Tesla's former Wardenclyffe property is up for sale...

[Ragnarok]

...and the current owners couldn't give a damn. Housing?!?

If I had a spare 1.65 million lying around... I might even consider it. But I'd want to restore the (formerly beautiful) old brick lab building.

http://www.longislandpress.com/2010/09/16/teslas-last-stand-on-long-island/

Snip:

"Here, Tesla’s creation and its secrets rot, neglected, in an abandoned lot behind a barbed-wire fence obscured by weeds, right here on Long Island. Soon, however, they may be gone forever.
“This is his last standing lab in the world,” says Assemb. Marc Alessi (D-Shoreham). “It’s not just a Long Island landmark or even a national landmark. This is a world-wide historic site because this man has contributed so much to the progress of mankind.”

By the end of this month more than a dozen soil samples will be taken from a Superfund site in Shoreham and given to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Once the tests are completed and no further signs of contamination are found, the DEC can finally clear the 16 acres for sale. The former industrial property, where photo products were manufactured from 1939 until 1987, is now zoned for 2-acre housing. The Agfa Corporation’s current asking price is $1.65 million, but it’s negotiable, the company says. What’s not negotiable is that it must be sold. Donating it to a not-for-profit group is out of the question.

“We could sell it today. We just need to find a buyer,” says Christopher M. Santomassimo, the corporation’s general counsel and secretary for its North America operations.

The company is paying for the final phase of the DEC study as part of its legal obligation under terms of the State Superfund clean-up, having spent more than $5 million since it bought the property in 1969 from Peerless Photo Products. You can understand why they might want to unload it. The Agfa Corporation, already buffeted by the digital revolution, has been hit hard in the recession, and it hasn’t made money from this photo-products facility in decades. In 1983, the DEC said the hazardous waste on the site, from heavy metals like cadmium, silver and lead, posed “a significant threat” and immediate action was required. The property is located over a single-source aquifer, and for years Peerless had dumped its wastewater into a man-made lagoon about 800 feet by 400 feet long near where the old railroad tracks used to be. Agfa signed a remedial agreement with the DEC in 1991.

“Peerless polluted the property and they got stuck with the clean-up,” said a representative of Corporate Realty Services, which is representing Agfa. “We have some people looking at it, but there’s nothing serious at this point.”

That could be the best news about Tesla in a very long time.".... (more at link)

Yah, right.

Sighhh... the world just really sucks sometimes...

R.

[k-os]

If they hadn't polluted the water (and of course, if I had the $), I'd love to have that property. Tesla was a brilliant and fascinating man. I've read everything I could about him, and it's never enough.

[keehah]

Inventor Tesla's Plant Nearing Completion
Brooklyn Eagle, February 8, 1902
http://www.teslascience.org/pages/twp/tunnels.htm

Some of the farmers who come to Wardenclyffe to send their products to this city look at Mr. Tesla's tower, which is situated directly opposite the railroad station, and shake their heads sadly. They are inclined to take a skeptical view regarding the feasibility of the wireless "world telegraphy" idea, but yet Tesla's transmitting tower as it stands in lonely grandeur and boldly silhouetted against the sky on a wide clearing on the concession is a source of great satisfaction and of some mystification to them all. "It is a mighty fine tower," said one food farmer to a visitor last week. "The breeze up there is something grand of a Summer evening, and you can see the Sound and all the steamers that go by. We are tired, though, trying to figure out why he put it here instead of at Coney Island." While the tower itself is very "stagey" and picturesque, it is the wonders that are supposed to be hidden in the earth underneath it that excite the curiosity of the population in the little settlement. In the center of the wide concrete platform which serves as a base for the structure there is a wooden affair very much like the companionway on an ocean steamer. The tower and the enclosure in which it has been built are being carefully guarded these days, and no one except Mr. Tesla's own men is allowed to approach it. Only they have been allowed as much as the briefest peep down the companionway. Mr. Scherff, the private secretary of the inventor, told an inquirer that the companionway led to a small drainage passage built for the purpose of keeping the ground about the tower dry. But such of the villagers as saw the tower constructed tell a different story. They declare that it leads to a well-like excavation as deep as the tower is high with walls of masonwork and a circular stairway leading to the bottom. From there, they say, tunnels have been built in all directions, until the entire ground below the little plain on which the tower is raised has been honeycombed with subterranean passages. They tell with awe how Mr. Tesla, on his weekly visits to Wardenclyffe, spends as much time in the underground passages as he does on the tower or in the handsome laboratory and workshop erected beside it, and where the power plant for the world telegraph has been installed.

No instruments have been installed as yet in the transmitter, nor has Mr. Tesla vouchsafed any description of what they will be like. But in his article he announces that he will transmit from the tower an electric wave of a total maximum activity of ten million horse power. This, he says, will be possible with a plant of but 100 horse power, by the use of a magnifying transmitter of his own invention and certain artifices which he promises to make known in due course. What he expects to accomplish is summed up in the closing paragraph as follows:

"When the great truth, accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed, is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by virtue of this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurated and it is shown that a telegraphic message, almost as secret and non-interferable as a thought, can be transmitted to any terrestrial distance, the sound of the human voice, with all its intonations and inflections faithfully and instantly reproduced at any other point of the globe, the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying light, heat or motive power, anywhere--on sea, or land, or high in the air--humanity will be like an antheap stirred up with a stick. See the excitement coming!"