scholarly contemporary 2009 study on kingston, ny

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Space and Place in Kingston, New York

byAnezka Sebek

from Google Earth

Fundamentals of Urban Sociology

GSOC 5004

December 18, 2009

Virag Molnar



“Anyone knows what a good city is. The only serious question is how to achieve it.”

--Kevin Lynch The Theory of Good City Form

Introduction

For Kingston’s citizens, the solution to the problems of the city’s redevelopment is a paradox.

On the one hand, Kingston, a city of 22,000 people, is set in a natural and beautiful geographic space

as a small historic Hudson River city near the Catskill Mountains on the fringe of the New York

Regional Metropolis. On the other hand, its core along the Midtown Corridor is riddled with crime

and absentee landlords and presents a desolate and alienating landscape where no developer would

risk any capital.

Kingston’s story is similar to the stories of hundreds of small cities throughout the United

States. Kingston, could be considered an ‘ur’ city, as local author Lynn Woods called it in a recent

conversation, a model of a small city caught in the undertow of a large metropolis. It closely

resembles old London as a collection of villages that the New York metropolis “has swallowed up in

the countryside,” as John Eade (2000) quoted from a London Insight Guide (p. 41). However typical

the model of Kingston as a small city may be, it has its unique problems that can only be studied by

looking at the particular history of the city and speaking to the people who live there.

This paper offers the beginnings of a framework with which we can look at Kingston from

social, historical, political and economic points of view to bring awareness of the city’s history and

collective memory. Because of the layered complexities of Kingston as part of the regional spread of

New York City, this study will need to expand on all the topics raised here. No simple panacea will

solve the problems of a city that is always tethered to global competition that affects the entire NewYork City Region.

I will first situate Kingston in the larger context of the New York metropolis as a space in this

urban hierarchy. Next, I will contextualize Kingston by pointing to its symbiotic relationship to New

York City through quantitative demographics. I will then zoom in closer to the actual place by

offering a tour of the city and a brief history of how some of the political boundaries that were drawn

in the 19th

century have contributed to the “malling” of Kingston. I will then conclude with a view

from the varied voices of the stakeholders of the city.

Kingston’s problems are the result of many eras of local and then global economic boom and bust and currently there seem to be only passive answers to predatory investment and development.

Since the 1960s, no comprehensive planning has been done. Without a cohesive vision that merges

the social, historical, political and economic aspects of these problems, alternatives to reactive

market-driven fixes undermine the ability for the people of Kingston to create their own sense of

place.



Space and Place in Kingston, NY Anezka Sebek

2

I. SPACE

A. Contextualizing Kingston in the New York Metropolitan area geography

When reading the location of Kingston, New York (see cover image) from a satellite height,

it is centrally located between Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey, a two-hour

drive (90 mile) into New York City. Kingston shares its history with Poughkeepsie, Newburgh and

Peekskill: all cities with populations of 10,000 to 50,000.1

Albany is the capital of the State is at the

north most and New York City is at the southern most end of the Hudson River. Ultimately, the fate

of all the Hudson River cities is inextricably tied to the successes and failures of the large megalopolis

of New York (Stradling 2007, Evers 2005, Steuding 1995).2.

The convenient umbilical cord of the Hudson River shows how a massive megalopolis like

New York City has easy access to consume the natural resources of the Hudson River Valley and its

surrounding mountains.3 The river cities stand in the shadow of the global megalopolis supplying it

with labor (commuters) and critical resources like water 4, warehousing, high technology industries,

back-offices, and local agricultural products. New York City needs this support structure so that it can

succeed on the international stage in competition with other global cities that are growing even more

powerful than the nations in which they reside. (Davis. 2005:99). In the 1980s, New York, along with

London and Tokyo, became centers of global finance, service and management; shifting, as Saskia

Sassen points out “tasks out of the shop floor and into the design room and has changed management

from what was once an activity that was focused on the shop floor to one that is financed focused

today (Sassen 1991:325).” Being tethered to New York, necessarily affected economic life in

Kingston.

1 One in ten Americans lives in areas like these that are now called “micropolitan” areas. The Office of

Management and Budget (OMB) designates urban areas with “a recognized population nucleus” as a micropolis

(Federal Register 2000). There are 578 micropoli in the US. 10% of the US population lives in these smallcities. 87% of Americans live in towns with populations of less than 10,000. (Urban Affairs Review 2005; 40;

342) 2 The US OMB considers this area as The New York Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), the largest and most

populous of all MSA areas where over 18 million Americans live. 3 The Hudson River’s headwaters begin at Lake Tear of the Clouds about 150 miles North of Troy (47,459

density 4557). The river continues past Albany (93,539 density 4375), Kingston (22,441 density 3051),

Poughkeepsie (29,654 density 5764), Newburgh (28,101 density 7352), Peekskill (24,484, density 5662).

Compare to New York City (8,363,710 density 27,575) (www.city-data.com)4 The Ashokan Reservoir headquartered in Kingston, supplies New York City with “more than 1 billion

gallons of fresh, clean water daily to 9 million customers throughout the five boroughs and upstate.

Consisting of 19 reservoirs, 3 controlled lakes, and more than 6,000 miles of pipes, aqueducts, and tunnels – our system is a green machine that runs almost entirely by gravity and, for the most part, doesn’t requirefiltration.” http://nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/wsstate08.pdf




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Kingston had its beginnings in the 17th

century New World Dutch Colony and became a

prime location of 18th

and 19th

century industrialization and mining when it was the origin of raw

materials such as Pennsylvania anthracite transport on the Delaware & Hudson Canal. In the 20th

Century, like all other cities in the United States, the ever-hungry quest for cheaper labor

deindustrialized US cities: heavy industry was pushed South and, in due course, to other countries

(Cowie, Heathcott 2003:140). The entire balance of the US economy shifted in favor of global cities

as new centers of consumption and services (financial, IT, etc). Kingston suffered through The Great

Depression, racially motivated redlining of poverty-ridden neighborhoods, urban renewal and

destruction. Then, in the 1870s, the creation of The Town of Ulster set up perfect conditions for the

coming and going of IBM to create the technoburb that was in need of open, unbuilt space. (Fishman

2003:85). Yet it was IBM that contributed most damage due to its exodus in the early nineties, the

result of that era of boom and bust is written on the face of the city to this day.

