June 15, 2009

OUR TOWNS

Two Rebirths, Miraculous but Unfinished

All week long, the grand flotilla, led by a replica of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon, has made its way up the river. It sailed under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge here Thursday afternoon, marking the anniversary of the ship’s voyage 400 years ago.

Part history lesson, part spectacle, part celebration, Hudson 400 in many ways marks a fragile, incomplete miracle — the way the river, a foul industrial cesspool just three decades ago, has been brought back to life.

But if the river, in large part, has been reclaimed, the future of the towns along it is a more complicated business. And few places reflect those complications more than Hudson, about 100 miles north of New York City. Once a raucous industrial city spewing pollutants into the river, then a boarded-up postindustrial corpse, now, like the river, it’s both a marvel of reclamation and a problematic unfinished story.

Here is a link to the whole article in PDF download format.

The observations strike us as on target concerning the situation with jobs and the local population. There definitely are several realities at play in Hudson. Small stages make the contrasts more easily visible.