FROM THE ARCHIVES: History for Sale

There’s a bit of a tussle going on in New York’s real estate market. And, no, it has nothing to do with the global economic downturn or the collapse of the real estate bubble here in the U.S.---at least, not directly.

There’s a fight over a dilapidated 16-acre Long Island commercial complex that’s been empty for over a decade. It has changed hands a lot over the years, but its original owner and builder was Nikola Tesla.

Between 1901 and 1917, Tesla was engrossed---as only Tesla could be, given his obsession-compulsive disorder---in building a giant tower. He wanted to broadcast to the world---not just words, radio and sound . . . but also, electricity.

Indeed, Wardenclyffe Tower was Tesla’s attempt to create a giant wireless electric tower. And, although it was never completed before Tesla’s quirks and rather deep debt caught up with him, remnants of the tower (its base) and the lab (the building) remain.

That’s where the fight comes in.

Agfa Corp. owns the complex, and they have since well before this blogger was born. They built parts and parcels for their well-known imaging systems on site for two decades before the doors closed in 1992. (Since then, the corporation, with a push from the state of New York, has been cleaning up the contamination from the chemicals used in the process.) Now, Agfa has put the entire complex up for sale.

For decades, a series of science associations and “friends of Tesla” groups have been trying to get the site declared a national monument, registered as a part of history. But, it’s been a slow and laborious process aggravated by any number of issues: cost, red tape, rotating association memberships, lack of interest by the state representatives, the site’s problems with contamination. Now, there’s a sense of real urgency, given that the real estate notice offers to level the property for potential buyers, effectively erasing Tesla’s “million-dollar folly,” as newspapers in 1917 called it.

Now, here’s where the economy does play in: Agfra has said they are open to legitimate offers from groups wanting to save the complex and convert it into a Tesla museum, but it has made quite clear that it cannot afford to donate the property for such a purpose.

The battle is ongoing, and no one can predict its outcome. Will Tesla finally get a museum from Wardenclyffe, or will it be flattened for “progress”? Will nostalgia win, or will the bottom line?
Tesla was an odd character, perhaps the classic view of a “mad scientist,” only made more potent by the various disorders he exhibited that were never accurately diagnosed, by his tendency to experiment on a big level and send bolts of electricity through the sky, and by his extreme focus on scientific ideas that seemed magical and supernatural to the average citizen. But, he was brilliant. He won the radio battle with Marconi---though it took a Supreme Court ruling after his death to confirm that. He designed the first hydro electric plant, and, oh yes, one other small little factor: He electrified the world, since his alternating current won out over Edison’s direct current.

This round, though, might go to Edison. Wardenclyffe, which is basically “down the street” from the Edison Museum remains a ghost of a dream, while Edison already has his architectural place in American history.