| The Center has purchased a building in Troy,
New York, to serve as the office for research and projects in
the Northeastern United States. Renovations are underway, including
the installation of public exhibits in the first floor storefront
space.
Near the State Capital at Albany, Troy is geographically
in the middle of the cluster of states designated by the CLUI
as the Northeast Interpretive District (New England, New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania). It is at the confluence of the Erie
Canal, the Champlain Canal, and the Hudson River, a historic crossroads
of the engineered landscape, where raw materials from the historic
hinterlands met the unobstructed water highway of the Hudson that
led to the population centers of the coast.
Aided by this location, Troy developed into the
center of the country’s iron industry in the mid 1800s,
cranking out stoves, horseshoes, and, ironically, the railroad
spikes that enabled a new form of transportation to replace the
canal system – the railway – which later rendered
Troy’s strategic location on the river and canals obsolete.
Similarly, Troy ushered in the steel age by having the first Bessemer
process steel mill in the nation, the first economically viable
method for converting iron into the more versatile steel, and
a process that was adopted with greater zeal by the famous industrialists
who established the new industry in their home state of Pennsylvania,
putting an end to Troy’s primacy in metal production. And
so it went with other industries, including textiles, which went
south, and detachable shirt collars, which went out of fashion,
until the city which had grown quite large, found itself without
a central industry.
The post-industrial, post-Victorian decline was
met by nearly all the towns of the northeast which were centered
on industries that used the rivers flowing out of the hills to
power their mills, as Troy’s did. Some cities crumbled,
some were reinvented, and most just made do somehow and slowly
changed. But there are few cities which seem to have missed as
much of the 20th century as Troy. Downtown looks like a Dickens
novel, and has been used as a location for period films (including
Scorcese’s 1993 adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, Age
of Innocence). The major exception is the row of riverside storefronts,
at the heart of downtown, torn down in the 1970s to build the
parking garages and offices for the new, modern, and anomalous
City Hall. Urban renewal that was soon regretted.
Other agents keep the area positioned within the
19th and 21st centuries. One of these is the Rensselaer Polytechnic
University, which looms above the city, looking in places like
an old sanitarium. The school is famous for producing some of
the great engineers of the industrial age, the bridgebuilders,
ferris wheel makers, and surveyors that built 19th century America.
Across the Hudson from Troy, the Watervliet Arsenal is “America's
oldest and newest manufacturing arsenal,” according to their
official literature. The arsenal was established to support the
war of 1812 (though it was officially founded in 1813), and since
that time it has been the primary builder of cannons and other
large bore guns for the Army. The barrels for the Abrams tank
are still made there. Up river at the Cohoes Falls, once second
only to Niagara Falls for attracting tourists to its romantic
cascades, so many canals tapped water away from the falls to power
the now abandoned mills of Cohoes that the flow practically stopped.
Today, the river is still used to produce electricity, and depending
on demand, the flow of the falls fluctuates between something
and nothing.
Troy is also where the meat packer Sam Wilson was
from, who packed barrels of meat for the Army during the war of
1812, and who eventually became known as Uncle Sam, familiar to
us mostly as a WWII recruitment program image. In 1961, the 87th
Congress of the United States adopted the following Resolution:
“Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives
that the Congress salutes Uncle Sam Wilson of Troy, New York,
as the progenitor of America's National symbol of Uncle Sam.”
“Uncle Sam” is buried in the Oakwood Cemetery in North
Troy, a large rural cemetery noted for its ornate romanesque crematorium.
Ruins of the industries cover the hills and valleys
of the region, and their legacy continues to have an impact today.
Some say that most of inhabited New York State would probably
be a superfund site, if people dared to look. This is the exciting
new environment that the Center now finds itself in.
|
