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    The WPA Guide to New York: The Empire State
    The WPA Guide to New York: The Empire State
    The WPA Guide to New York: The Empire State
    Ebook1,628 pages36 hours

    The WPA Guide to New York: The Empire State

    By Federal Writers' Project

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    About this ebook

    During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authorsmany of whom would later become celebrated literary figureswere commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.

    The WPA Guide to New York provides a total of 45 excellent tours, taking the reader across the Empire State, from Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks to the five boroughs of New York City. In addition to the nation’s center for culture and industry, New York also contains rich Native American, Revolutionary, and immigration historyall detailed in this diverse guide for a diverse state.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrinity University Press
    Release dateOct 31, 2013
    ISBN9781595342300
    The WPA Guide to New York: The Empire State

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    • 4/5
      I once had this book checked out for nearly six months (I found it deep in the stacks, and nobody had checked it out for DECADES, so I didn't mind using the power of a faculty-staff library card to check it out for a month at a time) and used to just pick it up and read a section from time to time. For some reason I've been thinking of it again over the last couple of days, and wish I had it around.

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    The WPA Guide to New York - Federal Writers' Project

    PART I

    The General Background

    The New York Countryside

    By DIXON RYAN FOX

    THE Empire State’—it would gratify the people of New York if they could discover who first dared that spacious adjective. It must have been a man of uncommon prescience, for in the early years of independence there was nothing imperial about the State. It was seventh in population. Its port-town at the mouth of the Hudson, about two thirds the size of Philadelphia, had been partially burnt during the Revolution and when its Whig inhabitants returned to claim it from the British army and the Tories, they found little to cheer their hope. The other inhabitants of the new State were clustered along the banks of the Hudson and on Long Island, with a few straggling settlements up the Mohawk and along the Susquehanna. Up to the time of the war, the Indians, chiefly Iroquois or tributary tribes, had held all north and west.

    The Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779, which broke the Indian power, made it possible to penetrate the wilderness in peace, and in the last years of the eighteenth century settlers, chiefly from the thinner soil of New England, were wrestling with the primeval forest, planting corn and wheat between the stumps, setting up gristmills and log taverns, talking confidently of a great future. Washington, journeying through the new country with Governor George Clinton, hazarded a guess that New York might be the ‘seat of empire’; but it was not until another generation had come to manhood and the first governor’s nephew, De Witt Clinton, had induced the State to build the Grand Canal from the Hudson to Lake Erie, giving the farmers of the new western counties an outlet for their produce, that the city on Manhattan Island was secure against the competition of Philadelphia and the State was certain of a commanding destiny.

    The fact that the water-level route from the ocean to the great interior spaces of the North American continent, a route used by turnpike, canal and railroad, ran straight across New York had much to do with the State’s development; but the rushing streams near that great highway, or in the valleys that led toward it, soon did their ample share in turning the wheels of industry. Cities like Rochester, which milled the farmers’ wheat into flour, and Utica, which was surrounded by small cotton manufactories, rose with miraculous speed, but on such a solid foundation of public need that they kept importance, and, when outdone in their original specialties by distant competition, adjusted themselves to other industrial production. From the hills by Lake Champlain the iron mines sent treasure to the city of Troy, until its foundries supplanted stagecoach making as the chief business of the place. Then when the rich deposits of the Minnesota ranges made New York iron unprofitable the citizens of Troy took up the clever idea of making detachable collars. Since detachable collars have sagged in popularity, industrial leadership has turned to other haberdashery. In every city of the State, and there are 60 of them, the presence or absence of geographical advantage and flexible, intelligent enterprise accounts for prosperity or the lack of it. Few, if any, New York State manufacturers have a competitive margin with respect to low labor costs. This circumstance accounts for neat and pleasant housing, generally speaking, but here and there it explains some smokeless factory chimneys as well.

    New York holds its premier position in wealth and population by reason of its being an industrial and commercial State. But, the great metropolis aside, it is, especially for the tourist, primarily rural. It has been officially described for tourist interest as ‘the State that has everything,’ partly because of its striking contrasts. Ordinarily latitude and altitude are the chief factors in accounting for climatic differences. In these respects New York is scarcely to be compared, shall we say, with California. The ‘long way’ of New York is from east to west; as the traveler goes it is some 600 miles from Montauk Point to the Pennsylvania line at Lake Erie, an impressive distance in the eastern States. But nature has provided contrasts within even this narrow range of latitude. On Shelter Island, caught between the points of Long Island, the Gulf Stream influence permits the only stand of bamboo north of the Carolinas, while Owl’s Head, in the Franklin County upland, each year reports winter temperatures about as low as any in the United States. The gardens of Westchester are blooming when ice still chokes the harbor in Buffalo. But the varying height of land tends to equalize the climate of the State as a whole. There are hills along US 20 and in Cattaraugus County, to say nothing of the Catskills, that are as high as Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. The rainfall grows heavier toward the south, except on Long Island, where Suffolk County has a maximum of sunshine.

    The motorist entering New York is conscious first of the road on which he travels. Vaguely he apprehends that the cost of road construction must be high, because of the rolling country and the many streams. Until recently new construction was usually superimposed on old roadbeds, but during the past quarter-century, with the development of strong and reliable cars, the engineers have cut through many miles of ‘virgin’ territory up hill and down dale, to the shortening of distances. Yet, generally speaking, a long stretch of straight road is still rare in New York State; speed conditions are usually sustained by scientific banking of the frequent curves.

    Of the 86,000 miles of road within the State 14,000 have been built directly by the State engineers, State roads having been begun in New York by the act of 1898, antedated only by the Massachusetts statute of two years before. But Massachusetts has never had a road problem comparable to that of New York, in mileage, burden, or unevenness of terrain, nor have many other States. New York has had to set standards of road-building for the country. Eighteen thousand miles of roads are on the county system, but with these, as with the 32,000 miles of market roads in whose responsibility the towns co-operate, the State pays a large share of the cost. Presumably the number of State roads will steadily increase, but reduced appropriations of the 1930’s, enforced by necessary State economies, cut down the rate of building. The ten and a half billion vehicle miles estimated as the annual burden of New York State roads give them use and wear beyond those of any comparable area in the world.