B. Current Population of NY and Kingston compared

Kingston is located on the northwestern edge of the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) that

makes up the New York Metropolis. Because it is part of a wide net of small, continuous cities that

make up this region, demographics are often fuzzy and constantly shifting and changing. After the

last census in 2000, the population in Kingston passed a threshold that caused the US Census Bureau

to include all of Ulster County’s population as the Kingston MSA. This helped the city become an

Entitlement Community for Federal Housing and Urban Development grants of over $1 million a

year (Virginia Craft interview 12/9/09).

Demographic Comparisons based on 2000 Census:General Population

Population Density per sq.mi. Male Female

New York City* 8, 363,710 27,575 3,962,602 (47.4%) 4,401,108 (52.6%)

Kingston city+ 22, 441 3051 10,570 (47%) 11,871 (52.9%)

*2008 population increase 4.4% since 2000+2008 population decrease 4.3% since 2000Table 2

A recent Moody’s report, although mistakenly combining Kingston with Ulster County due to

this new US Census designation, shows that there is a significant migration coming in from

Poughkeepsie, a city across the river and one that has become a high-end professional commuting

community because of the excellent commuter rail service to New York City. As a result, rental costs

have skyrocketed (Moody’s Precis Metro Kingston September 2009). In contrast, Kingston only has

bus service into New York City and therefore rental costs on this side of the river are lower.

Comparing the demographics of Kingston to New York City is like comparing David to

Goliath yet aspects of the data show similar percentages of male to female, median income, and




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income per capita (See Table 1). Moreover, the percentage of people who live below the poverty level

is slightly lower in Kingston at 15.6% versus 18.5% in New York and, predictably, median income is

lower as well. Also, the cost of living index is significantly lower in Kingston and less than the US

Average. This is a comforting statistic to commuters who make their living in New York City at $50

for a round-trip bus ticket. Adirondack-Trailways is the only commuter bus service between New

York City and Kingston.

NEW YORK CITY KINGSTON, NY

Daytime population change due

to commuting +563,060 (+7.0%) +6,702 (+28.6%)

Workers who live in the city 2,922,206 (91.5%) 5,151 (50.2%)

Cost of Living Index 177.1 (very high US average is 100) 94.3 (less than average US Average is100)

Table 2 - All data in tables from www.city-data.com

Many people, who live in Kingston and call it their home, also live in New York City part of the week. This phenomenon is due to the fact that there are no living wage jobs in Kingston.

Although suburbanization of the ‘70s and ‘80s created lots of amenities and infrastructure, jobs have

come and gone. The recent economic downturn has exacerbated this condition. Moreover, the

renaissance and gentrification of the 1990s has compelled many professionals to move back to New

York (Zukin 1998:831). In spite of that, sheer economics still force lower income people to live

farther away from the Metropolitan center as we can see in Table 2. Important aspects of citizenship,

such as how people report their taxes or how they register to vote, become a real conundrum. Also

while commuters are a minority of the overall population of New York City, Kingston statistics showthat many people who count on the city for their livelihood choose not to live there. They instead

choose to live in the smaller rural towns surrounding Kingston: the true exurbs of the metropolis.

Housing:

Median House

Value

Land Area Owner Occupied Renter Occupied

New York City $311,000 303.3 sq. miles 34% 66%

Kingston $197, 204* 7.35 sq. miles 47% 53%

*up from $86. 500 in 2000Table 3

In terms of value and owner occupancy (Table 3), people in Kingston are more likely to own

and occupy their homes—47% to New York’s 33% —even though the rental rate for the small city is

rather high at 53% compared to New York’s 66%. With the recent upswing in home values, the

median house value in Kingston jumped from $86,500 in 2000 to $197,204 in 2006-08. These

inflated prices are now being reassessed down in the present recession.




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Racial Composition

White Black Hispanic Other (Chinese,

Native American,

other)

New York City 35.0% 26.6% 27.0% 14.7%

Kingston 77.1% 12.8% 6.5%* 6.5%

* Up to 10.4% in 2008

Table 4 The biggest and most notable difference between the metropolis and Kingston is racial

composition (Table 4). In 2000, white people were the predominant race in Kingston at 77.1%

compared to 35% in New York City. At 12.8% the number of African Americans in Kingston is close

to the 14% US national average while they comprise 26.6% of the New York City population.

Furthermore, according to the US Census Bureau’s American Factfinder, Kingston gained a high

percentage of Hispanic population since the 2000 Census. In 2000 there were 1516 Hispanic (Latino)

people or 6.5% of the Kingston population as compared to 2,619 or 10.4% in 2008. According to a

Kingston citizen who knows this population well, there are two towns in Mexico, Puebla and Oaxaca

from where most of the population is migrating. Low-wage jobs in gardening, farming, and

construction are plentiful in Kingston as are low-cost homes and as noted previously and a relatively

low cost of living index. Mexican eateries and grocery stores are taking over vacant buildings in

Midtown Kingston.

Meanwhile, Kingston’s overall the population has fallen 4.3 % since 2000. White people

constituted 80.4% of Kingston’s population in 2000 while in 2006-08 they constitute only 75.1%. The

white population has in actual figures shifted only by a few people (from 18,853 in 2000 to 18, 957 in

2006-08) but it is the proportion of race that has shifted toward an increase in people of color. African

Americans now constitute 15.8% of the population while in 2000 they represented 12.8% (actual

figures 2995 people in 2000 to 3996 people in 2006-8). (http://factfinder.census.gov )

Income, Poverty and Median Age

Median Income Income per capita Percent below

Poverty level

Median Age

New York City $53,514 $29,885 18.5% 35.9

Kingston+ $42,385* $25,084 15.6% 38.1

*Up from $31, 594 in 2000Table 5

A better more fine-grained study of employment opportunities, median income and poverty

statistics needs to be done than is available on websites like www.city-data.com, (See Table 5).5

Most

notable is that there seems to be more work opportunities in office and administrative support work in

Kingston. This is highly likely due to back-office low-wage, high intensity operations that reside in

the large office parks on the outskirts of Kingston where it meets The Town of Ulster (See Appendix

1).




