Tuckahoe Residents Raise Red Flag Over Plan For Hotel On Old Quarry

TUCKAHOE, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- Plans to build a hotel at an old stone quarry in Westchester County have left some area residents fuming.

As CBS2's Lou Young reported, the land has some buried history that many in the neighborhood would rather not disturb.

From the air, it is a vacant lot along Marbledale Road in Tuckahoe. The proposed development on the site has some excited, but business owner Rachel Zalottev is not one of them.

"Horrified, absolutely horrified," Zalottev said of her reaction to the development plan.

Zalottev does not like the idea of a hotel being built on the old marble quarry – a historic 19th century pit turned garbage dump, and worries about what might be churned up.

The marble from the quarry went into structures such as Federal Hall on Wall Street, Brooklyn Borough Hall, the arch in Washington Square, and even the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.

But Joseph Marinello of Tuckahoe said once stone was cut out, the hole was filled with decades' worth of trash.

"The Village of Tuckahoe dumped for free, the Village of Pelham dumped for free, the village of Bronxville dumped for free, the town of Eastchester dumped for free, and everything they burnt up at the incinerators was dumped down here," Marinello said.

The hotel is proposed for the center of what was a series of three quarries. Some are concerned it might attract a bad element to Tuckahoe, but the most vocal critics said it is the environment they are really worried about.

"We are pro-development," Zalottev said, "but you cannot develop unless you know what it is that you're going to encounter."

There are still pieces of marble at the quarry site. The developer, Bill Weinberg, told CBS2's Young by phone that his analysis of what is at the bottom of the site is mostly demolition and construction debris and some incinerator ash.

It was a landfill, he admits, but hardly the Love Canal superfund site upstate.

Tuckahoe Mayor Steven Ecklond said he is waiting for the state to evaluate the developer's soil tests, but he believes going ahead with the project is probably best.

"Most of the site, if it's going to be a hotel, is all just going to be blacktop because it's a parking area," Ecklond said, "so it'll be capped, in essence, with blacktop."

The quarry hotel project goes before the planning board in Tuckahoe late next month.