    The springy bituminous macadam will doubtless be preferred by many motorists, and the State is turning to it where a lighter traffic will allow, but the Portland cement construction is the more impressive. There are many three-lane cement roads, but there will be no more; the competitive center aisle has caused too many accidents. The four-lane roadway centered with a grassy mall is standard from now on for lines of heavy traffic, even though it costs $100,000 a mile under average conditions. The 110-foot cut through rocks a little north of Peekskill, though only a few rods in length, cost $1,000,000. Maps are drawn and calculations made for a 300-mile super-highway through a new right of way from Albany to Buffalo, carrying 12 lanes of traffic across streams and waterways and under or over every transverse road, at an estimated cost (probably too low) of $300,000 a mile.

    In 1926 the State began building its own bridges, and its engineers take pride in the fact that no flood has washed out one of State construction. They are braced for 20-ton trucks, two at once, and the older spans that do not meet this high requirement are duly posted. But we live in a fast-changing time; the highway division has not yet contemplated its full military responsibilities in this new age of 70-ton tanks. Bridge tolls, which had been thought quite obsolete in the modern State, have come back again by reason of the enormous cost of the structures across the Hudson and East Rivers; the engineering marvel of the Triborough Bridge is certainly worth a quarter to experience at first hand, and the approaches to the Washington Bridge are now equally elaborate. At the other end of the scale we can still gain an antiquarian thrill from covered modern bridges in the Catskill and Adirondack regions. One at Blenheim is carefully preserved as a museum piece for posterity.

    In the Mohawk Valley—in Schenectady and Montgomery Counties, to be precise—main roads have been lighted as brightly as city streets for an aggregate of over 50 miles, but the State is finding reasonable satisfaction for night driving in the reflecting guides at the side of the road, an idea borrowed from Michigan. The continuous installation from New York City to Albany is the longest in the world; its record in reducing accidents is out of all proportion to the moderate cost. In the daytime the number of accidents has undoubtedly been cut down by the system of road-marking introduced by New York in 1940, already copied in Canada and in all probability soon to be extended throughout the United States. The sign ‘Unlawful to cross solid line on your side,’ erected at intervals of five miles or more, might seem at first somewhat difficult to understand; but referred to the lines before you it is clear and simple. At any previous time comment on road markings would have been ephemeral, experiments followed so fast upon one another; but the present scheme seems likely to be permanent. Simple as it seems, the motorist may be interested to know that a twenty-six page pamphlet of directions is required to insure a proper application by road painters.

    What gives New York most distinction in its travel routes, throughout the country and perhaps throughout the world, is its parkways, built and maintained by special commissions operating under special appropriations. The innovation came about thirty years ago, and under peculiar circumstances. The little Bronx River, flowing through Bronx Park in New York City, carried an odorous burden from the houses, shacks, small mills and refuse heaps along its banks far up into Westchester County. Something had to be done about it. A suggested tunnel was rejected not only because of expense and because it would deprive the park of a scenic asset, but also because it could not contain the swollen stream in springtime. Instead, a joint commission was set up by New York City and Westchester, the former bearing three fourths of the cost, to park the environs of the river to its source in Kensico Lake and to include a landscaped roadway. The three commissioners set a high example in acquiring thousands of properties and building the Bronx River Parkway, at $1,000,000 a mile for 15 miles, without a hint of waste or favoritism. But the effect was not so much of civic virtue as of landscape art. European visitors and others went home to tell of a masterpiece. In days of constantly increasing prosperity Westchester, with help from the State, constructed five other parkways, all models of beauty and convenience, and the State continued with the Eastern State Parkway, to have its terminus at Albany, and now completed to the neighborhood of Poughkeepsie. As western Long Island routes of traffic became increasingly crowded and confusing, Robert Moses was appointed to head a parkway commission for that region. Acquiring rights through closely settled districts and arguing down the opposition of the owners of country estates, this indomitable leader carried through the project of half a dozen parkways, built on Westchester lines without grade crossings. These principles have governed other recent parkways in the eastern States, notably the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.

    Despite the attractions of the open road, many thousands of passengers will see New York each week from the windows of railroad cars. The railroad in this State has a long and honorable history, beginning in 1831 with the 16-mile Mohawk and Hudson, which, cutting a chord across the wide arc of the Erie Canal, ran trains from Albany to Schenectady. With its line to Saratoga the following year Schenectady became the first railroad junction in America; it seems natural that one of the country’s great locomotive manufactories should still flourish in that place. Success in this district led to ventures farther west, until by the early forties one could journey across the State from Albany to Buffalo by using eight different railroads. The trip, which theoretically could be made in 25 hours but scarcely ever was, became much easier in 1853 when the New York Central Railroad was organized from the constituent lines. Long before this New York City had begun the Harlem Railroad, ostensibly designed (to avoid the political opposition of steamboat men) only to tap the northern suburb on Manhattan Island, but actually in the course of time carried through to Albany by the State’s most eastern valley—possibly the only American valley customarily called after a railroad. The better level was along the edge of the great river, but the building of the Hudson River Railroad on the east bank was delayed by the adequacy of water carriage during the eight months that ice did not impede. By the middle of the century, however, it reached Albany, a few months before the Harlem. About 20 years later the two roads were combined with the New York Central under the organizing genius of Commodore Vanderbilt. Under Vanderbilt’s son it then absorbed the West Shore (built so that the Central would have to buy it), the Rome, Watertown and Ogdensburg, the Utica and Black River, and others.