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C. The coming and going of IBM, Kingston becomes a technoburb

As the data in the previous section show employment location and opportunities are a critical

component to the success of a Hudson River city like Kingston. To understand the current lack of

jobs and poor economic health of the city we need to look back a few decades to the way that IBM

affected this community. We start with the way that space became a critical component in the coming

and going of IBM.

Most Kingstonians wonder about the peculiar geographical fact is that there is no way to

enter into The City of Kingston from the major highways without crossing The Town of Ulster,

which wraps around it like collar (See map in Appendix 2). This is an apt metaphor because since the

creation of the Town of Ulster, Kingston has had to play “second fiddle” to the open spaces and

opportunities for shovel-ready development of (often) prime agricultural land along the Town of

Ulster’s 9W corridor that links into Rt. 209 and the NY Thruway (Interstate 87).There is no better analysis of this way of describing what has happened in Ulster County than

to look at the analysis of Robert Fishman’s technoburb. Similar to Silicon Valley and Rt. 128 in

Massachusetts, technoburbs form decentered cities along highway corridors. The structure of the

technoburb is actually based on two ideas that should, according to Fishman (1987), anger any city

planner:

…the waste of land inherent in a single family house with its own yard, and the waste of energy

inherent in the use of the personal automobile…the technoburb has no proper boundaries...of separateand overlapping political jurisdictions which make any kind of planning virtually impossible. (P.190).

Fishman (1987) argues that the process of suburbanization, a process that has lasted for the

last 200 years and culminated to form the new city form. Originally, cities had a strong urban core

with expansion of suburbs that stretched outside their political borders. However, postwar

development caused the periphery to spread away from the central cores of cities, The new city came

to be called the technoburb not necessarily because high technology industries found their home there

but because new communications technologies were invented that superseded the necessity for

personal face-to-face contact (Fishman 1987:183-184). The decentered automobile driven life of the

late 20th

century homogenously populated city centers with developed amenities such as all-in-one

super malls brought suburbia to its end. Moreover, this new form of the city has erased much of the

benefits of the direct neighborhood contact of the public sphere in pre-suburban cities. Instead,

television took center stage in the home and offered no replacement for social and political contact.

5 In Appendix 1, I have inserted graphs that show the differences of emphasis in jobs for both males and

females in Kingston and New York City.




7

The technoburb found the perfect tool for self-promotion in television broadcasts and provided “an

unrelentingly negative picture of the city as the haven of crime and deviance (Fishman 1987:202).”

For Kingston, it all started more than a century ago. Between 1872 and 1879, wealthy

landowning Republicans who were politically in charge of the Ulster County Board of Supervisors

sought to separate Kingston from the rich farmlands to the north and south. To thwart the effect of the

mostly Democratic out of work bluestone workers, called “ruffians of the worst kind” by the Weekly

Freeman, the Republican landowners of rich farms around the new City of Kingston created the Town

of Ulster. (http://townofulster.org/content/History ) This separation proved initially to be the creation

of a decentralized town of disorganized hamlets on the shores of the Hudson River. Yet The Town of

Ulster’s most favorable agriculture and its ownership of the final lock of the Delaware & Hudson

Canal eventually triumphed over the deflated economy of Kingston. It was a relationship that would

set the stage for 20th century suburbanization and much smoother dealings with IBM and the Regional

Hudson Valley Mall. The open lands outside of the Kingston City boundaries offered uninterrupted

space for buildings, office parks and mall complexes.

Fueled by the invention of the automobile, New York City expanded outward, only

temporarily thwarted by The Great Depression and World War II. The Post World War II housing

boom fueled by favorable Veterans Administration mortgages made it possible for more people to

live away from the decaying city centers (Duany, Plater-Zybeck, Speck 2000:8). According to

Fishman (1987), the irony of the technoburb is that the highway infrastructure was created to funnel

traffic into old industrial sites; instead the opposite occurred (p. 196). Even though Kingston is a

small city, its center Midtown strip was lined with industry served by the rail lines that were

abandoned in favor of trucking as deindustrialization took its toll. On the outskirts of the Kingston,

suburbs such as Lake Katrine in The Town of Ulster sprouted up largely because of its convenient

new system of state and local highways further eliminated the need for passenger rail on the west side

of the Hudson. To bring jobs closer to the attractive quality of living in the foothills of the Catskill

Mountains, IBM built a 2.5 million square foot facility on pristine farmland owned by the Myron

Boice Farm family in 1954. The regional Hudson Valley Mall was built soon afterward to service the

new growing population of suburban dwellers whose center became their home complete with a life

of commuting, the daily grind and television at night.

At first, the IBM factory built typewriters and when cheaper labor and real estate became

available in Lexington, Kentucky, manufacturing of typewriters moved south. By 1964, the factory

began to produce the successful IBM 360 mainframes (http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ )

Unfortunately, the influx of IBMers into the Town of Ulster in the early 1950s did little for Kingston,

especially not the already poverty-ridden areas. Besides Lake Katrine, many other local and more




8

rural towns gained population and with the exception of the large mansions on the Uptown side of

Kingston and along Albany Avenue, the newcomers largely ignored Kingston’s Midtown and

Downtown. They preferred to break new ground in the Catskill Mountain towns or to commute into

The Town of Ulster by car. After all, this was the glorious decade of American suburbanization, a

decade that turned Kingston into a driving city and Midtown into a faceless strip of failing stores that

cannot compete with the regional mall. Steve Finkle, Kingston’s Director of Development tells the

story of how the city of Kingston was “malled:”

We had problems that smaller cities had when you build a mall outside the city and you start putting

big box stores up and people chose to go out there. When I first came to Kingston in 1980, the main

street was full. There was a Woolworth’s and shoe stores and clothing stores and higher-level goodsand services. But that basically moved…the families aged out and businesses either moved to the mall

or went out of business and the mall took over the business. (Steve Finkle Interview 12/4/09)

For IBM, the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were prosperous years. The company created similar facilities all over the Hudson Valley but, eventually, the company’s failed management policies and

the pressure from small PC manufacturers abroad brought IBM to its knees. 7,000 local

Kingston/Ulster jobs were lost (NY Times, July 28, 1994, p. D5). Today, the company still operates a

plant in nearby Fishkill, NY that is only a tiny fraction of the size of the Ulster plant. While the

leaving of IBM directly impacted life in The Town of Ulster and the suburbs of Kingston such as

Lake Katrine and Esopus, the sudden drop in countywide revenue hurt Kingston more than Ulster

because it was anachronistically still hurting from urban renewal and industrial decline.

