CARL HULTBERG: 1950-2019

A NYC Ecological Visionary Passes On

Carl Rudolph Hultberg, a little acknowledged influential figure in New York City ecological politics and a pioneer of some of alternatives in place today, died at his home in New Hampshire on June 20, 2019. He was 69 years old.

Carl was born in the East Village, and returned to the neighborhood in 1985 after a childhood spent in New England and Europe, and a period living in North Carolina. Upon his return, he immediately dove into New York City’s burgeoning eco activist scene. Carl’s special project in those years was the Village Green Recycling Team, one of the first efforts at a recycling program in the city—picking up recyclables from participating individuals and businesses across the Village (east and west), and getting it to recycling centers in the Bronx.

The Village Green Recycling Team and sibling Lower East Side Ecology Center (started a few years later by volunteers from the former), by their very existence, put pressure on the city to launch an official recycling program. Environmental groups were at this time lobbying the City Council to pass a bill mandating such a program, after much resistance from the Sanitation Department. The enviros could point to these grassroots initiatives as evidence that recycling could work in the megalopolis; a bill was finally passed in 1989. Carl would subsequently become the head of the recycling program at New York University.

The Village Green Recycling Team used distinctive locally-built top loading work tricycles, and Carl became an avid enthusiast and promoter of experiments in bicycle and human-powered vehicle design. He was actively involved in the struggle of bicycle messengers to keep Fifth, Park and Madison avenues open to bikes after the Koch administration issued an order banning them from those Midtown thoroughfares during working hours in 1988. This was the first time that messengers really got organized, in what Carl called “a spontaneous American labor movement.” They repeatedly rode en masse, in defiance of authorities, and ultimately prevailed in getting the ban overturned. Carl was riding right along with them and promoting their cause as an activist and photographer. These actions presaged the Critical Mass bike rides that took off in the ’90s, cyclists making the point with their bodies to demand their right to the road.

Again, this demand would later be taken up by the bureaucracy under Mayor Bloomberg, and dedicated bike lanes began appearing on many Manhattan streets — with stretches of Broadway now closed to cars entirely.

For several years during this period, Carl co-produced the “Cycling and Recycling” radio show on New York’s WBAI with Charlie Komanoff, then the head of the bicycle advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. Carl also served on the board of TA.

Carl was also involved in the New York Greens, a nascent attempt at a Green Party in the city; in struggles to save threatened community gardens (especially Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden); and street theater groups, such as the All Species Parade, in which art activists dressed up in homespun costumes to impersonate their favorite endangered animals.

Finally, Carl was an avid musicologist. He was the grandson of Rudi Blesh, the famous jazz critic and promoter, and among his other projects was the Rudi Blesh Ragtime Society music appreciation club. His cavernous antebellum apartment on East Fourth Street that he inherited from Rudi was packed almost to capacity with vinyl--an international collection spanning ragtime, jazz, blues, rock and way beyond. Late night cannabis-fueled listening sessions in which I mined Carl’s record collection for music to play on my own WBAI program cemented our friendship.

In 2006, Carl took a buy-out from his landlord (the building was subsequently turned into a luxury hotel), and moved up to Danbury, NH, where he, naturally, headed up the village recycling program there. He died after a period of declining health.

--By Bill Weinberg [Carl self-published a book of photo journalism, GARDEN OF EDEN: THE ECO EIGHTIES IN NEW YORK CITY. He also authored the self-published RUDI AND ME: THE RUDI BLESH STORY (Told by His Grandson).]