“If we wait five years, we will be able to walk across the river if it’s left
unchecked.” — Bob Petzold, president of Petzold’s Marine Center, on the urgency of halting hydrilla’s rampant spread.
This is the second of a series about invasive aquatic hydrilla and its growing threat to waterbodies and communities in Northwest Connecticut.
CHESTER, Conn. — Bob Petzold has spent the past few summers mowing his marina’s boat slips.
Thick, verdant green mats of notoriously troublesome hydrilla have made it impossible for vessels to enter or exit the channel unless he and his crew mechanically chop, gather and haul away massive piles of the invasive weed, which has clogged the Chester Boat Basin, one of two marinas he owns and operates on the Connecticut River.
Petzold knows that in doing so, he raises the risk of spreading hydrilla fragments that will drift away and repopulate elsewhere. But he has little choice, he said, if his four-generation, family-owned and operated business is to remain afloat.
“It’s a necessary evil,” he said. And an expensive one at that.
“We spend thousands of dollars on outside contractors and we have our own staff remediating it just to keep the channel open,” Petzold explained during an early September visit to his marina.
“When the water is clear, you can almost watch the hydrilla grow. If we wait five years, we will be able to walk across the river if it’s left unchecked.”
Bob Petzold, owner of the Chester Boat Basin on the Connecticut River, points to an area clogged with thick mats of hydrilla prior to a test application of an aquatic herbicide by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this summer. Two of his marinas are among five demonstration sites in the Connecticut River Watershed selected for hydrilla research.Photo by Debra A. Aleksinas
The strain of hydrilla in the Connecticut River has been an ongoing concern since its discovery in 2016. It is considered genetically distinct from other known hydrilla populations in the world, and as such, there is limited information available to aid in the development of management strategies to limit its explosive spread.
Kayaks can’t pass through it. Boat motors get tangled by its long strands and stall. Coveted fishing holes have been abandoned by anglers, and swimmers won’t swim in it. Scientists are also addressing concerns about hydrilla’s threat to the ecosystem, including osprey and bald eagles. They fear that the Connecticut River strain harbors cyanobacteria, which produces a neurotoxin deadly to birds of prey.
Rhea Drozenko, river steward for the Connecticut River Conservancy, pointed to the Mattabesset River as an example of hydrilla’s explosive nature. “It created this huge mat, and some native plants couldn’t stand a chance. It created a sea of hydrilla.”
Fortunately for Petzold, and others who own businesses or real estate, enjoy recreational activities or cherish the 200-mile-long river’s aesthetics and ecology, hope is on the horizon.
Petzold’s two marinas, Chester Boat Basin and Portland Boat Works, are among five sites in the Connecticut River Watershed selected for testing of aquatic herbicides this summer as part of an ongoing hydrilla research project by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).
Other test sites include Chapman Pond in East Haddam, Keeney Cove in Glastonbury and Selden Cove in Lyme.
Scientists hope to reduce and control hydrilla, while protecting plants, fish and the long-term health of the river, as well as its $1 billion-plus contribution to Connecticut’s economy.
The results of that research could also bring a sigh of relief inland, where 10 lakes, so far, have been identified as hosts to hydrilla, which is spread between bodies of water primarily by unsuspecting boat owners.
East Twin Lake in Salisbury was the first lake outside of the Connecticut River watershed to identify an infestation late last summer. That number is expected to rise once the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) concludes its planned inspections of every state-owned boat launch throughout Connecticut.
Invasive aquatic plants in the Connecticut River.Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station
In 2021, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), announced that he is leading an effort to secure $100 million over four years in federal funding for a multistate effort to control hydrilla in the Connecticut River Watershed, and in June, he announced $5 million in federal funding for the USACE demonstration project.
“Senator Blumenthal was here. He pledged his support in getting government funding for this continual battle,” noted Petzold, who referred to hydrilla as “the biggest threat beyond our control” in the nearly 80-year history of his family business.
The funds will also support other goals including preventing hydrilla from spreading into coves, tributaries and inland waters, improving surveillance and detecting new infestations early and responding quickly to control and eradicate new infestations.
In addition, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), through the State Aquatic Invasive Species (AIS) Grant Program, made $500,000 available to municipalities, state agencies and nonprofit organizations to reduce impacts of aquatic species, including hydrilla, on inland waters.
Connecticut awarded approximately $952,700 to 46 projects statewide during the first three years of the AIS Grant Program.
