Northern New York is caught in a conundrum. While its long term economic life has been stagnant or declining with its base in small farms, paper mills, and small manufacturing, the engines of growth in the larger economy are pushing at the edges. Stasis has allowed the North Country to maintain open space and a way of life in small towns and villages where everybody knows everybody. This way of life is challenged by the arrival of big box stores. The big box stores have parking lots bigger that most of the old downtowns. What is really arriving is North America's car based suburban culture. Watertown's new development next to Interstate 81 at Arsenal Street could be anywhere in America. Starbucks, Ruby Tuesday's, Ponderosa, a curving access road and three story hotel have nothing unique or local about them. Only winter provides a distinguishing characteristic with the ever changing snow banks. The new reality provides jobs in a place which was loosing population to places like the Carolina's, Florida and Texas where entry level work paid more than minimum wage. Meanwhile, the North Country's dairy farms have inexorable grown into large corn fed milk factories, often staffed with immigrant labor. That people would travel two and three thousand miles to feed cows and milk on eight hour shifts would have amazed someone in the era of milk cans and twice daily milk trucks, but then again a psychiatrist teleported from 1962 would be amazed by the dramatic increase in schizophrenia- all those people walking around talk to imaginary friends [on hands free ear attached cell phones].
What has always distinguished this place is green space, the fact that almost all of this place is green space. One need only talk to older residents of the Town of Colonie outside Albany to learn how quickly that can change. Wolf Road, now the throbbing four lane Main Street of one of the suburban cores of the Capitol District, used to be a rural avenue of some of the most productive vegetable farms in the state. Today in Potsdam, and in LeRay green space is turning to tarmac. Arsenal Street is Watertown is the new downtown, but much of it is inaccessible on foot, or by bicycle. Public transit in these areas isn't. When a place loses green space, it loses part of its soul.
There has been a decided lack of government planning for this growth. The patchwork quilt of New York State's municipal government works against comprehensive planning. It is also difficult for local legislators who grew up in the milk can era to see or imagine what is being done to their world. There is also a certain part of the community that says if it means jobs, profit, money, growth it must be good. At one time GM Powertrain meant jobs, profit, money, growth. Today GM Powertrain is a Superfund site owned by a bankrupt shell corporation. Unless your Amish, you can't stop change. What can be done however is to learn from other places that have tamed the growth. The city fathers of Watertown saw the need for green when they imitated New York City, Montréal, Boston, Buffalo and Chicago, and commissioned Thompson Park more than one hundred years ago. Green space regulations in the Town of Colonie require trees and plantings along side parking lots, for example. Other areas have demanded developers install sidewalks. Indianapolis, Indiana and Ottawa Ontario have both grown their city boundaries to incorporate their grown city and extended urban amenities. Perhaps we should send our leaders on a road trip.
