[Leica] Recession/crisis

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

There is very little visual evidence of the recession in New York's  
Hudson Valley. Sure, there is much less new home building than there  
was a couple of years ago and a few more day workers, possibly  
illegals, hanging around street corners waiting for jobs. But it is  
hard to photograph what isn't there. There are no protests, no riots,  
no storming of the state offices. No one is selling apples from a  
pushcart. But then we had our recession decades ago. Because of easy  
water transportation the Hudson River valley was the U.S. industrial  
heartland for almost 200 years. But with railways, highways, and air  
travel that no longer mattered. Locals are fond of saying that the  
Hudson Valley reached its economic zenith during the Civil War and it  
has been downhill ever since.

Factories closed up or moved elsewhere. Anti-pollution legislation  
prohibiting industrial discharge into the river was the final straw.  
My area lost a big distillery, food processing plants, paint  
manufacturing, automobile assembly, a paper mill, brick making and  
cement plants. Even the Crayola crayon company left town and moved to  
Easton, PA. Commercial fishing for striped bass, blue crabs, and even  
sturgeon caviar disappeared. Further upstate, entire industries shut  
down. The Smith Corona typewriter plant moved to Mexico and then  
closed entirely. Endicott Shoes, the country's largest show factory  
went out of business. IBM sold its laptop computer manufacturing  
operation to China. Finally, the lumber industry was decimated as  
wooded areas were purchased and incorporated into the Adirondack  
"Forever Wild" state park. (Which, by the way, is three times the  
size of Yellowstone.) None of this was high tech but steady blue  
collar work.

The residue of lost industrialization is easy to see but it is old  
news. Riverside towns such as Peekskill, Fishkill, Newburgh,  
Poughkeepsie and many of those along the Erie Canal are ghosts of  
their former vibrant self. Docks are decrepit, factories vacant, some  
houses old and in disrepair. They make good photo ops but it would be  
a fraud to pass them off as symbolic of the current financial crisis.  
I walked the neighborhood looking for dramatic scenes, even ordinary  
scenes depicting the recession, but I couldn't find any. I guess I'll  
go back to shooting photos of flowers and grandchildren.

Larry Z