It's time to embrace the DRI

Hudson Falls, spring and a chat about pronouns

Bella and I have been following the progress of the market center on South Street during our almost-daily forays into downtown.

It started as an almond-shaped hole oriented diagonally to the street. Now the hole has been filled with crushed stone, tamped down and rolled flat, and cement is being poured in a rectangular ditch next to the sidewalk. 

Construction continues on the market center on South Street, which is meant to host the farmers market and other community events.

The warm winter seems to have helped the construction schedule, although work paused during the 20-inch storm last week. 

I made a habit in the past of criticizing the state’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative, part of the larger regional economic development program put together by our previous governor, Andrew Cuomo. 

The effort struck me as overly bureaucratic — a top-down approach in which local officials tried to win over state functionaries by pitching projects that were cool and community-oriented, like farmers markets.

But local economies should grow organically, shaped by local conditions. When the state imposes on an upstate community a vision that excites bureaucrats who work in Albany and live in Clifton Park, the result can be awkward.

I made a related argument for years about GlobalFoundries, saying New York should not have given away $1.2 billion in cash and tax breaks to tempt to Saratoga County a corporation owned by oil-rich Abu Dhabi.

But after years of rants, I’ve rethought that position in light of the growth of the chip-making foundry, which now employs about 2,500 people, and after another expansion, will employ 4,000.

“Maybe I was wrong,” I said to a friend recently.

“You weren’t,” he said. “That money could have done so much more good distributed to local businesses.”

Then he mentioned that his son is working at GlobalFoundries.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened with a different development strategy — if, for example, $120,000 grants had been handed out to 10,000 small to medium regional businesses looking to expand.

Or if $1,200,000 grants had been awarded to 1,000 large regional businesses for expansion. Could those businesses have added an average of five or more jobs over the past 12 years?

The answer doesn’t matter. We must work with what we have, which in the case of GlobalFoundries is a company that employs thousands of people in jobs that pay fairly well.

And in Glens Falls, we have millions in state funding to make our downtown better — particularly on South Street, which still makes a shabby impression with its boarded-up storefronts.

Two of those zombie buildings — the former Sandy’s Clam Bar and the former Hot Shots, both at the corner of Elm Street — should soon be reborn as commercial and residential space. The state announced recently that Bonacio development, which owns the building, has qualified for $6.6 million in tax credits — the final bit of financing the project needed.

It’s easy to carp about the slow pace and shifting vision of downtown revitalization, but city officials deserve credit have trudging on through mounds of paperwork and disruptions of the pandemic.

I’ve wondered often over the past seven years if work would ever begin, but now it’s happening. In a few years, South Street will have been pulled from the brink of blight and transformed into the city’s bustling hub. Then, at long last, we will be able to legitimately claim there’s nowhere to park.

Jewels of Hudson Falls

Bella, Ringo and I stopped at Kendall McKernon’s gallery in Hudson Falls on Saturday, and the voluble, charming Mr. McKernon gave us a tour of all five floors of the Sandy Hill Arts Center, purchased and rehabilitated a few years ago in a labor of love by Bill Nikas.

The top floor is a community space that on Saturday was set up with tables, chairs and decorations for a high school sports banquet. The next three floors (going down) are occupied by art studios and a two-story open space with 20-foot tall windows, as beautiful as a church. The renovation has preserved the building’s character — old wood floors and doors about 6 feet wide.

It’s a place filled with sun-struck spaces, not least the McKernon Gallery on the ground floor, which is crowded with creative works in all sorts of media by regional artists, local jams and syrups and sauces and McKernon’s own photographs. 

Kendall McKernon holds forth in one of the glorious upstairs spaces in the Sandy Hill Arts Center. Some of his photographs are displayed on the bench.

Spring

A friend sent me a few poems in recognition of April as National Poetry Month, perhaps because poets have been inspired by spring for millennia, sometimes in ways that confound expectations, as with William Carlos Williams’ poem “Spring and All,” which starts like this:

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast — a cold wind.

My friend, Richard Carella — a poet from Hudson Falls — included in his note three poems from poets who either lived here or did some work here.

He wrote, “The poems have in common, among other things, an arresting serendipitous occurrence … from which occurrence, arresting philosophical, and poetic, ruminations evolve.”

It seems to me, too, that all three could be read as spring poems:

THE MAPLE IN BLOSSOM

So many bees came to the maple tree,

their humming was audible in the house.

The tree, shimmering with their movement,

appeared iridescent. We, too, show in this way,

how full of moving blood we are in flower.

— Sherry M. Kearns (from Deep Kiss; 2013)

ORDINARY DAYS

Halcyon, unremarkable,

They are treasured most because

No one calls or comes by.

Nothing happens but the sun.

Such freedom comes seldom;

Chinese scholars a thousand years ago

Enjoyed such ordinary days.

 — Michael Perkins (from A Splendor Among Shadows; 2013)

PRECOGNITION

Central Park, NYC

June, 1969

A little girl

in a red dress

falls down

in dandelions

laughing at

her own clumsiness...

at first

I think her an image

among images then

see she’s the whole poem

— Paul Pines (from A Furnace In The Shadows; 2018)

The crocuses were disheveled by the large snowstorm last week, but they survived.

Chatting

Zo came over, as he often does, and we chatted about trans issues — mostly pronouns — and also Bella’s new leggings and then Zo’s and Tam’s experiences with college housing in Albany. Zo went by "she” and “her” through college. Now 28, Zo goes by “he” and “him.” This has been a smooth transition, easily accepted by me and Bella and not questioned by people who meet Zo now for the first time. From the time Zo was a toddler, many folks have identified him as a boy and then a man, so it looks like they knew the truth of the matter before Zo himself embraced it.

Here’s the audio of our chat (we stick mostly to the subject for about the first 15 minutes, then wander):

Zo sits with Bella on the couch in our library recently, while Ringo keeps watch out the window.