Eliza Jane Darling

Dr. Eliza Jane Darling lives in the Hamilton County town of Benson, is the former Hamilton County historian and teaches remotely as an associate adjunct professor in the Anthropology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Adirondack Gentrification: No Country for Young Women (Final Installment)

August 6, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling 10 Comments

Since environmental preservation has in part contributed to the gentrification of wilderness, it may seem logical to conclude that deregulation is the solution to the Adirondack housing crisis. It is not.

While the peculiar form such administration has taken in this part of the world leaves much to be desired, the accomplishment of the Adirondack green movement is still nothing short of remarkable: it has compelled the State to discipline capital’s monstrous appetite for profitable nature, and it has held the line even amidst the neoliberal feeding frenzy that has consumed much of the world in the last half-century. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: No Country for Young Women (Final Installment)

Adirondack Gentrification: Resortification & Urbanization (Part 6)

August 5, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling Leave a Comment

Rural gentrification has appeared in almost every region, from Big Sky territory to the Rockies to Prairie Country to New England to the American South. Outside the United States, it has been documented in Spain, Turkey, Sweden, New Zealand, France, Canada, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, and especially Britain.

While the details vary from place to place, most gentrifying rural communities suffer the same consequences: the displacement of the rural working class, the decline of available space for social reproduction, and the aging of the vestigial population. Yet if rural America is united in its symptoms, it is divided by its disease. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Resortification & Urbanization (Part 6)

Adirondack Gentrification: Seasonal Development & The Rent Sink (Part 5)

August 4, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling Leave a Comment

In the spring of 1989, the Adirondack working class received an alarming wake-up call in the unlikely form of Robin Leach. The Adirondacks, according to the garrulous host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, were a hidden jewel just waiting to be discovered by travelers with a taste for wilderness and the purchasing power to claim a slice of nature-at-its-moneyed-best for their very own. The show had even gone so far as to list the remote and rugged mountains as an “upcoming hot spot for jet-setters” in its “Guide to the World’s Best Places.”

Leach’s prediction had been well borne out by the mid-1990s. “Rough It Like A Rockefeller,” proclaimed one strapline in the travel section of the Wall Street Journal, while an article in Vanity Fair encouraged readers to go “camp hopping in the haute Adirondacks” and Travel and Leisure billed it as a place where “the notion of escape endures.” Such articles, liberally sprinkled with posh photographic layouts depicting the rich at play in tastefully rustic lodges nestled on the shores of gleaming silver lakes, recommended such accommodations as The Point in Lake Placid, where guests could take in the clean mountain air for a mere $1300 a night.

Beemers had been traded for sport utility vehicles, and the Adirondacks, it appeared, had become an exclusive retreat for well-heeled consumers seeking respite from their taxing cosmopolitan lives in the newly fashionable wilderness. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Seasonal Development & The Rent Sink (Part 5)

Adirondack Gentrification: Wilderness Disinvestment (Part 4)

August 4, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling Leave a Comment

Rolling Stone once called Times Square “the sleaziest block in America.” The shoe fit in the early 1980s, when the crossroads of the world was the Skid Row of the east coast.

Today, a building in Times Square will run you somewhere in the vicinity of $600 million, but not long ago the neighborhood met the primary precondition for gentrification: disinvestment, a malady common to many inner city districts at the time.

Deindustrialization was one factor in urban depreciation. Suburbanization, rezoning and public retrenchment were others. All added up to the same sum total of cheap urban space beckoning profitable reinvestment. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Wilderness Disinvestment (Part 4)

Adirondack Gentrification: Depletion (The Devil’s Due, Part 3)

August 3, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling Leave a Comment

In the autumn of 2015, the Adirondack Research Consortium in partnership with the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government held a panel to discuss the diminishing demography of the Adirondacks. The all-male affair it convened to lead this conversation was typically partisan, casually excluding the perspectives, positions and participation of those primarily burdened with the labor of Adirondack propagation.

While this august assembly of middle-aged men sat pondering the problem with pie charts and furrowed brows, back home in the mountains, the keystone species of the demographic ecosystem – Adirondack mothers – got on with the business of raising children in a climate that is notably inimical to their interests even within the auspices of nation that is generally hostile to the working conditions of those who shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for social reproduction. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Depletion (The Devil’s Due, Part 3)

Adirondack Gentrification: Dispossession & Chronic Displacement (Part 2)

August 2, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling 7 Comments

The shortage of children that closed the Raquette Lake School a decade ago was not due to a housing deficit. On the contrary, Raquette was chockablock with housing when the school failed, much of it sitting empty for most of the year.

While Raquette boasts some unusual features – some of its structures are accessible only by lake – it shares this same predicament with most other gentrifying Adirondack places, lake-locked or otherwise: plenty of lodging and nowhere to live.

How can any community with so many vacant dwellings suffer from a housing crisis? [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Dispossession & Chronic Displacement (Part 2)

The Devil’s Due: Adirondack Gentrification & Environmental Justice (Part 1: Displacement)

August 1, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling 11 Comments

“Just close the fucking thing.”

These words of quiet despair were uttered twenty years ago in the aftermath of a meeting at the Raquette Lake School, whose imminent demise was increasingly apparent to the people of the village. The atmosphere at the Tap Room, the unofficial community center where attendees had decamped to face the inevitable over a beer, was raw.

The man who issued the fatal prognosis relished it neither as a parent nor an alumnus. But the writing was on the wall. Pupils had dwindled to single digits, too few for a play or a baseball team, never mind the district budget for utilities, maintenance, transportation and salaries. With no babies on the horizon, the current crop of children would age out, and there would soon be none left to educate. [Read more…] about The Devil’s Due: Adirondack Gentrification & Environmental Justice (Part 1: Displacement)

1932 Adirondack Killing Sparks Questions About The Role Of Race

May 6, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling Leave a Comment

Ernie Blanchard and Lester Turner who lodged an indignant complaint against an unnamed black man living in the Adirondack woods in 1932 were no strangers to crime. They were well acquainted with a range of infractions – from illegal construction to rum-running to illicit hunting. For some of those crimes they were fined, others were the subject of casual boasts long after the fact. [Read more…] about 1932 Adirondack Killing Sparks Questions About The Role Of Race

Stories of 1932 Shooting of Black Man in the Adirondacks Questioned

April 28, 2021 by Eliza Jane Darling 3 Comments

The area at the center of this map — near O’Neil Flow, just southwest of Blue Mountain in the Central Adirondacks — is where in 1932 a group of white men, including state troopers and gamekeepers, hunted and killed a black man who was living in the woods.

The black man was never named, and newspapers exaggerated his size and his actions. [Read more…] about Stories of 1932 Shooting of Black Man in the Adirondacks Questioned