Small rays of new life appeared. During the late 80s and 90s as the professionals moved back into New York City to gentrify the industrial neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn, artists

moved into Uptown and Downtown Kingston in search of large, sunny studio space. As for the IBM

Park in The Town of Ulster, in 1998, Alan Ginsberg, a New York entrepreneur bought the 260-acre

site after IBM abandoned the plant in the mid-nineties. Ten years later, Ginsberg is redeveloping the

site as a green campus

(http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2009/07/21/news/doc4a651bb2c7db9261045949.txt ). He

renamed the plant TechCity and enthusiastically claims that “Renewable energy is the wave of the

immediate future, and we intend to ride it effectively.” He anticipates TechCity becoming “arenewable energy industrial complex, positioned well to serve forecasted needs for green construction

materials” (http://www.techvalley.org/Pages/News%20_%20Events/Tech%20Valley%20News/8-17-

2007.html).

As we consider the reuse of IBM office space in The Town of Ulster, I would like to

summarize this part of the paper that has looked at Kingston as a space. We look at how, in




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collaboration with the cities on the Hudson, Kingston feeds the metropolis of New York with its

resources. All the Hudson River cities suffered much of the same fate as large US cities: city centers

were ignored while highways cut into pristine countryside and became the target of tract housing with

matching malls and industrial and office parks. This irresponsible use of space continues today all

over the world.

Kingston is also part of the new US Census designation of a “micropolis,” a small city with

population fewer than 50,000. Small cities present a new set of problems but also opportunities.

According to David Bell and Mark Jayne, small cities are human scale and offer possibilities for

redevelopment and city-center living with the added benefits of walkability and multi-purpose

building improvement in historic settings; usually each small city has a unique quality or selling

point. However, they caution that this revitalization must be accompanied with excellent

communication with all city stakeholders from the citizens to government and private investors

because politics in small towns are often traditionalist and conservative. (Bell, Jaynes 2000:8-9) This

is where I would like to shift the focus of this paper from space to place. While space is created by

physical proximity and geography, people create a sense of place.

II PLACE

A. Reading the City, a ride through Uptown, Midtown and Downtown Kingston

Just as quantitative numbers and data of the previous chapter drove the analysis of space, the

idea of place is driven by how the built environment looks and feels. The brilliant work of Kevin

Lynch helps us understand our environment from the level of our senses emphasizing the critical

importance of the city’s image:

Most people have had the experience of being in a very special place, and they prize it andlament its common lack. There is a sheer delight in sensing the world: the play of light, the

feel and smell of the wind, touches, sounds, colors, forms. A good place is accessible to allthe senses, makes visible the currents in the air, and engages the perceptions of the

inhabitants. (Lynch 1981:132)

The majority of people who come to Kingston drive into the city. It is not a walkable city and

local bus transportation runs only once an hour. (Because the bus is so inconvenient, they are

frequently empty). There are three distinct points of entry: Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown. It is

easy to avoid any of the other three areas simply by entering and exiting from one of the major

highways: Rt. 32, NY Thruway 87/587 or Rt. 213 and Rt. 9W. (See Appendix 3 for map).




10

The typical way the commuter buses enter is from the south of town on Rt. 32. Turning north

along Washington Avenue, Kingston looks like any 19th

century town in America: medium to large

wooden Victorians, some truly stunningly renovated, with wide and friendly porches sit back from

the street. Deising’s Bus Stop Diner and an abandoned Friendly’s—at the entrance to the Dietz

Memorial Stadium the city’s modest sports field—bookend the bus station on either side of

Washington. Here, commuters can get into their parked cars. On the far side of the bus station is the

rubble field prepared for the coming CVS Pharmacy, evidence of a recent triumph of city officials

over local citizen’s objections to clear the brownfield of earlier days. (There are five big name

pharmacies within a 2-mile radius of the new CVS.) in addition to a local family owned pharmacy

that is trying to hold on to its slim margins. Traveling further on foot or by car onto North Front

Street is Uptown Kingston. North Front runs along the footprint of the stockade wall of the original

Dutch Colonial Village. The stores here have a canopied walkways designed by architect John Pike.

The Pike Plan, as it is still called, was supposed to help these small family-owed shops compete with

the new Kingston Plaza that was built in the sixties on the fertile banks of the Esopus river below

only a stone’s throw away from the older neighborhood (Evers 2005:401-404). Nevertheless, the tug

and pull of the old district against the newer Kingston Plaza is never-ending.

Behind the strip of the Pike Plan stores is the most ancient neighborhood of the city, The

original buildings of the Dutch Colonial village have been kept up and lived in, some have recently

been copiously restored and house history and artifacts open for regular public view.

Coming in from the West of the City of Kingston, off the New York Thruway, Rt. 87, the

traffic circle swings car traffic onto bypass Rt. 587 to dead-end right into the top of Broadway at a

confusing intersection with Albany Avenue. The traffic is guided through several on-ramps with

stoplights around wedges of unkempt triangles. An unfriendly strip of buildings facing the

intersection across a small, grassy triangular wedge boasts a Dominoes Pizza next to the Women’s

Incontinence Clinic. Several faceless apartment buildings line the four lanes of Broadway that reveal

a sad and desolate strip: the Probation office, Eng’s Chinese Food, then the proudly renovated 7/21

Media Center followed by the Broadway Diner and a car repair shop with parked utility vehicles, On

the opposite side of the street is an empty Honda Motors with some old American clunkers in the

showroom. Block after block offers a gas station, another car repair shop, an empty Bank of America

followed by yet another gas station. Then, the abandoned Kings Motel looms like a white whale next

to a lively row of La Oaxaqueña (a Mexican grocery store), a clinic for the disabled and a grand

anomaly: the magnificent Ulster County Performing Arts Center (UPAC) with its four neo-classical

two-story columns from which the bright flag marquees flow with world-class names like Yo Yo Ma

and Garrison Keeler. Next to the UPAC is a new Spanish supermarket with a rainbow sign that




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garishly proclaims its opening. Unfortunately, low, unkempt or abandoned buildings face the UPAC

and parking lots between the buildings give this section of Broadway an old toothless grin look.

