New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

development

The First Major Test at APA for Governor Hochul & Chairman Ernst

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White Lake Granit QuarryWill the new boss be the same as the old boss?

We’ll know the answer to this question when the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) meets on January 13-14th. On its agenda is a draft permit for a new granite quarry in White Lake in the town of Forestport in the Western Adirondacks.

This project is widely opposed by neighboring landowners, residents, and property owners in the general area. There have been very few private land development projects in the last two decades that have engendered such a high level of public involvement and concern. [Read more…] about The First Major Test at APA for Governor Hochul & Chairman Ernst

New Road To Open Access To St. Lawrence County Wild Areas

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DEC LogoThe New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has announced the amendment of the Kildare Conservation Easement and the Five Mile Conservation Easement Recreation Management Plans (RMPs) to include new opportunities for public access to recreation in the Adirondack Park. [Read more…] about New Road To Open Access To St. Lawrence County Wild Areas

The Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

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Saving Americas CitiesThe most recent episode of Empire State Engagements features a conversation with Dr. Lizabeth Cohen Professor in the Department of History at Harvard, who discussed her Bancroft Prize-winning book Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). [Read more…] about The Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

Urban Renewal History Project Seeks Local Records

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Broadway East Project proposed Land Use PlanUrban renewal was one of the most important — and controversial — domestic policies in our nation’s history. Between 1949 and 1974, the federal government spent over $7 billion to revitalize more than 1,200 cities struggling with economic and population decline.

The program’s goal was to provide local leaders with funds to demolish “blighted” areas and thereby to clear large tracts of land for redevelopment. Among the casualties were over 330,000 households, at least 90 square miles of urban cores, countless communities, and much of the nation’s architectural heritage. [Read more…] about Urban Renewal History Project Seeks Local Records

Adirondack Gentrification: Resortification & Urbanization (Part 6)

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Anti-gentrification graffiti in rural WalesRural 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)

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The Point Lake PlacidIn 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: Dispossession & Chronic Displacement (Part 2)

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Census Tables From the American Community Survey 2010 & 2019The 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)

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Raquette Lake Rockets 1972“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)

How New York’s Suburbs Got So Segregated

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Levittown 1948 NYT Why is the population of Massapequa in New York’s Nassau County 98% percent white? Why do almost no Black families live in suburban Levittown, New York? Are we looking at free choices by families or underlying housing patterns that reflect the impact of past and current racist practices?

Newsday exposed racial channeling by Long Island realtors in an investigation that showed how they steered potential home buyers to particular towns based on their race and ethnicity. [Read more…] about How New York’s Suburbs Got So Segregated