By Myles Ma | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on August 16, 2016 at 7:30 AM, updated August 16, 2016 at 10:40 AM
HILLSDALE — Terri Pendergast used to enjoy walking her dog in the woods behind her house every day. She’d take a meandering path through the timber, her childhood stomping grounds, to trails leading to the Musquapsink Brook.
For Pendergast, it was a quiet sanctuary she shared with the deer, owls and other animals that made these woods their home. The woods butted up to the back of about 15 homes on Ell Road, turning yards into country oases just 25 miles from New York City.
But in June, those woods were suddenly gone, replaced by a 12-acre bald patch crisscrossed with muddy tire tracks to make way for a housing development.
Wonderful to asphalt every square inch of land.
Terri Pendergast should have purchased the property and all of the development could have been stopped in it’s tracks.
She won’t be allowed to trespass no more. What if the new neighbors don’t like her, her dog or her house? Who do they complain to? Grow up, that’s what happens in life.
Disgraceful
Seems like Ms. Pendergast’s ire should be the greedy seller of the land back in 2002 to the greedy developer.
Ms Pendergast lives presumably in a house in Hillsdale. That house was probably once part of a “wooded country oasis”. I understand that it is sad to see these small slices of nature disappear but you can’t bar development of these spaces if they are privately owned and zoned for residential use anymore than you can be forced to turnover your house so it can be restored to its once natural state for the rest of us to enjoy.
A cautionary tale to the Schedler neighbors for sure. Better open your eyes to what COULD be there: a park the whole village can use or “a 12-acre bald patch crisscrossed with muddy tire tracks to make way for a housing development.”