Feed on this...
Stick it in your email
What the hell's a Feed?
Every Day is Like Sunday
This is the coastal town that they forgot to close down… come Armageddon, come!
I grew up in a small village on the Hudson about 130 miles north of New York City called Catskill. Its economic history goes back a long way, to the purchase of its lands from the native Americans in 1638. Through the following centuries it had its share of good fortune — Martin Van Buren, our eighth president, was married there and Alexander Hamilton tried his first case as a young lawyer in the building I knew as the local Masonic Temple. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, lived in a mansion on Spring Street where, a century in the future, my aunt Rose would purchase what may have been his dilapidated studio on a parcel of land adjoining her house and blithely tear it down to make room for her garden.
Like many very old towns and villages, Catskill has weathered booms and busts of changing tastes and economies. For a long time it was a dairy farming community that supplemented its income with tourist trade from around the region drawn to the haunting hills and low mountains of which Washington Irving wrote. Over time, the nation’s economy reached into the area in the form of inexpensive commodities conveyed on vast new highways. It became cheaper to eat food produced outside the area and tourists could bypass the town entirely on the way to larger, more luxurious accommodations in more distant places. The slow depletion of the town’s vitality was underway and by the time I showed up it had surely seen better days.
Still, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, it was a functioning community. There were some local industries — the cement plants of neighboring Cementon (I kid you not) and a few resorts (including my grandmother’s boarding house) that could count on a regular clientele — providing enough income to make Main Street, where I lived, a busy center of commerce. All of one’s needs were met by two grocery stores, a department store, two butcher shops, a green grocer, barbers and beauticians, men’s and women’s clothing shops, furniture and hardware stores and a community theater (quaintly called The Community) which had been a vaudeville house but now showed just movies. Saturday afternoons, when people from the greater area came into town to do their shopping, were quite busy. In the summer, very busy. But that’s all over now.
Irving Academy, my grade school, now a senior citizen’s center.
I remember talking once with the town president as part of an assignment I was doing for high school on the local economy and his very dour prognosis of what was in store for the town. He was trying to attract new industries to the area, to make up for losses in farming and tourism but the demographics were going south: the best and the brightest kids moved away after high school to pursue opportunities elsewhere, and there was a problem with entrenched segregation among the small minority population which made the town anathema to progressive industries. A true negative feedback loop that guaranteed declining fortunes.
An economy of poverty began to form. On visits home from college in the 1980s I noticed stores beginning to close. A few large discount supermarkets opened near by offering their volume discounts and the dwindling local trade migrated there. Then Walmart arrived. Like a blow falling on a bruise, the purveyor of cheap Chinese goods sold to poor people at the prices they can afford saw its opportunity and pounced. The result was the death of Main Street. By the turn of the century, the street that I had grown up on was a ghost town of shuttered businesses and listless youths loitering after dark to sell each other drugs. It’s a story that has played itself out in countless communities in our “globalized economy” and will play out in countless more.
A boat launch on the Catskill Creek where I almost drowned at age 12, near planned luxury condos for weekending Manhattanites.
Lately, as happens so often in depressed communities, some artsy types have swooped in and bought up inexpensive storefronts and homes hoping to turn the dying town into a new Woodstock or New Hope — an art and antique center that will draw well-heeled weekenders from New York and Boston. I have mixed feelings. Places like Woodstock are not real communities, they are shopping theme parks for the rich. Luxury condos are being built in Catskill within sight of a housing project where many poor people live. As a Manhattanite I am used to that kind of rude contrast, but I never expected to see it in my home town. I resent that the only choice available seems to be Walmart discount poverty rubbing up against superficial wealth. In a global economy where it’s cheaper to build industry in China than in your own back yard the viability of small middle class communities seems ever more untenable.
I suppose as an evacuee I really have no right to complain about what the people of Catskill do. Like so many of my classmates, I spent my youth resenting the provincial constraints of my hometown and couldn’t wait to get the hell away to the big city once I had the chance. But would it be too self-indulgent to be nostalgic for what was? The world is changing very fast and I fear that the benefits we gain from new technology and the unfettered flow of capital around the world come with a very steep price tag. Will the country itself come to the realization too late, as I did, that you don’t really know what you had until it’s gone?
Posted in Blather 07/7/07 | 
Email this |
Share/Save this: 
I would love to give you an up to the minute vision and tour of Catskill. Let me know the next time you are back home. vjs
Comment by Vincent Seeley - current Village President — July 7, 2007 @ 7:37 pm
Thanks Vincent, I was there two months ago.
Comment by SD — July 7, 2007 @ 8:26 pm
What a nice piece. I was drawn right in. I wanted more of the town, details, people who owned the local malt shop if there was one, as you laid it out before you moved into summary and conclusion. I could see this developed into a longer piece on small towns. Lots of small towns are facing what you describe. What can be done? By whom? More, please.
Gerald
Comment by Gerald — July 7, 2007 @ 8:48 pm
Love the Morrissey references.
