In their less guarded moments, Ulster County preservationists despair of being able to communicate the value of learning about the extraordinary natural and socio-historical setting in which we live. Every example of a fast-food restaurant next door to a historic home is like a dagger in their hearts.
Often dismissed as NIMBYs and elitists, they find it difficult to respond.
“Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice,” writes urban sociologist Aaron Passell in a recent book. “In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not affordability. Such efforts lead to gentrification and rising property values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often people of color.”
Passell explores how community activists and local governments use historic preservation to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy-interventions that enables communities to exercise some control over their changing neighborhoods.
The secret weapon in exurban areas, where the fabric jointly wrought by man and by nature are so closely intertwined, is the story of how what is came to be – an origin tale of endless fascination to all, or almost all.
The sumptuous book Legacies on the Land, an exploration of “the historic houses, hamlets, and landscape of southern Ulster County,” was published by Black Dome Press in Catskill.
This is no fly-by-night compendium. Shepherded by editor Vals Osborne and a flock of editors and researchers, the hefty volume is the culmination of 14 years of sustained efforts.
“Originally researched and written as guidebooks for historical house tours that covered ten communities in Ulster County across several centuries,” explained admiring reviewer Christopher Pryslopski, editor of The Hudson River Valley Review, “the material has been thoroughly revised and expanded upon …”
The team of 20 dedicated volunteers, many of them professional historians and writers, labored under the auspices of the Huguenot Historical Society on a 450-page volume with 17 maps and more than 400 photographs, including 300 in full color. The economics of digital color printing even for short runs has changed dramatically, according to Steve Hoare of Black Dome Press. The result is photography of stunning quality in this book, which sells for $35.
Local livelihoods
Houses, hamlets and landcapes. Dwellings, groups of dwellings and the land on which the inhabitants live. Individuality, community and surroundings.
About four hundred years ago – a long time by the standards of American history – European settlers of various nationalities – seized some rich lands in the Hudson Valley populated by the indigenous Lenape people.
The Europeans started with a trading post in Ponckohockie in 1615 and a growing number of farms, mostly populated by settlers from the Fort Orange (now Albany) area. All were ordered by governor Pieter Stuyvesant to construct and take shelter within a stockade in Kingston in early autumn of 1658.
A few years later, a small population of Dutch, Huguenots (French Protestants) and Walloons (Belgian Protestants) moved from Kingston (called by the Dutch name Wiltwyck until 1664) to Niew Dorp, the “new village” now known as Old Hurley, and thence to establish what is now Huguenot Street in New Paltz in 1677, surrounded by 40,000 acres purchased in questionable circumstances from the Native Americans. They called their like-minded group The Duzine.
Over the next centuries, a tangled web of houses, settlements and landscape — accompanied by several profound revolutions in transportation and technology — evolved into a rich variety of human livelihoods. Until tourism came along, the different communities of southern Ulster County came to specialize for the most part in agricultural and extractive industries.
This is a book with an introduction and ten chapters, each of which boasts its own thorough introduction.
The first three chapters are based on house tours of central New Paltz, of the westerly hamlets up to the Gunks, and of the formerly LeFevre family lands southeast of the village core down Route 208 toward Gardiner. The fourth looks at the changing face of agriculture west of the Wallkill River in Gardiner and Shawangunk.
The fifth chapter centers on the fruit farms of Marlborough, the sixth on the hamlets of Plattekill, the seventh on “the mysteries of Clintondale,” and the eighth on rural Lloyd.
The ninth chapter tracks the Rondout Creek’s passage to the Hudson River past St. Remy, along Black Creek and through the Town of Esopus.
Finally, the tenth and final chapter visits the cement works and canal town of Rosendale and beyond.
Exurban turnaround
What does this sustained feat of prodigious scholarship bring to the community table? Though the full returns will never be available, current signs point in multiple directions.
Ulster County has long been an exurban second-home oasis for New York City residents. Because the local jobs picture has been bleak for many decades, however, substantial financial penalty is involved in the transition to full-time local residency.
In the last two years, data from the real-estate industry has shown a rapidly changing picture. For decades, Ulster County housing prices have lagged behind the state average. Recently, they’ve leaped above average, and 2024 mid-year numbers show that trend continuing. Ulster County is more attractive to immigrants, it seems.
Mid-Hudson Pattern of Progress this year published a report based on IRS data, “Money Migration,” which indicated that Ulster County residents, with a total taxable income in 2020 of $6.1 billion, received an injection of $547 million (with $327 million of it coming just from Manhattan and Brooklyn) in the two years of the pandemic. These immigrants had money to spend.
That’s great for real-estate buyers, but it’s a disaster for renters.
The combination of rising prices for shelter and relatively low wage increases has made Ulster County a poster child for gentrification. The intertwined fabric jointly wrought by man and by nature means little to people who can’t afford a roof over their heads.
Will this trend, which is more evident in the upper Hudson Valley than in the lower part, continue?
A number of factors are involved in money migration. One of the most significant seems to be that the percentage of people working digitally at least part of the time from home now exceeds 33 percent of the entire American work force. The Covid epidemic has changed work habits. Workers are getting New York City paychecks while sitting in Ulster County homes.
Moneyed digital immigrants prefer to live in places on their way to successfully integrating individuality, community and surroundings. Is Ulster County going to be one of them?
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