    From New York City to Lake Erie and the West the shortest line was obviously not along the water level; daring, or perhaps reckless, promoters projected a line straight across the southern hills. The charter of the Erie Railroad compelled it to build entirely within the State and its eastern terminus therefore was at Piermont, just above the Jersey border on the Hudson, where a long pier still exists to reach a proper depth for a steamboat landing; the other end at Dunkirk was almost as awkward, for Buffalo was and is the great New York harbor of the lakes. There is no time here to trace the means by which these errors of planning were corrected, or the greater errors of financing. Suffice it to say that starting May 14, 1851, a train moved through in four days, the most distinguished passenger being Daniel Webster, whose rocking-chair was strapped to a flat car so that he might better survey the scene between speeches. The Delaware and Hudson, chiefly a freight road handling coal, strikes across the State from Pennsylvania to the Canadian border at Lake Champlain; the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western and the Lehigh Valley, coming in from the south, spread their systems through the central and western counties. There are numerous tributary roads, some of them long independent. It was well on in the nineteen thirties that the eleven-mile Middleburg and Schoharie Valley Railroad, perhaps the shortest independent line in the country, gave up operation and with a favorable foreign market for scrap iron went far toward satisfying its bondholders. In earlier days it had been profitable for its officers to exchange passes with the other railroads of America.

    To traverse the length or breadth of New York State one does not have to go by land. Many who read these pages will take the steamboat from New York City north to Albany through that spacious and magnificent fiord, the Hudson River. To say that any river route is incomparable in beauty may, of course, be extravagant, but there is nothing of its kind in the United States, at least, and Yorkers feel a thankful pride that this impressive scenery is included in their varied homeland. Not so long ago the steamer was the favorite means of traveling Lakes George, Champlain, Cayuga, Seneca, and many others, but, with the convenience of motor cars, this traffic has fallen off. Nevertheless, the steamer, the motor launch, the rowboat and the canoe are still the leisurely and wholly satisfying ways to see the shores of New York lakes—and there are thousands of them.

    Perhaps there is a faint trace of nostalgia in the romantic interest that inland water travel holds for twentieth-century Americans. In days when horses and oxen, to say nothing of thigh muscles, afforded the only competition, water travel, where possible, was the swiftest, most convenient, and, as it still is, the cheapest, mode of transportation. It is a comfort now, in this new time, to brush aside the compulsions of the modern tempo and settle back into the nineteenth century. It was faith in the superiority of water transportation that led General Schuyler and his friends in 1792 to project canals from the Mohawk to Lake Ontario and from the Hudson to Lake Champlain. It was faith and persistent persuasion for many years by which De Witt Clinton got through the legislation that started the Erie Canal in 1817 and drove it straight across the State, an unprecedented distance. To invent the engineering methods needed and construct so long a waterway for $7,000,000 aroused the admiration of the country; its respect for the projectors’ judgment was increased by the fact that the canal, charging moderate tolls, paid for itself in ten years.

    The Erie Canal, whose old gray-stone lock walls can still be seen along State 5S, not only made New York City the port of the northern Middle West, but greatly increased population and land values for a wide district north and south of its own line. Its success stirred the State to build others, some of them feeders for this ‘Grand Canal’ and some of them independent links between natural waterways. The traveler now passes the ruins of the Chenango, the Chemung, the Black River and other canals, but he sees in full use and in greatly improved condition the canal from the Hudson to Lake Champlain (which is as old a project as the Erie), the Oswego Canal to Lake Ontario, and the Cayuga and Seneca Canal, which joins the two lakes to the main navigation-way across the State.

    This principal waterway is now, of course, the Barge Canal, begun in 1903 (with no strong sympathy from the railroads) as a free way for Great Lakes barges to the Hudson, with its access to the sea. It follows in general the old Erie route, but in the eastern portion makes use of the Mohawk River. One hundred and seventy-seven million dollars have been expended in the twentieth century on this most extensive of American canal systems, to say nothing of annual maintenance appropriations which average above $3,000,000. With a 12-foot depth, it rises 565 feet to the level of Lake Erie. At its many locks, especially at Lockport, automobiles may oftentimes be seen clustered about, their occupants peering over the parapets to see a great petroleum power-barge being raised or lowered. There is a vertical change of more than 200 feet along the Mohawk at Cohoes Falls. A few miles below, on the Hudson, is the Port of Albany, to whose wharves there now comes ocean commerce from all parts of the world.

    No passenger boats now serve the public on the canal system, though private motor boats and yachts ply its placid waters. Freight transportation is, of course, the major purpose, and it is not astonishing that the State which has spent so much on these facilities does not unanimously favor the mammoth project of the St. Lawrence waterway, however beneficial that would be to the northern counties.

    We have lingered on the avenues of travel, as perhaps a guidebook must, but whatever its other utility travel would lose much of its charm and instruction without a survey of the scene along the highway. Throughout most of the State one realizes that he is traversing a prosperous farm land. A stranger from the Mississippi Valley may be surprised to learn that New York, which confines the largest population within an area but twenty-ninth among the forty-eight States, yet ranks seventh in the value of its agricultural product. Cattle grazing on innumerable hill-pastures or knee deep in a thousand streams, lush meadows flecked with sparkling flowers, ample barns with towering silos—all these are picturesque enough, but they are not maintained for scenic purpose. Half the New York farmers’ cash income is from the dairy industry, aggregating $300,000,000 annually. Other States surpass us in the production of butter and cheese, but they look a little enviously upon New York with its convenient and voracious market for whole milk, delivered without the cost of processing. With its unique advantages of production and a great consuming population—it supplies over 70 per cent of its own metropolitan market—New York is the only State that has engaged in a systematic and extensive governmental campaign to advertise the values of milk as a food and a beverage. Heavy milk trains are constantly en route through the valleys of the State, and everywhere along the main roads one sees the flashing aluminum tank-trucks of the great milk-distributing companies or of the co-operative Dairymen’s League.

    In the midst of modern scientific agriculture the mind goes back to the Society Instituted in the State of New-York, for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures, meeting year after year during the 1790’s in the city of Albany. It was not the first organization in the United States devoted chiefly to agriculture, but the 150 names upon its roll, scarcely one of which is without a State and national significance, indicates the talent here brought to bear upon the problem. One of the papers at an early meeting was on the ‘Advantages of Domesticating the Elk and the Moose.’ It is cited not because it had the slightest practical consequence but because it represents the restless imagination of the early leaders in this State, as well as elsewhere, and the useful failures in the field that had to be made before practicable crops and breeds were hit upon. Some crops, like alfalfa, were rejected only to be profitably introduced a hundred years later; others, like mulberry trees for silk production, were enthusiastically promoted and hopeful investments made, only to go down in disappointment.

