Customer Reviews

The Heart of the Catskills

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As one among the numerous "transplants" from New York City who have settled in the Mid-Hudson Valley over the past few decades, it's embarrassing to admit how little I knew about the place I've now lived for twenty-plus years ... even as I've developed an appreciation for the landscape that goes beyond its obvious attraction to tourists in spring, summer, and fall, and to the skiers who ply the high Catskill slopes in the winter.

Bob, who's a friend of mine, has been just about forever. A Kingston native now living in Shokan (hard by the reservoir) and working out of his restored Dutch house, he uncovered marvelous old photographs of the old towns and cities, resort hotels and tanneries, for this book. And he matched them with a comprehensive written history that covers the region with the thoroughness of a microscope. The naturalist John Burroughs (of Roxbury) is in here--hiking the highest peak in the Catskills, Slide Mountain, to mourn the death of his friend Walt Whitman--and the painter Frederic Church, of the "Hudson River School," whose home at Olana is now a national landmark.

But much of the Catskill story is about environmental degradation--of the streams, as a result of the mid-nineteenth century tanneries; of species of birds and fish, from hunters and stream diversion for the luxury hotels and later the reservoirs; and ultimately, so far as many old-timers who live here are concerned, the worst of all: construction of the New York City reservoirs.

Wisely, Bob mentions but holds back on this last: the eminent domain destruction of towns and hamlets in order to flood the landscape and build the great reservoirs that would (and still) supply the city with what's purported to be the cleanest water in the world: the Cannonsville, Pepacton, Ashokan, and Neversink. It's the topic of the book he's currently working on.
I Think, Therefore Who Am I?