Making Mountains (First Printing) New York City and the Catskills

Stradling, David & William Cronon

ISBN 10: 0295987472 / ISBN 13: 9780295987477

Published by University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 2007

About this Item

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books; 6 X 1 X 9 inches; 311 pages; B&W photographs. Minor to light foxing on the top exterior edge of textblock. A couple of minor smudges on front free endpaper. Very Good condition otherwise. No other noteworthy defects. No markings. ; - Your satisfaction is our priority. We offer free returns and respond promptly to all inquiries. Your item will be carefully cushioned in bubble wrap and securely boxed. All orders ship on the same or next business day. Buy with confidence.

Seller Inventory # HVD-67924-A-0

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Making Mountains (First Printing) New York City and the Catskills
• Publisher: University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295987472
• ISBN 13: 9780295987477
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Condition: Good+
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.

Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water.

The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation.

In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

About the Author

David Stradling is associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His focus is the intersection of urban and environmental history. He is author of Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 and editor of Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classical Texts.