    In the State census report of 1845 vegetables and chickens were ‘not important enough to be listed.’ Now there are nearly 200,000 acres devoted to vegetables within the State. In the southern valleys of the Finger Lakes the summer fields are alive with workers picking vegetables, especially beans, for the local canneries. New York is second among the States in potato production, a fact easily accepted by one who travels the length of Long Island surveying field after field covered with the full dark green of potato vines as far as the eye can see. On the Jericho Turnpike during midsummer nights there rolls a procession of trucks carrying their burdens of two-bushel bags to the great city markets, interspersed with like loads of cabbage, onions, lettuce, and other garden produce. Traveling the New York Central one can see the great muck fields south of Rome striped with thrifty vegetables, carefully tended by Italian-Americans, with their tradition of close gardening; the motorist in Orange County sees like tillage. On the slopes of the Catskills one looks upon the choicest of cauliflower, desired in every market.

    Fruits, for a century past, have been an important interest in New York. Nearly a third of the currant production of the United States is centered in the Hudson Valley. There, too, are ample apple orchards, gay with blossoms in the spring and heavy with fruit in September. The Champlain slope is famous for the McIntosh; Monroe, Ontario and Wayne Counties produce an apple harvest each year surpassed in size only by a comparable area in the State of Washington. About a hundred years ago the volumes edited by Ebenezer Emmons for the New York Natural History Survey showed hand-colored plates portraying beautiful apples, but they represented rare approaches toward an ideal rather than the general fact in New York State. Today one sees the plowmen turning up the soil between the tree-rows, the sprayers forestalling the tent-caterpillars, the pruners lopping off dead branches, the planters putting in the grafted seedlings, other workers carefully applying fertilizer—and one realizes the sifting of methods, largely by the State experiment station at Geneva, which has brought the standard fact up to the ideal in pomology, as in every other branch of horticulture. Thousands of farmers, however, still grow ‘cider apples,’ taking what bounty they can from unassisted nature. Vineyards fill many a landscape in the Chautauqua, Niagara, and Finger Lakes regions; and the wineries at Hammondsport on Keuka Lake, served by skilled workers of French or German background, grow more famous each year. The Oswego County strawberry crop requires help from far and wide during the last two weeks of July. Twenty million chickens grow each year to the glory of New York State; the duck farms of Long Island give their region a strangely interesting aspect. The State ranks third in egg production.

    A word may be admitted here on the production of maple sugar, a by-industry with small direct investment among New York farmers, but one in which, nevertheless, the State ranks second. In March one sees the roadside maples pierced with spouts and hung with buckets to catch the sap, but the sugar-house usually lies too deep in the woodlot to be visible to the traveler. It is affectionately known, however, to the young folk, who like to gather there in season to watch the sap boiled down in the great vat over a snapping fire and now and then to eat the flavorous wax formed by pouring the hot heavy syrup on pans of snow. The tract north of Utica, stretching along the Black River, was first opened on the bright hope of this industry when, in 1791, Gerrit Boon, for whom Boonville was named, representing investors in Holland, cleared 17,000 acres of all but maple trees and attempted mass production by catching dripping sap in an elaborate system of down-grade pipelines. The Amsterdam businessmen were not alone in their dreams of an enormous maple-sugar market. When a New York landlord called on Jefferson in 1791, the Secretary of State assured him that ‘in a few years we shall be able to Supply half the World.’ Such ambitious ventures soon fell into decay, but individual farmers here and elsewhere in the State soon counted on their own maple trees for sweetening their food. In the early days of antislavery agitation it was hoped that, duly commercialized, this domestic product might supplant cane sugar entirely in the general market and thus make unprofitable the tropical slave-plantations. Another incipient reform was not promised comparable benefit, for certain projectors built high expectations on ‘rum from the maple tree.’

    If you talk with any official of the State’s Department of Agriculture and Markets you will find an intense interest in the problem of grading produce for market. Following the example of California, the State government has set up rigid standards, with but a small percentage of tolerance, and whether the product is eggs, apples, potatoes, or anything else the ‘Empire State label’ pasted on the box or bag gives the inspector’s guaranty as first, second, or third grade. The farmer, therefore, markets his produce as he does his milk under the State’s responsibility.

    The temples of New York agriculture are found not only in the Grange halls that one sees in so many hamlets and which the official county agents visit to give instruction, as they likewise do the rural schools, but most impressively at the State College of Agriculture at Cornell University and at the State Fair grounds in Syracuse. When Elkanah Watson, the P.T. Barnum of our agriculture, established county fairs in New York during the second decade of the nineteenth century, he could scarcely foresee the splendid exposition buildings at Syracuse, where each year so many resort to see exhibits of the best achievement through all the 62 counties. It may seem surprising to include the city counties in this broad statement, yet even Manhattan Island makes its contribution to agriculture, from the laboratories of the department of agriculture in Columbia University.

    Despite all that has been said of agriculture in its various forms, most Yorkers, as is well known, gain their daily bread in cities, and directly or indirectly from industry. In some towns the industrial roots run deep indeed: as in the gun manufactories in Ilion, which stem from the ideas of a farm-boy, Eliphalet Remington, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which family enterprise later extended to the making of typewriters; in the copper mills at Rome; and in the glass works at Corning. Some industries will attract the traveler’s interest because of their unusual success in labor policy, with institutional expressions, as in the Endicott-Johnson shoe mills in the so-called Triple Cities—Binghamton, Endicott, and Johnson City. Others will draw attention not only because of mechanical efficiency but also because of the frontier explorations they are making in new fields of science, as the Eastman Kodak and the Bauch and Lomb Companies in Rochester, and the General Electric Company’s parent establishment in Schenectady; and some because in themselves they represent new departures in our way of life, as the International Business Machines manufactories in Endicott and elsewhere. There are industries still located in New York because they once had a peculiar geographical propriety, like the packing houses in Buffalo; and some which are only a memory, like the farm-machine works that contributed so much to Auburn when western New York exported great quantities of grain and hay, or the giant tanneries of Prattsville, or certain ghost towns of the lumber trade. Abundant water power brought manufacturing to scores of towns in New York, like Rochester, Little Falls, Glens Falls, and Watertown; cheap fuel in the form of natural gas did the same for others, as Jamestown, Olean, and Salamanca. And there are some industries that came about simply because the early inhabitants of the locality had a good idea and developed skill and enterprise irrespective of geographical advantage, like glovemaking in Gloversville, Johnstown, and Fonda.