As stakeholders await the results of the USACE’s demonstration project, already there are encouraging signs.
Petzold pointed to the gently rippling water surrounding the boat basin, which he said had not been that clear during peak boating season for several years. Around the slips, strands of sickly-looking hydrilla floated among dead leaves, victims of herbicidal dosing.
He credited the bipartisan support of lawmakers on the local, state and federal level for going “above and beyond” in supporting and communicating with stakeholders.
“In my mind, it’s made a world of difference. We’ll see what the test studies reveal, but it seems like it is doing the trick here, at least in the basin,” said the marina owner, who credited DEEP and USACE for working together effectively and keeping stakeholders in the loop and respond to their concerns.
“At this point I guess there’s no cure for it, but we have to figure out a way to stop it from spreading and growing as best we can.”
Beth Rye of Chester, who owns two vessels, a 20-foot Grady-White and 35-foot Viking, was ecstatic about being able to navigate in and out of the slips without her boats’ props getting snarled in hydrilla. “It’s gone!” she announced with glee.
Relief for some raises red flags for others, noted Drozenko, particularly when aquatic herbicides are involved.
“There has been a lot of concern about the use of herbicidal treatments, especially in very fragile, ecologically sensitive zones.”
Lakes and ponds, she said, are easier than flowing rivers to treat, as they are more contained and especially if the infestation is caught early, as in Salisbury’s East Twin Lake.
“Whereas if hydrilla moves into the Housatonic River,” the river steward cautioned, ‘it will have the same impact as in our river.”
Coming next: What’s at stake for Salisbury’s six lakes in 2025 and beyond.
Dan Baker, left, and Daniel Latzman at Barrington Hall in Great Barrington.
The partnership behind Barrington Hall began long before the building itself. Both Baker and Latzman grew up on Long Island, spent more than a decade in New York City, and eventually found their way to the Berkshires, drawn by the desire for something different. What they didn’t realize at first was just how closely their lives had already mirrored one another.
They were born in the same hospital, a year apart. Their families had distant connections. They even played on the same soccer team — never meeting, but moving through the same spaces. It wasn’t until they became neighbors in Egremont about five years ago that those parallels came into focus.
“In hindsight, it feels inevitable,” Latzman said. “But it was actually extremely random that we ended up here.”
From the beginning, Barrington Hall was meant to be a place people return to, not for any one event, but for the experience of being there. On any given week, the space might host a jazz performance, a dance party, a songwriter circle or a children’s event. Some nights bring in touring acts. Others highlight local creatives. The variety is intentional and so is the atmosphere.
“It’s about people,” Baker said. “It’s about being present.”
Inside Barrington Hall.Provided
Baker and Latzman are keenly aware of the world outside with its constant barrage of information, political conflicts, a culture that pulls people deeper into their screens. Barrington Hall offers a way out of that noise.
“A little bit of a bubble,” Latzman said. “A place to step away from everything else.”
During a recent event, they noticed something telling: a full room of people dancing, talking, engaged — and almost no one on their phone.
“That’s when you know something is working,” Baker said.
Taking over a beloved local space comes with responsibility, one Baker and Latzman have met by honoring the building’s traditions while also expanding them.
“We didn’t feel obligated,” Latzman said. “We felt honored.”
Part of what makes the space distinct is its versatility. Large enough to host more than 250 people, yet intimate enough to feel personal, it fills a gap in the local landscape, serving a wide range of people and bringing different groups together in the same space.
“We want people to feel like, if something’s happening here, it’s worth checking out,” Latzman said.
They are carefully balancing community access with the realities of running a business, with an eye toward the long term.
“We want this to be here in 20 years,” Latzman said.
Inside Barrington Hall.Provided
That vision extends beyond the building itself — future collaborations, expanded programming, a growing role in shaping the cultural life of the Berkshires. But at its core, the mission remains simple: to create a place where people can gather, a place that feels alive.
And perhaps most importantly, to create a place where, if only for a few hours, people can step away from the noise of the world and enjoy being together.
When asked who they’re most excited to host next, their answer was immediate: The Mammals on April 10 and Lee Ross, a one-man party band from Massachusetts, scheduled to perform on May 1.
For more information and tickets, visit
barringtonhallgb.com
Gail Rothschild with her painting “Dead Sea Linen III (73 x 58 inches, 2024, acrylic on canvas.
Her work begins, often, with something small: a scrap of linen from the Judean desert, dating “to a time before the notion of ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine;’” a fragment so diminished it barely registers as an object; or a rare indigo-dyed child’s head cloth from Tutankhamen’s tomb.