Broadway continues on and suddenly dips underneath Railroad Avenue. We have literally

come to the other side of the tracks. The landscape changes with some renovated buildings and a new

shiny Rite Aid pharmacy. Then, as if we have come upon a totally different town, on the left, on a

steep rise from the street is the magnificently restored City Hall, its design based on The Palazzo

Publico in Siena Italy (Rinaldi,Yanisac 2006:120) On the right, is Kingston Consolidated High

School, an equally regal and massive building with the still unsightly Carnegie Library building on its

front lot. The renovation money for the Carnegie has been approved and promises to be a Media Arts

building full of performance, music, drumming, dance, and the latest digital technology arts and

design; a collaboration with the Board of Education and the forward-thinking Center for Creative

Arts. The City Hall is followed by the Kingston Hospital and again a row of small stores several

vacant storefronts followed by series of gas stations as well as yet another newly built Walgreen’s

Pharmacy.

Coming in from Rt. 9W, the character of the city is markedly different. This is the Downtown

of Kingston, which runs along the Rondout Creek as it empties into the Hudson. Broadway is steeply

graded here as it ends at the water along The Strand (“the beach” in Dutch). Brightly painted brick

storefronts face out to the water. Going west along Broadway, on one side of the streets are more

historic storefronts and on the other is a newer housing development of two-story brick façade

apartment buildings with mansard roofs, an obvious attempt to match the historical buildings on the

other side of the street. The sound of tires hitting metal on the Rt. 9W overpass rumbles deafeningly

overhead as it crosses the Rondout Creek to the town of Esopus. Nevertheless, rows of restaurants

and small boutiques look festive and inviting. The summer brings boaters from all ports. Medium-

sized cruise ships come down from Canada across the Erie Canal and up the Hudson from New York

City. The Rondout Rowing Club’s crew boats are stacked up next to an old tugboat called The

Matilda propped up on dry land at her multi-story height. Next to the old tugboat, The Hudson River

Maritime Museum and several other restaurants welcome visitors from the water right to their tables.

B. The creation of the City of Kingston from two villages, the subsequent

separation from The Town of Ulster.

The villages of Kingston and Rondout

No analysis of a city would be complete without looking into its earlier history. Kingston’s

glory days are embedded in its collective memory of 400 years of city development. Most prominent

are biennial celebrations of the burning of Kingston by the English during the Revolutionary War, a




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bit of history that is celebrated by many river cities along the Hudson complete with costumed

reenactments. Because of its Irish history, St. Patrick’s Day is the biggest parade that unifies all three

parts of the city and brings in people from Ulster County. Most of the city’s festivals such as the July

4th

Fireworks and the annual Soap Box Derby as well as other ethnic festivals are celebrated on the

waterfront. Very little other mixing of the populations happens except for these holidays.

Nevertheless, a city that exists for 400 years has layers of decision-making that continues

under the surface of current day life. Understanding structural and spatial decisions that were made a

long time ago can affect present day decisions by city planners, government and citizens. These

decisions become embedded to the point that they are accepted and never questioned. And yet, they

continue to gnaw at the current day problems of the city.

Dutch farmers founded the village of Wiltwyk (Dutch for “wild woods”), which is now

Uptown Kingston, shortly after Henry Hudson threw down his anchor at the mouth of the Rondout

Creek. Peter Stuyvesant, famed governor of New Amsterdam, instructed the farmers to create a

garrison stockade wall to guard them from the ever-angry Native Esopus tribe. Later, the colonial

village was designated New York’s first capital during the Revolutionary War (Evers 2005, Steuding

1995).

On the waterfront, the trading village Rondout was established; what is now Downtown

Kingston situated at the “rond uit” (Dutch for round exit) or curved bend at the mouth of the Rondout

Creek where it meets the Hudson River. It is also the deepest harbor on the Hudson except for the

New York City harbor. The small settlement had been a highly successful 17th

and 18th

century fur

trading post. In the 19th

century, this inland harbor was the end point of the Delaware and Hudson

Canal that ported anthracite from Honesdale, Pennsylvania over the Appalachian Mountains to

Rondout from 1828 to 1898. The small village grew to a sizeable town of over 10,000 residents and

800 businesses (Steuding 1995:154).

For a while, it seemed that nothing could go wrong for the village of Rondout. The steam and

paddleboat industry boomed as it ferried materials on the busy Hudson waterway south to New York

and northward to the Erie Canal and beyond. Kingston Point was the gateway to the Catskills and the

Victorian Kingston Point Park boardwalk became a tourist attraction where millions of summer heat-

weary New Yorkers could go for a day trip or continue into the resort-filled Catskill Mountains. In

the winter, when the river froze, ice was mined for ice boxes in New York City; ice sailing became a

popular sport (www.hrmm.org).

In 1872, Rondout was such a thriving town that the citizens petitioned Albany for it to

become a city (Steuding 1995:155). However, the village of Kingston in a deft and swift political

stunt managed to change the request to a unification of the two villages. The two villages could not




13

have been more different. The village of Kingston was settled by staunchly Calvinist Dutch Reformed

church members while entrepreneurs and Irish Catholics ran the village of Rondout. According to

historian Bob Steuding, Robert Loughgran of Kingston outmaneuvered the Rondout petitioners and

managed to erase the name of the Rondout permanently off the list of New York State town names.

The uncomfortable pact between the two village populations has never been mended and the

collective memory lives on in the minds of the citizens of the city today (Evers 2005, Steuding 1995).

