The Piermont Pier Is Getting Money Again. The Closed End Still Isn't.

Walk the pier on any clear evening this September and you will hit the rope before you hit the river view everyone associates with Piermont. The barrier across the concrete end has been there since November 2024, close to two years now, long enough that most people who live here have stopped registering it as news and started treating it as furniture. Then word goes around that the Village just put money into the pier again, and the assumption resets: they're finally fixing it.

They're not. Not that part, anyway.

What Closed, and Why the Money Isn't Fixing It

The closure traces back to a routine safety check. Piermont's volunteer fire department, which runs one of the few dive rescue teams in Rockland County, took boats out to inspect the underside of the concrete substructure built in the 1950s and found significant decay. What they documented went to an outside engineering firm, Blue Shore Engineering, which came back with a warning about several spots at imminent risk of failure. Village officials didn't see it coming. Mayor Bruce Tucker put it plainly at the time:

"We are going to need some major money here. If anyone has any money, we'd love to talk to them."

The engineering read was more nuanced than a flat condemnation. The firm called the structure viable overall and suggested a five to eight year reassessment window, but flagged that a log or ice sheet striking one of the already-cracked piles could bring a section down without warning. That distinction, viable in general but vulnerable to one bad impact, is why the Village closed the end as a precaution rather than announcing a demolition. Nearly two years later, no funding source for a structural repair has surfaced in any public meeting record, and the rope is still up.

Two Different Ledgers

Here's the part that gets lost when the pier comes up in conversation: the Village has been spending real money on this asset in 2026, just not on the piles that are cracked.

At the July 14 Board of Trustees meeting, alongside routine items like AED equipment for the police department and a new roof for the DPW building, trustees approved a $15,000 bond resolution for what's listed simply as the Piermont Pier Tree Project. That line sits comfortably next to a longer-running effort that has nothing to do with concrete repair. Back in 2023, Sustainable Piermont completed a planting project on the pier funded through a combination of state DOT and DEC grants, introducing salt-tolerant native species along the shoreline to slow erosion and rebuild the riparian buffer. A related pilot for a living shoreline on the south side of the Piermont Marsh proved workable, and the Village has been pursuing funding to extend that treatment to the pier's south edge.

The tree project on this year's bond schedule reads like a continuation of that same environmental work, not a pivot toward the collapsed end. It's landscaping and shoreline stabilization money, budgeted in the same modest range as benches for Bridge Street Park, not the kind of capital outlay a concrete rebuild would require.

So the pier is, in effect, two separate problems on two separate ledgers. One is an ecological maintenance project moving forward in small, grant-sized increments. The other is a structural liability still waiting on the kind of money Mayor Tucker was describing when he said the Village would need to find it somewhere.

The Rowing Club Didn't Wait for Either One

If there's a group that has simply worked around the closure rather than waiting on it, it's the Piermont Rowing Club. The club's roots go back to the late 1800s, when it operated alongside the old Nyack Rowing Association, both clubs launching from the Hudson and meeting up for competition at Rockland Lake's Farmer's Day Picnic. Today's version runs its season April through November, weather permitting, out of the launch area near Parelli Park at the pier's base, the same stretch that never closed.

Every other spring the club runs a Learn to Row program for adults, typically about ten beginners per class, teaching sculling rather than sweep rowing. New members get paired with a mentor for the rest of the season and row with experienced members in the boat during their first year. None of that programming touches the roped-off end. It happens entirely on the open two-thirds, which is presumably why the club's agreement with the Village showed up on the same July 14 agenda as the Tree Project bond, two unrelated pieces of pier business getting handled in the same meeting because they both, in their own way, depend on the part that still works.

What Still Works, Almost Two Years In

For everyone who isn't rowing competitively, the open stretch of the pier is still doing what it has always done. It measures out to roughly two miles round trip and takes most walkers thirty to sixty minutes, an easy, mostly flat route that draws a steady mix of joggers, dog walkers, and people timing their arrival for sunset. Parking along the pier itself is by permit only, so the practical move is to leave the car in the public lot near the start and walk in. The pier gates close at 9 PM, and the tide has a habit of creeping over the access road right around closing time, which matters if you're driving something low to the ground.

The rest of a typical loop hasn't changed either.

• The Piermont Farmers' Market runs Sundays at Flywheel Park, the same park that holds the historic flywheel once used to power the Piermont Paper Company back in 1902.
• Otto's Full Service, a roughly 130-seat New American spot, occupies the old Gerhardt's Garage building on Piermont Avenue.
• The Turning Point keeps its long run as the village's intimate live music venue going.
• Reilly's Public House still runs its weekly trivia and karaoke nights.
• The hand-cranked Sparkill Creek drawbridge, built in 1880 and the only one of its kind left in Rockland County, still connects the village side to the trailhead for Tallman Mountain State Park.

None of this needed the pier's end to be open. It has been running on the same footprint since before the rope went up, which is part of why the closure hasn't reshaped daily life here the way a total shutdown might have elsewhere.

The Honest Read

If you're waiting for a Village announcement that the concrete end has reopened, this year's spending isn't a signal that it's coming. The money moving right now is aimed at keeping the shoreline from washing out and the plantings established, useful work, but a different category of problem than the one Blue Shore Engineering flagged in 2024. The structural fix still needs the kind of funding nobody has named a source for yet.

What the pier actually offers this fall is what it's offered since the closure went up: a two-mile out and back with a rope at the far end, a rowing club still putting boats in the water a few hundred feet from that rope, and a village center around Flywheel Park and Piermont Avenue that never needed the whole pier to keep its rhythm.

For more on what makes Piermont worth knowing beyond the pier, from its Hudson River access to its walkable village core, visit Catherine Hotaling's guide to the neighborhood, or reach out directly if you're thinking through what a home in this part of the Lower Hudson could look like for you.