7/28/2019 scholarly contemporary 2009 study on kingston, ny http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/scholarly-contemporary-2009-study-on-kingston-ny 1/29 Space and Place in Kingston, New York by Anezka Sebek from Google EarthFundamentals of Urban Sociology GSOC 5004 December 18, 2009 Virag Molnar
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7/28/2019 scholarly contemporary 2009 study on kingston, ny
“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.
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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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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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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.
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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
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).
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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
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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.
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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%)
7/28/2019 scholarly contemporary 2009 study on kingston, ny
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%)
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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.
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Duany, Andres and Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck, Jeff Speck. "What is Sprawl and Why?" In Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, 3 - 20. New York:
Northpoint Press, 2000.
Eade, John. " Chapter 3: “Representing the Global City: Contemporary Tourist Guides.”
in Placing London: From Imperial Capital to Global City., 33-48. New York: Berghahn Books,
2000.
Edison, Michael. "Rosendale Cement." Rosendale Cement.http://www.rosendalecement.net/html/history_of_rosendale_cement.html (accessed November
19, 2009).
Fishman, Robert. "Beyond Suburbia: The Rise of the Technoburb." In Bourgeois Utopias, the Rise
and Fall of Suburbia, 77-85. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Hayden, Dolores. "Chapter 2: “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and thePolitics of Space.”." In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History , 14-43.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press., 1995.
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