Gardens - Landscape Architecture

Olmsted Exhibit Celebrates Utica’s Natural Landscape

August 14, 2014 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

In the early 20th century, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870-1957) and Thomas R. Proctor (1844-1920) led the way in the transformation of the Utica landscape, creating beautiful and naturalistic recreational spaces that provided escapes from the city and enhanced the quality of life for its inhabitants.

“A Century of Olmsted: Utica and Beyond,” on view August 14 through January 4 at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, is the first exhibition to explore the creation of some of Utica’s most beautiful natural places. [Read more…] about Olmsted Exhibit Celebrates Utica’s Natural Landscape

Mount Lebanon Heritage Herb Festival Planned

May 30, 2014 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The third annual Mount Lebanon Heritage Herb Festival celebrates the illustrious past of herbs in town history as well as the Native American and Shaker traditions in the heart of the Lebanon Valley of New York, considered the birthplace of the herbal pharmacy in the United States.

The event takes place on Saturday, June 7, 2014 from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on the historic grounds of Darrow School, at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. More than eighteen talks, walks and workshops explore the role of herbs in food, gardens, medicine and health from the early days of the Native Americans to current practices. [Read more…] about Mount Lebanon Heritage Herb Festival Planned

Fort Ticonderoga King’s Garden Season Begins

May 14, 2014 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Fort Ticonderoga’s King’s Garden will present a new spring event “Friendship & Flowers” on May 17, 2014. This pre-season event for gardeners and their friends offers continental breakfast, a horticultural talk, giveaways, a garden tour, and plants to take home. Attendees will get a first look at the King’s Garden which opens to the public on May 24.

“Early season blooms of lilac, crabapple, columbine and forget-me-not will tempt your senses,” Heidi Karkoski, Fort Ticonderoga’s Director of Horticulture, says adding that the event will be an opportunity to “learn about plans for the season and what new annuals and perennials will be added to our designs.” [Read more…] about Fort Ticonderoga King’s Garden Season Begins

Jay Heritage Center Celebrates Black History Month

February 6, 2014 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Jay Heritage Center invites you to celebrate Black History Month with two exceptional speakers who will talk about the free African American experience in antebellum New York on Saturday, February 8, 2014 10:00am – 12:30pm.

Author, Dr. Myra Young Armstead, Professor of History, Director of Africana Studies at Bard will talk about her book Freedom’s Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America. She will share insights from her research about the free black experience in 19th century New York as revealed in a handwritten diary kept for almost four decades by James F. Brown. [Read more…] about Jay Heritage Center Celebrates Black History Month

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space

December 21, 2013 by Editorial Staff 1 Comment

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914 by Joseph J. Varga (Monthly Review Press, 2013) considers how urban spaces are produced, controlled, and contested by different class and political forces through an examination of the famous Manhattan neighborhood during the “Progressive Era.”

Hell’s Kitchen is among Manhattan’s most storied and studied neighborhoods. A working-class district situated next to the West Side’s middle- and upper-class residential districts, it has long attracted the focus of artists and urban planners, writers and reformers. Now, Joseph Varga takes us on a tour of Hell’s Kitchen with an eye toward what we usually take for granted: space, and, particularly, how urban spaces are produced, controlled, and contested by different class and political forces. [Read more…] about Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space

Westchester County: Religion, Gravestones and Archaeology

December 10, 2013 by Madeline Kearin 1 Comment

Gravestones represent some of the most valuable evidence available to archaeologists currently working on the St. George’s/St. Mark’s Church site in Mount Kisco, New York. Once occupied by two Episcopal churches – St. George’s (1761–1819) and St. Mark’s (1850–1916) – the site is also the final resting place of over 400 people, all buried between the 1760s and 1940. The area where the churches once stood was excavated this fall. The artifacts and information they uncovered is now undergoing analysis, and the excavation is planned to resume in the spring.

As co-directors of the excavation, Laurie Kimsal and I have discovered just how essential gravestones are to our understanding of the site. To begin with, gravestones offer clues to the location and orientation of the 18th-century St. George’s Church. Secondly, the gravestones provide insights into the values and beliefs of the people who erected them, as well as the social, religious, and economic worlds of the 18th and 19th centuries. [Read more…] about Westchester County: Religion, Gravestones and Archaeology

Mount Lebanon Herb Festival at Historic Shaker Village

May 28, 2013 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Mount Lebanon Herb Festival will be held on Saturday, June 8, 2013, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, rain or shine on the campus of the Darrow School in New Lebanon, NY, the historic grounds of Mount Lebanon Shaker Village.

New Lebanon has a remarkable history with herbs. Its famous warm spring feeds the Shaker Swamp in the village of New Lebanon, and that supported an extraordinary collection of wild herbs long used by Native Americans. The Shakers, who based their national headquarters in New Lebanon, expanded on the uses of these herbs and created an industry around their sales. In 1824, Elam Tilden (father of politician Samuel J. Tilden) put this knowledge toward the start of one of the nation’s first pharmaceutical companies, the Tilden Company, using herbal tinctures, extracts and compounds derived in New Lebanon that were eventually marketed around the world. [Read more…] about Mount Lebanon Herb Festival at Historic Shaker Village

NYC’s Green-Wood Cemetery To Mark 175th Anniversary

May 2, 2013 by Editorial Staff 1 Comment

What do artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, toy merchant Frederick A.O. Schwarz and political powerhouse William Magear “Boss” Tweed have in common?

They’re all buried in Brooklyn’s Historic Green-Wood Cemetery along with abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, musician Leonard Bernstein, industrialist Peter Cooper, composer Fred Ebb, piano manufacturer Henry Steinway, decorative master Louis Comfort Tiffany – and roughly 560,000 others – many equally famous (some infamous) and hailing from the worlds of sports, the arts, entertainment, politics, the military and industry. [Read more…] about NYC’s Green-Wood Cemetery To Mark 175th Anniversary

Boscobel House Appoints New Executive Director

April 4, 2013 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Following a national search, the board of directors of Boscobel House & Garden in Putnam County has selected Steven Miller of Morristown, New Jersey to be the historic site’s new executive director. Miller has forty-two years of museum experience with distinguished institutions throughout the northeast. In addition, he has been a museum consultant, writer, trustee and educator.

Situated on a bluff on the east bank of the Hudson River, Boscobel House & Gardens offers its visitors views of the Hudson River and the Hudson Highlands. Completed in 1808 by the States Dyckman family, Boscobel is regarded as a fine example of Federal architecture. [Read more…] about Boscobel House Appoints New Executive Director

Newburgh: Cradle of the American Lawn Mower Industry

March 5, 2013 by Miguel Hernandez 21 Comments

Abraham Levitt, the man who arguably built more suburban homes in the United States than anyone else in the years following World War II once said that: “No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes as much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and the locality as well-kept lawns”

The ubiquitous American suburban lawn in America began 100 years before in 1841 when a 25 year old resident of Newburg New York named Andrew Jackson Downing published a landscape-gardening book entitled, “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening.”

It counseled readers to improve themselves by improving their front yards and could well be the impetus of the self-help book craze of the later third of the 20th century. He believed that the perfect front yard had to have a large area of “grass mown into a softness like velvet.” [Read more…] about Newburgh: Cradle of the American Lawn Mower Industry