The no-mans-land between the two villages is the current day Midtown corridor and its nastiest

legacy.

If only the troubles of incorporation of these Ulster County villages ended there.

Gerrymandering on the part of Republicans created The Town of Ulster, splitting Kingston in half.

The Town of Kingston with its blue stone industry was permanently ostracized and silenced to the

north and in order to enter the City of Kingston from its most accessible routes, travelers are forced to

traverse The Town of Ulster where all future development of suburban sprawl found a welcome

home.

Furthermore, after the Civil War, the D& H Canal’s popularity waned and was replaced by

the new Ulster & Delaware Railroad with its faster and more efficient mode of transportation. Yet the

irony was that it was the railroad that contributed to the demise of Rondout at the turn of the 20th

Century. Unfortunately, at that time, extraction from the wealth of the mountains ended. There was no

longer the need for raw materials such as bluestone for the New York City sidewalks that were being

replaced with Portland cement. The world-famous Rosendale cement mines, which were responsible

for many foundations of New York City structures as well as the immovable footings of the Brooklyn

Bridge, were no longer productive (www.rosendalecement.net). Other products such as ice were

replaced by air conditioning technology and although brick making lasted into the 21 st Century, the

majority of the clay banks of the Hudson were depleted by the mid-20th

century. With the demise of

the need for raw materials, the U& D railroad went out of business in the 1930s and the new owner of

the rails, The New York Central, closed its shops in the Rondout in 1932 Slowly but surely, the

Rondout lost its gleam and by the 1960s there was nothing left but slums and deteriorating buildings.

Even the once-favorable day tourist spot of Kingston Point sagged into dereliction (Steuding

1995:176).

In the 1960s urban renewal leveled the deteriorating north side of Rondout’s end of

Broadway and Route 9W was built to cut a straight path from Rondout to The Town of Ulster, the

Hudson Valley Mall and the IBM facility. The poor migrated into Midtown to rent the vacant

Victorian row houses owned by people who might have followed opportunities in New York City and

other more distant locations. Looking at the parcel map of Ulster County, most of the buildings along




14

the Midtown strip and on the streets where crime is high are not owned by people who live there.

Absentee landlords and management companies from New York City and beyond register themselves

for Department and Housing Renewal money yet do only just enough to maintain their buildings

(DHCR Funding Awards 2007).

As a result, the Midtown strip in Kingston has become a marginal place without much hope

for redevelopment. Midtown suffers most from a lack of planning and vision. It is a liminal space that

has attracted liminal people. Mexican migrant farm workers and poor white and people of color as

well as unemployed people from New York City, refugees from the more dangerous Harlem and

Bronx neighborhoods have found a home there. Perhaps a contributing factor is that all of Ulster

County’s human services, parole offices, and homeless shelters are located there in this “Entitlement

Zone.” It is a convenient racial boundary and separation that is palpable when driving down along

the Midtown Broadway strip.

What can we make of these complicating factors without indicting a well-intentioned local

government and police force that cannot seem to solve the problems of crime and joblessness that has

settled into Midtown Kingston like a chronic disease without a cure? Returning to the analysis of the

technoburb, Robert Fishman’s assessment might be a helpful beginning. During the 20 th century, old

cities became “social and economic disaster[s] for the poor who have increasingly been relegated to

its…decayed zones (198).” The poor are attracted to the decaying housing stock where there is also

the complication of finding no meaningful work. He compares the phenomenon to Disraeli’s “two

nations,” one of stark separation between the haves and have-nots. (p. 199). Midtown is also the

home of nationally connected gangs as well as young “copy-cat” gangs. Thanks to the work of

Frederick M. Thrasher in Chicago during the early 20th

century, we know that these “interstitial” areas

are both geographic and social:

[these are]…spaces that intervene between one thing and another…The gang may be

regarded as an interstitial element in the framework of society, and gangland as an interstitial

region in the layout of the city. (P. 225)

Reactive competition for the Midtown strip brought what could be considered the “bottom

feeder” businesses: gas stations and unsightly, dirty car repairs shops. Automobile traffic was

encouraged to get down Broadway as fast as possible, emphasized by double height highway lighting

at night. Even during the day, no pedestrian culture exists. At night, the Midtown strip and the

neighborhoods on either side are dangerous as reported in a recent white paper by the Police Chief.

(Police Chief Keller’s White Paper on Midtown Crime 2008).




15

C. Whose city is this anyway?

Perhaps Police Chief Keller’s questions about how to solve chronic crime can begin to find

their answers in the multidimensional mix of Kingston’s citizenry who create their own sense of place. Cultural, social, political and spatial factors determine people’s attachment to the places where

they live:

Indigenous residents, as well as colonizers, ditchdiggers as well as architects, migrant

workers as well as mayors, housewives as well as housing inspectors, are all active in shapingthe urban landscape. (Hayden 1995:15)

Dolores Hayden draws here on Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of space as a social reproduction at the

levels of the body, the labor force, and how public space of social relations is tied to the spatial

workings of political economy. (Hayden 1997: 17-20) How a space looks and feels from the historical

to how we define our identities can go a long way to helping us analyze the many aspects of

Kingston’s redevelopment. To attain this ideal community strong ties need to exist between the built

environment, its landscape and its citizenry. The critical question always becomes: Whose city it is it?

Who decides what the image and perception of the city is? How much of the image of the city is

controlled or left to its own devices? Does city government have more power without a

comprehensive plan of a vital shared vision by all stakeholders? After all, the piecemeal development

of a city can easily be controlled by special interests while a comprehensive plan would necessitate a

larger vision, one that takes into account all the voices of the city in addition to attracting focused new

investment in designated locations and prescribed type of business. In this way the city is a

collaborative project in which people can live in a productive environment and own the environment

around them with pride. The answer to who owns the city is obvious: everyone owns the city. The

question remains how much the voice of Kingston citizens is allowed to determines the way the

environment is developed around them.