    But the city family wending its way through New York State may be concerned less with agricultural and industrial resources than with finding healthful and pleasant recreation. To mention this is to imagine the two tall and graceful ladies who flank the State seal, forgetting that they represent Liberty and Justice and, swinging wide their arms, assuming each the character of Hospitality; for when New York advertises that it ‘has everything,’ it is thinking particularly of vacation opportunities. When the State was set up in 1777 few thought of summer, much less winter, vacations in the country; most people lived in the country anyway, and a vacation was simply a few days off for fishing or hunting, and even this had to be justified in terms of economic benefit. Next to this the American conscience accepted ill-health as a basis for compromise with leisure, and when nature withheld this excuse it had to be spuriously affected. The beaches at Rockaway were early recommended by medical men to patients in the South; but New York’s chief therapeutic attraction came in mineral springs, of which, as discovery, partly by reports from the Indians, gradually revealed, the State had nearly a hundred. In the first years of the nineteenth century ‘invalids of elegance and opulence’ were advised to go to Ballston Spa and near-by Saratoga, and soon Lebanon, Sharon, Richfield, Clifton, and Massena had each its clientele. By the twenties leisure simply for rest and recreation had become respectable, and the Catskill Mountain House became a center of fashion. The Adirondacks, that great extension of the Canadian highland, were then all but unknown save to the most venturesome hunters. Not till Joel T. Headley, not long out of Union College, spent successive summers in the mountains to fortify his health and in 1849 issued his book, The Adirondacks, or Life in the Woods, was a broader curiosity aroused. In 1859 Paul Smith put up his hotel on St. Regis Lake, and others soon followed, catering not to hunters and fishermen alone but also to families who could pay for luxury in the wilderness. As the apostolate of William Henry Harrison Murray, better known as ‘Adirondack’ Murray, on hundreds of lyceum platforms shortly after the Civil War, popularized the idea of private camps and summer homes, the shores of Adirondack lakes and others throughout the State soon were strung with them.

    The increasing urbanization of life in America, and particularly in New York, brought more and more people to realize the charm and benefit of an annual month or fortnight in the country, and farmers found new income in the entertainment of summer boarders. Then enterprising city men themselves took over farms, enlarged the dwelling houses and set up as summer landlords, especially in Sullivan, Ulster, and Greene Counties. ‘Fresh air’ vacations for city children early attracted the support of philanthropic organizations and metropolitan newspapers; not only were the children scattered by carefully planned arrangement to farm and village homes throughout the State, but organized play camps, too, were soon set up. It occurred to some that the children of the well-to-do needed this latter type of recreation almost as much, and, in 1885, following a precedent in New Hampshire, Sumner F. Dudley, of Newburgh, inaugurated Camp Wawayanda at Warwick, with adequate fees from the patrons. It is scarcely necessary to say that camps of this kind have been set up in great numbers in the mountain and lake regions of the State. Doubtless John Burroughs, of Ulster County, with his admirable nature essays, and Dan Beard, with his writings on camp techniques, did much to stir the interest of Boy and Girl Scouts and others in this movement.

    It remains now to say something of what the State itself has done to provide facilities for outdoor recreation. State concern began in the Adirondacks, and two names stand out upon its early records. Franklin B. Hough, while supervising the State census of 1865, became alarmed at the denudation of the northern hills by lumbermen, and then, developing interest in scientific forestry under public control, not only influenced State legislation but ultimately organized the forest administration of the Federal government. Verplanck Colvin, a lawyer and topographical engineer, whose name is now appropriately borne by an Adirondack peak, spent his summers exploring the mountains and in 1872 ascended Mount Marcy and discovered Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds, the high source of the Hudson. On his application and under his superintendency there was instituted the Adirondack survey, which at last resulted in the great forest preserve of that region.

    The Fish and Game Commission was interested chiefly in the preservation of wild life for the enjoyment of sportsmen, but since the inauguration of a separate Conservation Department in 1927 the State’s interest has not been confined merely to serving and supervising the 2,000,000 hunters, fishermen, and trappers who use our wild land and waters, nor to the protection of the 2,400,000 acres of (wisely) abandoned farm land that the State has acquired, nor to flood prevention through water storage, as in the great Sacandaga Reservoir, which rivals Lake George in size and each spring prevents heavy losses by flood damage along the Mohawk and upper Hudson Rivers. More and more New York devotes itself to the accommodation of the tourist whether he travels on foot or in a motor car.

    The State owns and administers 70 parks, ranging in size from the single acre of Squaw Island in the northern portion of Canandaigua Lake up to huge areas like the Allegany State Park, nearly 57,000 acres of highland within the bend of the Allegheny River in Cattaraugus County, with 70 miles of spring-fed mountain streams, 50 miles of woodland roads and 100 miles of hiking and saddle trail. In Taughannock Falls State Park near Ithaca is the highest single waterfall east of the Rockies; in Robert H. Treman State Park, off the Elmira road not far away, is the beautifully sculptured Enfield Glen with its 12 falls and its great fresh-water bathing-pool beneath the spray. Among the famous Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence there are 10 State parks, and on Long Island 18. No one can realize the beauty of the State until he has explored the 15-mile scenic gorge of the Genesee in Letchworth Park, swept with his eye the almost endless view out from Thacher Park in the Helderbergs, climbed the paths of Bear Mountain and Harriman Section, skirted the royal mile of Storm King above the Hudson, and, in fact, sampled the resources of every State park. Doubtless the most impressive natural feature of the State is the great Niagara cataract itself.

