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.
