An allée can dignify an arrival, draw the eye to a focal point, even partition an open space. To do any of these effectively, it must appear linear, uniform, and repetitive. Of course, composed of living trees it can’t really be flawless; still, it ought to give the illusion of perfection. So there’s a problem if some of an allée’s constituent trees fail to thrive, leaving gaps and slumps in an assemblage meant to appear continuous and taut. That’s what was happening at Storm King.
The Storm King Art Center occupies 500 acres of rolling terrain about 50 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Highlands, a region of lushly vegetated, softly eroded low mountains. More than 100 monumental works by renowned artists are sited permanently throughout (more…)
The Upstate Archipelago proposal. Image courtesy Cornell Design, H+N+S, and SOAR (Strengthening Our Area Residents) of the Cornell University Cooperative Extension.
New York’s Erie Canal once projected a young nation’s power and commercial ambitions across half a continent. Connecting New York City and the Hudson River north of Albany all the way to the Great Lakes, at 363 miles long, it was the second largest canal in the world when it opened in 1825, and one of the most transformative infrastructure projects of America’s early history. It reduced bulk commodity costs by 90 percent, according to some estimates, and it’s been immortalized in stories and songs ever since.
But in the 201 years since it began construction, the canal has been leapfrogged by nearly every manner of freight and commodity transit: rail, road, pipelines, and even the now-navigable St. Lawrence River. Vessel traffic on the canal peaked in the early 1950s, and recreational boating peaked in 1989.
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Frederick Charles/fcharles.com.
From “A Foodshed Moment” by Anne Raver in the December 2016 issue, the story of the Hudson Valley’s struggle to balance real estate hunger for farmland estates with the need for cropable acres to feed New York City (pictured are Katie and Chris Cashen on their farm).