“I call them portraits of ancient linen,” she said.
Rothschild grew up in Greenwich and studied drawing and painting at Yale University. “That was kind of my first love,” she said. But she quickly veered toward something more collective, working with Peter Schumann at the Bread and Puppet Theater, building papier-mâché puppets and participating in a kind of performance-based activism that blurred art and politics.
“After Yale, I got out of school and thought‘Wait a second. I don’t want to paint anymore. I need to work with people in communities and make things.’”
She moved to Brooklyn and began working in public schools, developing projects rooted in collaboration and local history. The projects were ambitious, research-driven, and often confrontational. At the University of Massachusetts, she recalled asking students: “Did you know that Amherst was named for Jeffrey Amherst, who was responsible for giving blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans? Why don’t we look into that?’”
There were sculptures, letters to watchdog groups, installations. She worked on four such projects a year, she said, until the pace became unsustainable. “At some point I just said, ‘I’m exhausted. I’m going back to the studio.’”
What brought her back was a book, “Prehistoric Textiles ” by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Inside, she encountered an image of a 7,000-year-old textile, unraveling.
“It said to me, ‘this could be a great big abstract painting’,” she said. “What does it mean that this textile, this thing that used to be a Cartesian grid and over time has gone back to nature?”
That question became a kind of axis for her work. “There is this cusp between nature and culture,” she said. Early on, she avoided textiles with imagery, drawn instead to the raw language of fiber itself. But eventually, even that boundary softened. A project with the Godwin-Ternbach Museum introduced her to Egyptian textiles — Christian, pagan, Greek, Roman influences colliding in woven form.
Gail Rothschild’s “Esquina Decorada” (52 x 52 inches, 2022, acrylic on canvas)Gail Rothschild
What followed was a deepening relationship with museums and, crucially, with conservators. Institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and collections in Berlin and Paris began sending her images of textile fragments, sometimes pieces she has still never seen in person.
“It’s almost easier for me to transform it when I haven’t seen it,” she said.
Her process is both precise and intuitive. She grids the canvas and the source image, drawing freehand to “honor what the object is.” For a time, she works closely from the photograph. Then something shifts. “At some point I’ll say, ‘It’s a painting. It’s got to talk to itself,’ and then I stop looking at the photograph.”
What emerges is layered, luminous and muscular. “Sometimes people say, ‘Do you miss making sculpture?’ and I say, ‘I never stopped.’”
You feel that in the surfaces: the tension of threads pulling apart, the sense that something is both forming and dissolving at once. Even the backgrounds — often ambiguous, atmospheric — are not neutral. “It’s really more about feeling the space around the object,” she said, especially as she considers how ancient fragments are mounted on modern fabrics. “I get to invent an entirely other language.”
Some of her most arresting work is on the monumental textiles of The Met Cloisters, where medieval tapestries, some towering more than a dozen feet, are slowly, painstakingly conserved. It’s in the conservation labs that Rothschild has observed the physical reality of these works: their own weight pulling them apart, threads breaking under centuries of strain. Conservators insert new threads to stabilize them and Rothschild documents this process. “There’s a kind of poignancy to their work,” Rothschild said, “because as hard as we work to conserve the objects of our past, in the greater cosmic scheme of time, it’s only temporary. There’s something beautiful about that.”
Time operates on multiple levels in Rothschild’s work. There is the time of the object —thousands of years, in some cases — and the time of the painting, which unfolds over months. “Once I start working on something, I can’t stop,” she said. “But then it’ll rest for a while and I may change it, add layers.”
And then there is the time of attention itself, the way looking can tip into obsession, into pattern-seeking that doesn’t quite turn off. Rothschild is aware of that edge.
“I have to make myself stop or I just see patterns everywhere and I can’t stop, really,” she laughed. “That’s why I’ve built in other things I need to do in my life like take the dogs for a hike or, you know, volunteer at the Sharon Land Trust… otherwise I go a little nuts. And it wouldn’t be good painting either.”
A painting session, for her, has its own its own arc. “There’s kind of a trajectory for every work session. I might be repeating something and suddenly it looks linear. The language I started painting with may change by the end and I think, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna have to go back and repaint that.’”
But then, she said, there is a pause.
“I kind of step back and say, ‘No, this painting can hold both. That’s part of its history. There’s the history of the object but then there’s the history of the painting.’”
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