Case Study – Food: Growing It, Making It…in a Changing EnvironmentThe Past Is Future
Case Study – Art and Creativity Flow Against the Current: Hudson River Towns RebornCase Study – Buffalo Artists and Art Reborn

The original business along the river was agriculture, subsistence crops and grain, with the latter freighted down the river, milled in New Amsterdam / New York and sent across the Atlantic to England.  Grain production for export extended into the Mohawk River valley as well.  Subsequent developments took advantage of water – mills on the many streams feeding the rivers – to create a commercial presence throughout Upstate.  The banks of the rivers were the locus of the Industrial Revolution as it occurred in the young nation. Factories of all kinds emerged from New York northward and westward, even enabling automobile production in Detroit to feed its products eastward by water.

The Hudson River towns had begun to transform early in the century with heavy industry shifting to newer, lighter industry: semiconductor technology and pharmaceutical research and production.  All the while, agriculture had already shifted westward into the rest of the state and well beyond, into the Midwest and Western plains.

The river towns declined in importance: agricultural, industrial, commercial.  Towns that had thrived in the past on traditional manufacturing, hat-making, shirt-collar production, brick-making, shipbuilding, witnessed a slow and steady decline.  Their geographic virtues were evident, proximity to the river, but it seemed to count for less than it had before.  The river continued running…and the trains continued running, but with different purposes.

The one virtue that persisted and proved essential to the overall river town revival was the proximity to an ever more crowded city at the mouth of the river.  The proximity of New York City, initially by carriage and then by trains in the nineteenth century, brought wealthy businesspeople upriver to create grand estates beside the river and inland as well.

Money – industrialists - and creativity – artists - began to settle in along the river.

What remained of heavy industry displeased Wilson, as he looked at upper reaches of the Hudson:

After this, New York State opens out: wide cow pastures with their stone fences, first glimpse of the Adirondacks, quite different from the Green Mountains, more mysterious, grander, more interesting.  Then, Glens Falls, big town full of factories, area of cheap modern houses, general cheapness and tarnishment; tacky town end of Lake George, steamboat that is waiting for excursion, big restaurant bar, with Italian-looking barman and Polish-looking waiters, hard and crass little street of stores.

Upstate / Wilson / pp 76-77

A half century after Wilson’s concerns, Glens Falls is alive and quite well.  The paper mill dating from a century and a half ago, Finch Paper, still occupies a central location in town.  It has prepared itself for the computer-driven paperless future by churning out specialized paper products that no technical or social trend is likely to make superfluous.  Paper engineered for a future without paper, in general, but with an enduring need for Finch Paper and its specialized products.

Sitting on a hill just above those yards and plants sits the artistic inspiration of a family art collection, a wealthy and inspired couple from Glens Falls’ industrial age and the Gilded Age, preserved as the Hyde Museum.  That wealth comes from the plants below.  It is part house-museum and larger part a gem of a highly diverse and highest-quality collection.  It ranges from Botticelli and El Greco to van Gogh with many artistic stops in between….and proceeding into the modern and contemporary with Joseph Albers to Ellsworth Kelly and Sol LeWitt, much of it housed in a contemporary Edward Larrabee Barnes addition to the original home, on the National Register of Historic Places and well-maintained.

Gradually, the river towns up and down the river looked to New York City for inspiration, in terms of amenities, what one might need or want to settle in along the river and call a town a home.  Echoes of the important families, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, Jay Gould and so many more, all of whom could transport (or to be precise, have transported) all that one might need for elegant survival in their grand homes by the river.  Now, those formerly struggling river towns developed new leases on life, importing and establishing all of the niceties and amenities and essentials of New York City for those weekending or living throughout the year by the river or the hills not too distant.

The gentleman farmers or weekend farmers or even non-farmers who appreciated living amidst green appeared on the streets of these towns.  Along with them came creative types, individuals who could transfer their work from a bustling and disruptive urban setting, to continue their work upriver. At the other end of the financial spectrum were artists who could no longer afford studio space in the city but could in the many communities and the countryside hugging the Hudson.

The Covid pandemic accelerated an already vigorous transformation of the river towns.  The creativity flowed north, against the current, and ever-stronger.

So many of the river towns took on new life, no longer gray and failing and fading, but dynamic, trendy and trending.  Street life returned, even in some nightlife beyond dining, with cultural events occurring regularly and well-supported.

No need to be in Manhattan or Brooklyn or anywhere but in a river town.

The towns were being rediscovered.  Unexpected magic was playing out – in the form of art and culture.  Even commerce was reviving, retail commerce, to support the new arrivals from the city who needed furnishings, food, dining options.  This was the totality of what the New York City had formerly provided, a city re-created in miniature and just as walkable and accessible.  The river towns had happened.  Again.

Initially sleepy, still blissfully rather sleepy, it became a peaceful escape for many from New York City, on weekends, then all week and ultimately all the time.  Seed germination and farming have been replaced increasingly by gentrification. Much of what has occurred in the city travels upriver, against the tide and current, eventually, for better or worse, to the river towns.

Far better is the food and retail diversity, now common in many small communities beside the river.  An upscale market in the center of town could be mistaken for Citarella’s or Zabar’s, writ small but just as trendy and foodie, yet frequented by gentlemen farmers and real farmers alike.  On the opposite side of the street, however, is the design furniture studio – shop – for the gentlemen farmers.

Proceeding across that slender steel link, tipping one’s hat to Washington Irving and the mythology that he created about the Catskills and the river, one is but minutes from a more dramatic artist’s home and studio, Cole’s student and the next generation of Hudson River School painters, Frederic Church.  Church’s grand estate, Olana, is now a state historic site.  The centerpiece is an eclectic and clearly eccentric home.  One hesitates to call the structure a home, as an example of Orientalist architecture, both outside and in, with an almost kaleidoscopic mixture of Moroccan, Victorian, Persian and Moorish styles.  Calvert Vaux, yes, the Calvert Vaux of Central Park distinction, helped Church in designing and integrating the influences and styles.  He also assisted in the design of the surrounding 250 acres, all preserved and protected and maintained to this day, with elegant looping roadways coming up from the riverside Route 9 into the property and to the great house.  Some degree of Central Park moved upriver to Olana.

The art is on the walls inside, some Church paintings, in the eclectic and eccentric design of the structure by Church and Vaux and throughout the grounds, by Vaux, all preserved to this day.

Art seemed to have infused the river towns, large and small, with museums and galleries, formal shows and pop-ups, but everywhere and whenever.

Other sculpture parks emerged, some more oriented to the contemporary than to the established modernists.  All embraced the open spaces and nature as appropriate homes for this form of art and as destinations for cultural exploration.

One in particular, Art Omi, begun in 1992, combined sculpture and architectural explorations, settled in amongst 120 acres in Ghent NY.  In open fields and amidst woods and a small lake were planted striking sculptural installations, some several stories tall, waving to the sky and the wind.  Some had been trailered in, installed, while others clearly were so massive or so site-specific that they had been created on site, in the open air and nature.  The stated intent was to provide opportunities for up-and-coming important sculptors, working at a scale, many of them, that required the open air and open spaces to be presented.  Planted among them were some better-known artists, serving to entice visitors and intrigue them by the newer work as well as the long-established.