The city

To be fair, Kingston City Government works with a limited budget, the problem of a

declining tax base, and lack of personnel to control complex opportunities and challenges. The people

who have shepherded the current redevelopment of Kingston have been in their posts for 10 to 15

years, sometimes longer. The City Hall Planner, Suzanne Cahill and The Development Director,

Steve Finkle work with Mayor Sottile on several big projects that have taken years to develop. One

of those projects is the Hudson Landing New Urbanist community on the site of the old cement mine

on the Hudson River. I asked whether the development that will phase in 4,000 new residents in




16

housing of all kinds and sizes will be a drain on the city’s already fragile sewer infrastructure and

resources. The answer Mr. Finkle gave is that the need for private investment is very great and after

years of modifying the plans, the developer, AVR, was successful in proving that the remediation of

the cement mines combined with income from property taxes outweighed the cost of creating another

satellite neighborhood (www.hudsonlanding.com). The location of the new community will stretch

the city northward along the Hudson but promises of connecting the community to the Downtown

waterfront with a trolley line have been made. The residents of this community may not be people

who will contribute much to the fabric of the city. Because of a lack of local jobs, these new citizens

of Kingston will be commuters. A ferry to the Amtrak station on the other side of the river in

Rhinecliff will make it easy for people to hop on a train and commute to jobs in New York City.

Steve Finkle’s perception of Midtown is that there are no spaces there that can either be built

out nor be prime space for new investment and businesses to resettle. He believes that Midtown is the

last area that will be redeveloped by the city. Instead, he has his eye on continuing the development of

Corporate Drive where there was a recent build-out for Alcoa Fasteners. He is also raising a lot of

private matching funds for the Downtown waterfront where he believes there is lots of potential for

growth. His basic philosophy is that the market drives development and that it will eventually find its

way to Midtown. However, these preconceived notions added to the historical decisions by previous

tenants of Kingston often mire the city into ignoring opportunities in the more difficult old industrial

core of the city. Bringing jobs closer to these neighborhoods should be considered a prime

opportunity for redevelopment. Furthermore, absentee landlords, while on a recently created registry,

should now be held accountable for their imprint on this critical part of the city.

I asked where Kingston’s stimulus money was being directed and the answer was Uptown

and Downtown with Midtown continuing to be the last on the list for any kind of redevelopment. The

Uptown Pike Plan renovation as well as the Downtown waterfront revitalization are the kinds

measures that are being taken by most of the cities along the Hudson to encourage tourism. Thanks to

Congressman Hinchey, the Uptown Pike Plan canopy is slated for rehabilitation of the aging columns

and lighting. In addition, stimulus money is going into a new Downtown walkway along the ragged

and heretofore unkempt edge of the water where many of the derelict buildings were removed by

urban renewal in the sixties.

(http://www.house.gov/hinchey/newsroom/press_2008/101408UptownKingstonPlans.html )

Business

At the level of business, the recent creation of a Kingston Business Alliance has joined the

Uptown, Midtown and Downtown business associations. The collective memory of the history of




17

how each part of town was created still does damage to this day. Pat Courtney, was elected president

of the new alliance and plans are being made to create a business improvement district (BID) for the

Broadway Corridor. Consultants from successful other city BID efforts have been called in and a

Main Street Manager, a veteran from a Downtown art gallery has been hired to begin the public

relations campaign to bring the city together. For Midtown, the hope is that artists will settle into the

many vacant storefronts. The same renaissance that occurred on the Downtown waterfront is what is

hoped for. Apartments over the stores, offer good live/work spaces at a relatively low cost. No real

funds or planning have been assigned to the area while Uptown and Downtown businesses continue

to get new bites of interest from outside investors. (Phone Interview Pat Courtney, December 11,

2009)

The county

Since the mid-nineties, Kingston has been the recipient of state economic development funds

and adding to its recent designation as an Entitlement Zone, Kingston also manages the updated

Empire Development Zone for all of Ulster County. This complex designation that can be political in

nature points back to Fishman’s analysis of the confusing and difficult problems of redevelopment in

the technoburbs. Political push and pull of Ulster County towns in the countryside around Kingston

jockeying for prominence becomes an additional problem of the City of Kingston’s already

understaffed government. The Ulster County Development Corporation works closely with the city

on redevelopment. My recent conversation with Lance Matteson was optimistic about Kingston’s

future. Mr. Matteson has many other projects to watch besides the projects in Kingston. He is making

sure that Ulster County is represented in the global marketplace and recently traveled to China to

represent small and highly specialized industries in Ulster County. (Lance Matteson, Phone Interview

November 23, 2009).

The citizens

Kingston’s citizenry is a mix of old, new and no money. The three segregated areas of town

are distinct and separated by levels of income. The map below illustrates the concentrations of

income or lack thereof.




18

Ulster County Planning Board

Families with the old money stay out of the glare of media and local politics, although they

undoubtedly have great influence. They live in the quiet splendor of the large well-built mansions

along Fair Street and other Uptown streets. In sharp contrast, the people in Midtown who live one

street away from the most beautiful areas survive precariously through a drug culture and gangs from

New York City who make their presence known there. The Bloods and the Crips who entrenched

themselves in Los Angeles have infiltrated Midtown Kingston. Crime statistics are similar or

(sometimes) worse than New York City. Drugs and guns are often smuggled in on public

transportation. Unfortunately, Kingston’s Midtown crime rate makes for juicy news stories and

although confined to a small area, still gives the city a bad name overall.

www.city-data.com




19

And yet, the responsibility of solving Midtown Crime lies with all of its stakeholders of all

levels of income. Debate and face-to-face discussion need to be nurtured. As an example, City

Aldermen on the City’s Common Council need to interface personally with their constituents.

Kingston wards are small enough. This is a critical step toward creating awareness of all the voices in

each of the 9 Wards of Kingston.

