Aviation icon Curtiss gets hometown park

A patch of lakefront property is being turned into a park honoring the Wright brothers' archrival, Glenn H. Curtiss, after a lengthy feud over whether to preserve it.

Curtiss flew his bamboo-and-fabric June Bug over a vineyard for 1 minute, 42.5 seconds on July 4, 1908, outside his tiny hometown of Hammondsport in western New York. It was the nation's first officially observed flight exceeding a kilometer (0.6 mile).

The feud over the land, where Curtiss later carried out test flights for the world's first seaplane, came to an end last weekend when the town bought eight acres of overgrown lakefront land from a real estate developer for $900,000.

That money showed up in two chunks from anonymous donors — a $500,000 check delivered via a California charity and $400,000 offered by a local benefactor. Michael Doyle, a large-scale landowner and winery operator who acquired the contested land in the 1990s, came down from his $1.1 million asking price.

"I consider this a miraculous 12th-hour turnabout," said Geoffrey Grimsman, a part-time resident who reinvigorated a decade-old conservation campaign in 2004, when he suggested naming the proposed public park for Hammondsport's famous son.

There's already a small Curtiss Museum on the edge of town. But the efforts to create an 11-acre Glenn Curtiss Memorial Park were upended in 2004 when a referendum to issue $1.3 million in bonds was narrowly voted down.

The land comprises abandoned railroad property, an unruly mass of brush, trees and tall grass, and up to 175 feet of lake frontage, said Richard Gardner, who was voted out of office recently after 14 years as town supervisor. In the spring, Gardner expects to join a volunteer effort to spruce up the tract, install a few benches and picnic tables and map out walking trails.

"We really want it to be a low-key place," he said.

The village looks a lot like it did back in Curtiss' heyday, but physical reminders of its taciturn titan, who died in 1930 at age 52, are hard to find.

The Wright brothers made the first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. Curtiss' aircraft innovations swiftly eclipsed those of Orville and Wilbur Wright and helped fight two world wars. In 1911, he created the first seaplane, earning renown as "the father of naval aviation." And from 1915 to 1918, he turned Hammondsport into the airplane manufacturing capital of America.

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On the Net:

http://www.earlyaviators.com/ecurti05.htm