I tend to find nostalgia self-indulgent, but yours is nuanced and well done, as usual. The complex issues that globalization raises are not as simple as people would like them to be, unfortunately. There is certainly no stopping the industrial juggernaut of exports that China churns out on a scale that is truly awesome in its scope. And the conditions of the past that allowed for small quaint middle-class communities - isolation, segregation, and specialization - aren’t necessarily desirable in and of themselves. Nevertheless, I had a main street in my college town in VA that has now been overshadowed by a mammoth industrial park of corporate logos and fine dining establishments nestled quaintly between any one of the dozen gas stations available. An old friend told me recently with no sense of loss that this is where everyone in town hangs out now. This certainly does not bode well for small town American culture, such as it was. It is, however, the reality of things, and while every generation raises its cane eventually to shake it feebly in the direction of progress, there is no denying that at this point change is the only constant we will know for a long time to come.
Comment by Aatom — July 8, 2007 @ 11:48 am
Gerald,
What can be done? By whom? We could start by voting for politicians who at least acknowledge the cataclysm that free trade policies have wrought on domestic industries. That is, if you can find a politician who isn’t beholden to the monied interests that benefit most by those policies. Then maybe we could demand that corporations that benefit from market dominance in local communities (Walmart, Home Depot, etc.) contribute to a fund providing grants and incentives to develop new industries in the towns they “serve”. A little old-fashioned redistribution of wealth.
Aatom,
Thanks, as ever, for the kind words. You’re very right that nostalgia is self-indulgent, not to mention illusory. There was, of course, no perfect past. But there was a *better* past. I guess I just don’t think that change (which is inevitable) is identical with progress.
Comment by SD — July 8, 2007 @ 8:57 pm
I am so much in sync with your feeling of loss about small towns. Like you, I grew up in one and we visit one which used to be really thriving a century ago in Western NYS. Today the main employment is catering to tourists. Carpenters, masons, builders supply cottages and second homes for summer folk and restaurants cater to leaf peepers and wine tasting enthusiasts.
What scares the pants off me is how we have given away the store; I failed economics in college, never getting past the third chapter of Samuelson’s “Guns or Butter”. Even I, however, can figure out that if we do nothing in this country but consume, we are digging our own grave at an alarming rate. Years ago, I was trying to buy American and I make a point of doing it whenever I can but shoes, clothes, dog toys, etc, are all made almost exclusively in China. Some of the fat cats ought to wake up and figure out that for every job they take offshore they weaken our country. If all we produce is entertainment and a few airplanes, then we are at the mercy of the manufacturers for supplying us.
Even I get that. This is not astrophysics or even calculus: When we can’t even clothe ourselves it is scary, when we import our food, especially from filthy Chinese sources, we have started into a maelstrom. I made a conscious decision a week ago not to buy anything made in China. More important, I am committing to writing to as many sources as possible to urge my fellow Americans to support our own country by starting businesses here, by supporting local farmers, by buying one of something made here instead of buying five, ten or fifteen( pairs of shoes, trousers, sweaters, shirts or skirts) made in China.
I think if we appeal to the common sense of manufacturers and the American public, we can create an awareness and then, with any luck at all, people will realize that individually and collectively our actions have serious consequences.
Comment by Janet — July 10, 2007 @ 10:21 pm
Janet,
I agree, we’re giving away the store or — more accurately — the factory. All the hype about the “information economy” making up for the loss of manufacturing is so much PR pumped out by the classes that benefit by the changes underway. It’s very sad to see.
Comment by SD — July 11, 2007 @ 10:37 pm
This is happening in all the small upstate NY towns - Hudson, Red Hook, Chatham, Philmont, Catskill, etc… - all the small, historic, picturesque little hamlets scattered in the beauty that is upstate NY. These towns are rich with history & ghosts. And yes, the rich weekenders, the artists & dreamers, the eclectic & bizarre along with the locals and impoverished, breathe new (and sometimes unwanted) life into these small towns. Change is ok because it has to be.
I moved to Hudson - the other side of the Rip Van Winkle - a year ago. On the weekends, I like to travel around & visit all the wonderful little towns that upstate has to offer. it’s the unique & varied local shops that attract me along with LOTS of other visiters. It’s the beauty & the vibe & the history along with the new that makes places like Catskill so attractive. And yes, industry has taken a back seat to other types of economic growth. But that’s ok. I’d much rather see art galleries, coffee shops, book stores, restaurants & antique stores then a cement plant.
Comment by scribbler — July 12, 2007 @ 9:10 am
Scribbler, granted an art gallery has it all over a cement plant in aesthetics — but art galleries won’t put many kids through college. The reason I featured my former elementary school in the piece was because the number of kids in Catskill has dwindled so much over the past decade. People just can’t raise families there like they did. It’s not the town it used to be and might be again with a different economy.
Comment by SD — July 12, 2007 @ 9:57 pm
Your grade school building looks crooked and almost as if it is sinking into the ground. It’s interesting photography work.
Comment by Al Sharpton News Blog — July 22, 2007 @ 10:35 pm
I love it along the Hudson. Often think of moving there. I have friends in Rhinebeck and Albany. In the Times in their Escapes section they speak of these towns that would be wonderful places to move to - the friendliness, beauty, what they offer, real estate, etc. - and I always think, well, you better be one of the first who after this article just calls up a realtor and buys something there. Ironically enough, they harm the places they write about with admiration. Steven
Comment by Steven Cyzner — August 4, 2007 @ 4:35 pm
Steven,
Rhinebeck is great — I dream of having a house there. But that will have to wait until after the IPO on this blog… You’re right about the Times — their profiles of quaint upstate towns just accelerates the changes I was writing about.
Comment by SD — August 4, 2007 @ 9:35 pm