    Nothing need be said here of Niagara’s majesty, but the reader may bear with a few words on how it was secured for public enjoyment through all time. Frederic Law Olmsted, the eminent landscape architect, seems to have been the first to propose public ownership, in 1869. Visitors then had to pay a fee to see the Falls, but were generally disappointed because of the ugly buildings cluttering the margin; Goat Island, it seemed likely, would be entirely surrendered to industry. In 1879, with Canadian co-operation, an active movement was begun for public purchase, eliciting the support of most of the leading members of the Federal government and university scholars, divines, littérateurs, poets, artists, statesmen, and philanthropists everywhere. The State was slow to respond, but under Governor Cleveland the bill was finally signed, and the Reservation dedicated on July 15, 1885. Dr. Charles M. Dow, its historian, has pointed out the significance of this action not only for the Falls but also for park policy throughout the country. The purchase by a State of property for purely esthetic purposes was a new departure.

    The State does not own all the natural wonders within its borders—Ausable Chasm and the Howe Caverns and other caves in Schoharie and Albany Counties may stand as examples of private enterprise—but no commercial proprietor could be more solicitous in providing for the enjoyment of his visitors than is New York. Bath houses, boats, restaurants, picnic tables, everything is ready for comfort and satisfaction. In this respect perhaps the most impressive resort is the great development of Jones Beach, connected with Long Island parkways. Amid the beautiful masonry pavilions, faced everywhere by splendidly attired attendants, served expertly in every conceivable way, the guest can scarcely escape a pleasantly disturbing worry lest he has blundered into a first-class club and is mistaken for visiting royalty. At the Saratoga Spa the State has developed buildings and equipment that rival those of any bath resort in Europe.

    But public hospitality is not confined to the State government. There is Westchester County, for example, with its astonishing Playland, its Glen Island Casino, its many other recreation parks and public golf courses. There are hundreds of golf courses in the State where with little expense the casual tourist can have opportunity to try his skill. And the State’s hospitality to the vacationing public is not all for the day visitor. In the Adirondacks and the Catskills there are nearly 200 public campsites, large and small, many with resident supervision. There are rules to be observed, and in this sort of thing one needs the circulars of the Conservation Department, but the little societies of campers, constantly changing with going and coming, show a disposition to compliance. ‘Hearthstone,’ looking out on beautiful Lake George, apparently does not disturb the peace of costly private estates on each side.

    Much has been said here of New York’s facilities for a ‘good time,’ and for winter as well as summer, as there is skiing for long periods in a great part of the State, and tobogganing, bob-sledding, ski-joring and mushing. But a ‘good time’ is not always taken in terms of scenery or sport. Many a motorist will note particularly the monuments of culture and education. Some of them are humble, though neat and businesslike; there are 5,000 single-teacher school districts remaining in rural New York, so the ‘little red schoolhouse’—generally white—is often seen. But in early morning or late afternoon one encounters school-busses and sees them gather in parking spaces of impressive buildings, oftentimes, though not always, within village limits. These are the centralized schools, which have grown in number from 48 to almost 250 within the past 20 years, representing a policy which, if the truth be told, has caused no little discussion along the countryside. These schools are for the younger grades. The high school, in New York certainly as much as anywhere else in America, usually occupies the outstanding building of the community, the characteristic temple of the American spirit. In round numbers there are 1,000 of them in the State. At one time it seemed likely that they would sweep the field of secondary education; but for various reasons the good private academies have held their own and in recent years the number of church schools has increased. It is generally admitted—more than admitted by the Yorkers themselves—that in public education New York sets the standard for other States; no school system is more free of ‘political’ influences. In expenditure, either in total or per student, it stands ahead, with only California as a strong competitor. Stop at a taxpayers’ meeting and you will find that this policy is not carried through without some controversy.

    Church spires play their old parts in the skyline of every town and village, but the rural churches are less numerous now that the automobile has conquered distance on Sundays as on other days. The older Christian denominations are all represented, together with synagogues in the larger cities, but there are fewer variations than one meets in some States. Near New York City, as in other old regions of the Middle States, one sees the austere meetinghouses of the Friends, and the Dutch Reformed Church is conspicuous throughout the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys; but there is little to give a marked peculiarity to religion in New York. Knowing the predominance of Yankees among the early settlers of the nineteenth century, one may be surprised at the paucity of Congregational and Unitarian churches. But two facts may be remembered: the New York Yankees came from upland New England where neither orthodoxy nor later liberalism was conspicuously strong; and the many Congregationalists who did migrate found the expansive organization of the presbyteries better adapted to new settlements.

    To Auriesville, beside the Mohawk, the most extensive Roman Catholic shrine in the United States, many thousands annually resort to beseech the intercession of the first American Saints. At Palmyra, in Wayne County, a stately shaft reminds us that on this hill of Cumorah the prehistoric conflicts of the Mormons on New York soil were revealed to Joseph Smith. Not far away the Fox sisters, listening to strange table-rappings, began American spiritualism, whose chief gathering place is now Lily Dale, in Chautauqua County. In Yates County one can visit the home-site of the extraordinary Jemima Wilkinson, the ‘Universal Friend,’ who explained her miracles by the circumstance that she herself had been raised from the dead. Near the Massachusetts border, as we see from ample architectural evidence, were the original co-operative establishments of the Shakers; in Oneida County remain the buildings and the intelligent enterprise of the Oneida Community, though their social tenets have been abandoned. Seneca Falls was the cradle of the women’s rights movement whose symbol, though not whose guiding mind, was Mrs. Amelia Bloomer. To Saratoga County, near what is now South Glens Falls, we must go for the site of the first temperance organization, and to Warsaw, in Livingston County, for that of the first political convention of the antislavery men. New York is not without its shrines of religion and reform—of greater or less dignity.

    Colleges and universities in New York State—and there are 62 of them—are historically connected with religion rather than with the slow-evolving public school system. Union (1795), first chartered of the upstate institutions, was an exception in its nonsectarian auspices; it was founded by petition of citizens of all affiliations in the region of Schenectady—hence its name. And Cornell, the largest and most famous of the upstate institutions, developed shortly after the Civil War from the secular philanthropy of Ezra Cornell, a New Yorker who had made a fortune in the telegraph, ably advised by a friend who became its first president, Andrew D. White, of Dryden. But most of the early colleges, led by New England talent, were designed to qualify a ministry for their respective sects: Hamilton (1812), at Clinton, stemming from Samuel Kirkland’s academy, a missionary means for Congregationalists; Colgate (1819), at Hamilton, and Rochester (1850), for the Baptists; Hobart (1822), at Geneva, for the Episcopalians; St. Lawrence (1859), at Canton, for the Universalists; Alfred (1857), for the Seventh-Day Baptists; Syracuse (removed from Lima in 1870) for the Methodists; and others. Most of them, however, whether or not organically related at the start, have long since divested themselves of sectarian supervision; and, generally speaking, the strictly church-controlled colleges are now those of the Roman Catholic and Lutheran faiths.