A closer examination of the many factors that contribute to the local and metropolitan

network of crime may offer up some useful answers. On the local level, responding to this negative

perception about Midtown, in July of 2008, Kingston Cares, an organization that works with the

homeless and youth in Midtown funded a door-to-door survey to find out what people think of

Midtown. The area surveyed 497 people in the map below cited previously in the Police Chief’s

report. It is concentrated and small so it is often is viewed as “not bad enough” to receive funding

(See map below). However, all Midtown residents agree that crime and drug dealing is their worst

problem. They cite kids skipping school and gangs as contributing factors. As a result, 57% of the

people carry a gun while walking around in the neighborhood. Most feel trapped in the area because

rents are affordable because they don’t make a living wage. This area also has very poor public

transportation to areas such as the mall making this what I have called a “soft-walled prison.” The

danger of not addressing the problem head-on is that the concentration of crime is moving up river

from New York to Newburgh and across the river to Poughkeepsie. With the recent migration from

Poughkeepsie, the problem of crime is at a critical turning point.

In many conversations with local youth leaders, the perception of Midtown in the press and

by outsiders exacerbates their problems. The survey also showed that people in this area feel let

down by the local service organizations.

Kingston Cares Survey




20

The area that has seen the most influx of new migration of median income people from the

Metropolitan Core is by the Downtown waterfront. In the past fifteen years, as New York City has

become too expensive, artists and musicians who used to occupy Tribeca and the now gentrified

neighborhoods of Brooklyn, have found their way to Kingston. They are the David Brook’s Crunchy

Suburbanites (Brooks 2004:21). They don’t really care that much whether their house or lawn is

immaculately beautiful. They care that they occupy an old structure and try to save it from demise. In

a way they are a combination of bohemian hipsters and crunchy suburbanites. Some choose to raise

their kids in exalted abandoned churches where the light is just right to produce meditative paintings

that sell at a gallery on 57th

Street in New York City or they are musicians who light up sound mixing

boards all over Kingston in renovated pajama or brush factories. The latest economic downturn has

taken its toll and too much home and business real estate is flooding the market. Buildings that were

vacant even prior to the current downturn stain the landscape.

However, typical gentrification trends are manifesting themselves in Kingston as the city

attempts to make up for the years lost in the nineties after IBM abandoned the area. In addition to the

artists and musicians, Kingston also has a strongly politicized gay population that has established an

LGBTQ Center in Uptown Kingston. Fastidious gay renovators, typical of the people who occupy

the frontier spaces of old cities, have gentrified the areas in Downtown that were marginal. Areas that

were once full of crack houses are now safe and cleaned up. The waterfront is now being developed

for tourism and many of the vacant and abandoned houses are getting a makeover even in the

downturn. Although the coming and going trends of small antique shops, high end boutiques, and

good restaurants have been constant since the 90s, waterfront revitalization and an upturn in tourism

show momentum in the right direction.

Conclusion

In summary, I have begun to sketch an inclusive framework for the city of Kingston by

offering some analysis of Kingston as a “micropolis” in the large New York City area. Current

population demographics show in and out migration between the cities along the Hudson River and

New York City. This population is in constant flux depending on economic conditions. I also took a

look at the transformation of Kingston into the new city form of the technoburb with the creation of

The Town of Ulster that set the stage for the opportunistic development of the IBM complex. This

story was followed by the devastation of not only the exit of IBM but also the culmination of the

effects of historical decisions made in the 19th

Century with the creation of the City of Kingston. We

culminated the story with a short overview of some (definitely not all) of the stakeholders in Kingston

and propose a compelling argument for creating a comprehensive vision and plan for the city.




21

As a city, Kingston has problems but they are similar to many of the problems that face the

21st

century small US city. A multi-faceted strategy can enlighten and assist all the players in the

Kingston community to better understand their city and each other. Bringing together all community

leaders from ethnic, racial, educational, gender, community and occupational stations in life to own

their city will be instrumental to how Kingston’s built environment looks and feels.

A more inclusive urban landscape history can also stimulate new approaches to urban design,

encouraging designers, artists, and writers, as well as citizens to contribute to an urban art of creating aheightened sense of place in the city. This would be urban design that recognizes the social diversity of

the city as well as the communal uses of space, very different from urban design as monumental

architecture governed by form or driven by real estate speculation (Hayden 1995:13).

A citizen-led consciousness about the city has been growing in fits and starts over the past 20

years. Small organizations such as Friends of Historic Kingston, Kingston Citizens, Kingston Digital

Corridor, Family of Woodstock’s Everett Hodge Center, The Center for Creative Education, and

religious groups are all made up of mostly volunteer citizens who truly care about their city. They

have voiced their opinions on critical city matters and some have been heard on the level of

government, others have not. Much more needs to be done to incorporate all the diverse voices in the

conversations about the community and its aims. Efforts in the community for youth by community

centers and educational programs are most promising.

Four hundred years of living are evident in Kingston’s architecture. It is its best and one of its

most distinguishing features. It should not, however, be exploited to fold Kingston into another New

Urbanist community for commuters to New York City. It should also not become a Disneyfied

version of Kingston. There are other creative and lucrative solutions to inviting private investors into

the city. Redevelopment of the city’s built environment should be a conversation of regularly

scheduled and transparent engagement with its citizenry as well as the much-needed attraction of

private investment. It requires a precarious balancing act of complex communication with all the

stakeholders of the community.




22

APPENDIX 1

Employment Opportunities compared from www.city-data.com

Other sales and related workers including supervisors (5%)Other management occupations except farmers and farm managers (4%)

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations (4%)Sales representatives, services, wholesale and manufacturing (3%)Electrical equipment mechanics and other installation, maintenance, and repair occupations includingsupervisors (3%)Driver/sales workers and truck drivers (3%)Laborers and material movers, hand (3%)




23

Other office and administrative support workers including supervisors (9%)Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides (6%)Secretaries and administrative assistants (5%)Registered nurses (4%)Other sales and related workers including supervisors (4%)Cashiers (4%)

Preschool, kindergarten, elementary and middle school teachers (4%)




24

APPENDIX 2

Map of Kingston and surrounding towns

Ulster County Development Corporation

Note that the Town of Ulster was created as a way to separate the City of Kingston from thefirst lock of the Delaware & Hudson Canal and Town of Kingston was created at the same time.

Driving through several town boundaries to get to The City of Kingston is, needless to say,

confusing. The Town of Kingston was forever defused of its political power at the same time.




25

APPENDIX 3

City of Kingston with Major Highways

Ulster County Development Corporation




26

Census Block Map

Ulster County Planning Board




27

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