet,” Liesman said. “Kindness in every fiber and bone of his body.”
He told a story. Riverkeeper doesn’t sell merchandise. Sign up as a member, and you get a T-shirt. When Liesman asked Bobby to use his image on one, Bobby said yes immediately. Which, according to Liesman, was Bobby’s standard answer to every charitable ask anyone ever made of him. The running joke among people close to him: don’t ask Bobby anything, because he’ll always say yes, and his manager spent years trying to keep him from saying yes to everything at once.
Another story. Someone bottled wine with the Grateful Dead label on it. Liesman asked Bobby to sign one for a Riverkeeper auction. Bobby signed. Then noted, casually, that he knew wine pretty well, and that this one happened to be a good bottle. Auctioning it off for charity, he told Liesman, “makes a good bottle of wine great.”
The wine sold. The buyer never picked it up. Liesman thinks it might still be sitting somewhere in his house.
“Every time I get up on stage, my great hope is that I do the work, the body of work he put together, that I do it justice.”
The Encore
Stella Blue’s Band has always closed Free Dead in the Park with a Grateful Dead river song. They’ve encored with “Black Muddy River” before. Liesman wouldn’t say what’s coming this year.
What he hopes people walk out of Central Park with on May 12, around 8 p.m.: a thought about the river. A thought about the friends they came with. Some sense that the concrete jungle is itself an environment, that whatever space you’re in has living things in it, and that ignoring that relationship doesn’t make it stop existing.
“If all we do is raise the consciousness of a few people, it’s a worthwhile effort.”
The Other Magazine is a media partner for Free Dead in the Park. Stella Blue’s Band takes the Naumburg Bandshell stage Tuesday, May 12 at 4:30 p.m. Two sets. Free. Become a Riverkeeper member at the show and walk out with a commemorative T-shirt designed by Kelley Wills of Brain Flower Designs.
Bring water. Bring friends. The river’s right there.
Consume responsibly (and legally!),