    New York outrivals any State in the number of women’s colleges—Vassar and Elmira (each claiming to be the first full-fledged chartered college of the type), Wells, Barnard, Hunter, Skidmore, William Smith, Russell Sage, Keuka, Sarah Lawrence, and Adelphi coming to mind, as well as New Rochelle, St. Rose, and others under the Roman Catholic Church; but coeducation, too, has its stronghold in New York. The junior college movement has made little penetration of the State. Separate schools of engineering began in America with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, and besides university and college departments New York now has several other separate institutions granting the engineering degree: Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and, far to the north in Potsdam, Clarkson College of Technology.

    The State relies chiefly upon the endowed colleges and the two State teachers’ colleges at Albany and Buffalo for the preparation of its high school teachers, but takes most of its elementary school personnel from its nine normal schools, which now have certain degree privileges and doubtless soon will have more. Visitors from most States will be surprised at the absence of a State university and for a partial explanation of this circumstance must turn to the history of the University of the State of New York, which though doing no teaching itself has had, since its beginning in 1784, a sort of supervision of ‘private’ institutions, and in 1904 brought the entire school system within its control. Instead of maintaining higher academic instruction on the analogy of other States, it grants scholarships to the abler high school graduates each year, who may use them in any college within the State. At Cornell the instruction in agriculture, home economics and veterinary medicine, at Syracuse that in forestry, and at Alfred that in ceramics are financed by the State, and there are special agricultural schools at Farmingdale, Alfred, Canton, Cobleskill, Morrisville, and Delhi.

    In the southwestern corner of the State is the unique Chautauqua Institution, begun in 1873 as a summer training conference for Sunday school teachers but gradually developed into a nationally influential center of adult education. The universities, from Buffalo to the Hudson, where Union has an organic connection with the Albany medical, law, and pharmacy colleges, provide opportunities for professional education sought by students from many States. The two-volume guide devoted to New York City describes in more detail the vast educational resources of the metropolis: with Columbia, of world fame and contact; New York University, serving every sort of instructional interest; Fordham, under the rigorous program of the Jesuits; and others—not to speak of the four huge municipal institutions for the city’s own youth.

    In the matter of reputation, the many-sidedness of New York actually puts the State at a disadvantage. One State has green hills and little else, another boasts the quaintness of its little harbors, here and there another its manufactures, its agriculture, or whatever its specialty may be. But New York is not a specialist State; and the State that ‘has everything’ is less likely to be identified in competitive comparisons. To some, therefore, it will be surprising that New York, all in all, can claim an easy primacy in educational opportunity. The thoroughgoing traveler, however, comes to realize it, and to remark its storied halls—at Union, with its gray old buildings in geometric order, wherein Joseph Jacques Ramée gave the American college its first systematic architectural plan a half-dozen years before Jefferson built his university at Charlottesville; in Philip Hooker’s charming chapel, built a century and a quarter since at Hamilton; in the massive old Main Hall at Vassar; in the great quadrangle at Cornell, ‘far above Cayuga’s waters’; and more recently in the river campus at Rochester.

    The tastes and interests of a people, as well as their fundamental needs, are well reflected in their architecture. Since buildings in most places are likely to outlast their builders, the traveler through a region has opportunity to gauge by architectural evidence not only the civilization of the present, but that of successive layers, as it were, in the structure of history itself. He is interested, particularly, in what distinguishes the local life from other life, now and formerly, by reason of peculiar personal and geographical circumstances. In architectural forms New York has its own distinction. The few memorials of the seventeenth century speak of utility and, in the gun-slits of the Van Cortlandt manor house at Croton, of defense against expected Indian attacks. The Dutch Colonial is a well-marked style along the Hudson and the Mohawk, with rounded gambrel roofs, or stepped-end gables, or the full-length overhang supported by a row of posts. In some of the old farmsteads, like the Mabie house by the Mohawk near Rotterdam, built in 1671, the slave quarters are a feature. But there are other notable characteristics of our ancient houses; President Franklin D. Roosevelt has contributed to books on Dutchess County frames and doorways. Two communities are whole museums of early eighteenth-century stone work: old Hurley, back of Kingston, and New Paltz, with its high-pitched roofs that sheltered—and still shelter—Huguenot families. One can follow the Dutch and German influence among churches, too, from the famous little edifice at Sleepy Hollow, dating from 1699, past the two in the Rhinebecks, up to the Palatine churches—that at Fort Herkimer with its beautiful high colonial pulpit, that at Stone Arabia, and that on the road from Nelliston to St. Johnsville, the last-named possibly the best-known landmark of the Mohawk Valley. Down in peaceful Schoharie is the old stone church which did duty as a fort in the Revolution and is now annually visited by thousands as a museum.

    But the peculiar architectural record of New York is written not so much in humble farmhouses and in primitive churches as in the mansions of the landed families. The aristocratic land system was costly to New York in population and, perhaps, in basic prosperity, but it has left widely scattered monuments of gracious and expansive living that are not matched in other northern States. The Philipse manor homes at Yonkers and North Tarrytown, the Schuyler Mansion at Albany, the three Johnson houses at Amsterdam and Johnstown, homes of forest rulers, all breathe an air of feudal authority. These are convenient to the main roads and open to the public; but deep in private parks along the Hudson are the Livingston manor houses, far to the east are the manors of Gardiners and Shelter Islands, and there are many other lordly mansions lasting over from the eighteenth century, but visible to the stranger only in a distant view. The word manor is loosely used in most sections of the United States, but in New York it has a definite and legal meaning; in 20 spacious holdings, more or less, the ‘lord of the manor’ had the rights of his own courts, of nomination of the clergy, of exclusive property in treasure trove, mines, bridges, deodand—or the forfeiture of any instrument, vehicle, or boat that had been the means of death—etc.; but the practical peculiarity, not only in the manors but in certain other large estates as well, was in the perpetual leases by which the land was rented. Hence in Albany, Rensselaer, Columbia, Delaware, Dutchess, Putnam, and Westchester Counties there is still a vivid legend of antirent riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 20-mile-square domain of the old Patroon Van Rensselaer was not broken into independent farms until the 1840’s.

