CAPITAL STEETS LAUNCH EVENT

We're very excited to announce the launch of Capital Streets, a new nonprofit focused on transportation and liveable streets in the Capital Region. Our launch event is for advocates, activists, pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and anyone with interests in mobility and complete streets. On March 30th, we'll engage, learn, and celebrate together. Capital Streets will provide an overview of our organization, how we got here and where we're heading. We'll also hear from Jeff Olson, author of The 3rd Mode and an extremely well versed expert in bike/ped issues. An afterparty and networking session at Rare Form Brewing will follow.

Contact James for more information.

Capital Streets Launch Facebook Event

FoSCI Urban Renewal Film Series

Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal

March 15, 2023

6:30 – 8:00pm (doors at 6pm)

@ The FOCUS Lab (21 3rd St, Troy, NY)

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(Screening is free but seating is limited—please reserve.)

As part of FoSCI’s Urban Renewal Film Series, we will be screening Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal, about Kingston’s Rondout neighborhood, which was gutted by an urban renewal road and bridge project. Filmmakers Stephen Blauweiss and Lynn Woods will join us afterward for a Q&A, along with David Hochfelder, University of Albany professor, and urban renewal historian.

Film synopsis:

Urban renewal left lasting scars, but many Americans are unaware of how their city came to be pocked and fragmented by parking lots, expressways, Brutalist buildings, and crime-plagued high-rise public housing projects. Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal chronicles how a federally funded 1960s urban renewal project devastated the waterfront district of Kingston, New York, a microcosm of the urban disruption that occurred all over America. Nearly 500 buildings were destroyed and thousands of people were displaced, many of them African Americans who had difficulty finding new housing.

Interviews with former residents bring the destroyed neighborhood back to life — its bars, clothing stores, and bakeries — and describe the difficulties of being relocated; some African Americans were unable to find housing outside the area. Commentary by historians, urban planners, and city officials reveal the federal policies that encouraged suburbanization and worked against people of color in urban areas.

The film chronicles the area's decades-long recovery from total abandonment to the flourishing waterfront neighborhood of restaurants, antique shops, and cultural attractions it is today, even as the city still struggles with urban renewal's problematic legacy. Today, as people strive to re-create the walkable, retail-rich communities that once characterized the nation's downtowns, the story of Lost Rondout is instructive, showing how a neighborhood survived despite the misguided top-down planning efforts that nearly destroyed it and the on-going challenges posed by gentrification.

Produced and directed by Stephen Blauweiss and Lynn Woods.

“The reckless idiocy of 20th-century urban renewal is beautifully documented in Lost Rondout, an elegy for a wonderful Hudson River town that was all but erased from the map... ”
—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere

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A native of Manhattan and Hudson Valley resident since 1999, STEPHEN BLAUWEISS is an independent filmmaker, historian, graphic designer and author.

Blauweiss produces work on a wide variety of subjects, from art and education and history to social and environmental issues. He also produces theatrical events and museum-quality exhibitions on local history, architecture, and the arts.

He has produced over 100 short films, 3 features, and several music videos. Twenty of his short films have aired on PBS and been screened in museums and festivals across the U.S., Europe and Canada, including the New York State Museum, MASS MoCA and the Albany Institute of History & Art. Blauweiss was awarded funds from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2018.

Blauweiss published his first book The Life & Death of the Kingston Post Office, with Karen Berelowitz in 2018. The Story of Historic Kingston was published in 2022. For more information, visit www.blauweissmedia.com

LYNN WOODS is a journalist and painter who moved to the Rondout district nearly 20 years ago and has been fascinated by the torn-down city ever since.

Following a career as a business travel reporter, with articles published in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, American Demographics, the Wall Street Journal, and other national publications, she has written extensively for Ulster Publishing and Chronogram, covering the arts, environment, and urban revitalization in the mid Hudson Valley. She is co-author of Adirondack Style: Great Camps and Rustic Lodges, Universe Books, a division of Rizzoli International, published in 2011. Woods holds a degree in art history from Barnard College.

She is also a painter captivated by the Kingston streetscape and waterfront and is currently researching urban renewal in Newburgh, N.Y.
For more information, visit www.lynndwoods.com

DAVID HOCHFELDER is associate professor of history at University at Albany, SUNY, and director of the university’s public history program. His current research is a collaborative, public, and digital history of urban renewal, Picturing Urban Renewal, which has won four NEH grants. He is also assembling a statewide inventory of urban renewal records held locally in around 90 municipalities around the state, a project also funded by NEH and administered by the New York State Archives. 

Check out his NEH-funded Picturing Urban Renewal website (Work is ongoing): http://devapp.picturingurbanrenewal.org/

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NARCAN Training w/ Project Safe Point

Monday, March 13

6:00 – 8:00pm

As drug overdoses continue to ravage our community, please come to this free training on the use of life-saving NARCAN to reverse opioid overdose. Attendees will also receive fentanyl test strip training to learn to detect the presence of fentanyl. Troy Fire Department will be on hand to educate us about the importance of timely first response.

This event is free and open to the public. Childcare will be provided as necessary. Please let the host know if childcare is required.

REGISTER HERE

This River is a Place:

Activating a City’s Waterfront

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(This event will be held in person (live stream available to registrants). Presented in conjunction with the current exhibition “To Flow Both Ways: The Past, Present, and Future of Hudson Waterfronts” at the FOCUS Lab in Troy, NY. )

Cities across the county are engaged in cleaning up their waterfronts, developing abandoned spaces, and reconnecting their downtowns with their waterways. Long neglected and often deeply damaged by a legacy of pollution, waterfronts have suddenly turned into valuable land. But the development of waterfront space is only the first step—cities are discovering that in order to truly transform a place, they must activate it through programing, community partnerships, jobs, arts, culture, and commerce. People must have a reason to come to the water.

In this event, we will explore three Hudson Riverfront cities and hear about their journeys to activate their waterfronts, how they formed public and private partnerships, what has worked and what has not worked, and what steps cities just starting on the process should take.

Jeff Anzevino, Director of Land Use Advocacy at Scenic Hudson, will talk about overall waterfront activation strategies as outlined in the Revitalizing Hudson Waterfronts Plan, and then explore the case study of Beacon's waterfront, where he was deeply involved in the development of Long Dock Park. From Hudson, Adam Weinert, founder of the Hudson Arts Coalition will tell us about the organization of Waterfront Wednesdays, a hugely successful weekly community festival along Hudson’s waterfront. And from Kingston, NY, Julie Noble, Sustainability Coordinator for the City of Kingston, will narrate her role in the city’s Weaving the Waterfrontproject and developing Kingston Point Park into both a place of climate resilience and a community nexus.

The event will take place live at the FOCUS Lab. A live stream will be made available to those who register for the event. Light food and drink will be served.

TICKETS: $10 GA/$5 students. Scholarship opportunities are available.

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SPEAKERS:

Moderator:

REIF LARSEN | Founder, Future of Small Cities Institute

This event is being co-hosted by the Hudson River Watershed Alliance.

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