    The aristocratic idea, however vain and inappropriate it may seem to us today, set its pattern more deeply on upstate New York than is commonly realized. Many there were who sought to imitate the authentic manorial splendor by building mansions in the wilderness, centering in them an affection for conservative politics and the Episcopal church. Even the great land companies left memorials of frontier capitalism, like the Lincklaen house in Cazenovia and the Holland Company’s office in Batavia. Some, like the Napoleonic émigrés in Jefferson and Lewis Counties, brought anomalous courtliness to astonish the backwoods farmers of the early nineteenth century. But when the Indian claims were settled, and the area of cheap available New York land thereby immensely increased, the colonial rent scheme became completely impracticable. The only profit in wild land was to clear and plant it with one’s own hands or to sell it. Aristocratic pretensions on the frontier began to fade.

    The excessively active land market, long held back by circumstances already adverted to, brought the lawyer into special prominence in New York State. The little law office out beside the road, just beyond the shadow of the substantial village home, that one sees in many counties, represents what came nearest to a ruling class in this commonwealth during the thirties and forties. Gradually the lawyer gave way to the industrialist, and found his living by advising in the problems of industrial wealth rather than in those of real estate.

    Spiritually above and about the life that these represented was the classical tradition. It happened that the great growth of New York villages and cities came in the time when the Classical Revival was regnant in architecture, and scattered through the State are still found many of its best examples in domestic forms, on farms as well as in populous communities. The temple house with its heavily columned porch, so widely represented in our New York towns, was dark inside and not particularly comfortable, but in this day of self-indulgence it admonishes us that austere self-discipline and a reverence for standards played strong parts in producing the civilization we have inherited.

    Andrew Jackson Downing, of Newburgh, did much to popularize the American Gothic, especially for smaller houses, and the Italianate style, with square towers rising from the ground and with wide overhanging eaves—the ‘Hudson River Bracketed,’ which supplied the title for one of Mrs. Wharton’s novels. But Downing is more gratefully remembered for his landscape art, which spread its influence over the great estates along the river, where successful railroad men and manufacturers were taking on the style of English gentry. Here and there in New York, as in some other States, one passes a surviving witness of the mid-nineteenth-century vogue of octagon houses, extended from the monstrous example built north of Fishkill during the decade from 1848 to 1858 by Orson Squire Fowler, a Cohocton farm boy who had risen to fame as a phrenological lecturer and miscellaneous writer.

    As America went on to greater and greater material prosperity businessmen ornamented our cities with gloomy brick or wooden mansions sprouting bay windows, towers, cupolas, narrow piazzas and anything else that came to the designers’ minds, so long as it looked heavy and substantial. Most of those that time has left house lingering family remnants or stand unkempt and unwanted, shabby memorials of past power and glory. For vitality and prosperous hope, so far as domestic architecture is concerned, one now looks more to the suburbs, made easily accessible by the motor car. Here modern and historic styles mingle on surprisingly good terms and individuality has full play; yet the spacious front lawns with scarcely indicated boundaries give the aspect of parklike ensemble so characteristic of the New York and New England village, and envied by visiting Europeans accustomed to walled gardens.

    Many of those who love this State hope that legislation may soon control the distribution of roadside billboards; but on a less inappropriate poster panel current at the moment of this writing a gasoline company may win some approval in advising the traveler to see ‘Historic New York.’ The fact is, the State is drenched with history, as casual mention has already assured the reader. Some will be fascinated by the life of humble, ordinary people, as the scene suggests the changes that circumstances forced upon it in successive ages; some will seek out the folk-record of the New York mind, expressed in ballads, from that dashed off after the massacre at Schenectady in 1690, through those on the tragic Jane McCrea in Revolutionary days, to those of the Grand Canal and the early railroad engines—all set forth along with innumerable strange tales in Dr. Thompson’s Body, Boots and Britches. Very properly the State Division of Archives and History has placed more than 6,000 tablet-markers along the road margins, for the American people come more and more to cherish the American tradition and to seek out its notable sites. Many of those marked in New York are, of course, of significance merely local, if the word ‘merely’ may be countenanced in a matter of such importance to the young folk of the respective regions; but many, also, call to mind events and personalities that have made America what it is.

    Every New York child knows the debt his State owes to Dutch blood (seeing its record in the names spread through our town directories) and to Dutch custom, with its Santa Claus, Christmas stockings, cookies, crullers, cole slaw, winter sports, and other heritage. The day before these lines were penned the writer attended a Kermis, for which a complete Dutch village had been constructed on a spacious property beside a Dutch Reformed Church, where Dutch food prepared by Dutch chefs was dispensed, Dutch games and dances offered, Dutch silver and other art displayed, and a play of Dutch colonial life produced, while among the great throng present hundreds of ladies, Dutch descendants, proudly wore broad lace bonnets that, at one time or another, had been purchased in the old Fatherland.

    In most counties the Yorker knows the local legend of the confederated Iroquois, noblest warriors of the forest, who rushed down upon their enemies along the streams that flow from New York in all directions. He knows of saints and soldiers who came, with holy cross and fleur-de-lis entwined, to brave Indian peril in the very heart of the woodland province where they hoped to plant the faith and culture of France. On Long Island he marks the old field boundaries of Puritan towns and listens to the tales of pirates scattering pistareens to gaping plowboys, of off-shore whaling days and of voyages that sailed out from Sag Harbor across the seven seas. Not only from the magic pages of Francis Parkman but from the map itself he realizes that New York was the theater of the century-long conflict between the British and French empires, whose prize would be the control of a continent; hence those military ruins at Crown Point and Oswego and the fascinating fortresses that still stand at

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