A Central Park for the World

New York's Adirondacks

NEW YORK CITY - The rich cultural history of the Adirondacks, and the region's role as a favorite wilderness retreat for New Yorkers for more than 200 years, will be explored at the PaineWebber Art Gallery in midtown, January 22 through April 3.

Organized by the Adirondack Museum, the exhibition, "A Central Park for the World: New York's Adirondack Park," will feature art and artifacts that reflect the region's history and its aesthetic influence, including paintings from the Hudson River School, examples of "Adirondack rustic" architecture and furniture, hand-crafted Adirondack guideboats and canoes, and historic and contemporary photographs that chronicle the evolution of the largest park in the United States outside of Alaska.

The Adirondack Park, which covers nearly one-fifth of New York State, is the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi, encompassing six million acres of land. The Adirondack region was first termed "a Central Park for the world" in an 1864 New York Times editorial. By the late Nineteenth Century, the Adirondack region was one of the most popular summer resort areas in North America, providing a wilderness escape for city dwellers from all over the Northeast. Today more than eight million people visit the park annually.

The exhibit will contain paintings, artifacts, prints, maps, historical writings, photography, and freshwater boats. It will be organized thematically, taking the viewer through exhibition spaces dedicated to landscape painting, the history and preservation of the park, camping, boating, the life of sportsmen, the Adirondack Museum, Twentieth Century photography of the park and its people, and Adirondack rustic architecture and furniture.

The Adirondacks have had a major influence on the work of American artists, as will be shown in the first two sections of the exhibition.

Americans in the early Nineteenth Century believed the wilderness was the embodiment of their country's deepest spiritual values. Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand created a style of landscape painting in the early 1800s that reflected this view, which came to be known as the Hudson River School. Cole, Durand, and their fellow artists captured the grandeur and power of nature, using as their subjects the Hudson River and its surroundings along the 300 miles from New York City to the river's source in the Adirondacks. Paintings will include "Schroon Lake" by Cole (1846), "Lake George" by John Frederick Kensett (1856), and "Autumn Morning, Racquette [sic] Lake" by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1872).

By 1850, American landscape painting had become a dominant style. Americans shared with artists a love of nature, especially city dwellers who were increasingly surrounded by an industrialized landscape. Demand grew for Adirondack images, such as the popular Currier and Ives lithographs of hunting and fishing scenes, including "An Anxious Moment" and "A Three Pounder Sure" from 1874. Prints also served as environmental warnings, depicting the destruction of nature through logging, as in Julian Rix's "Destruction of Adirondack Forests."

Though declared a state park by the New York State legislature in 1892, the 9,375-square mile Adirondack Park remains a patchwork of publicly and privately owned land. It is shared by logging and mining companies, landowners including seasonal visitors and 130,000 full-time residents, and state-owned lands that are guaranteed by the state constitution to "be forever kept as wild forest lands." This unique arrangement creates a challenge in protecting the mountains, lakes and woods of the park and accommodating the needs of private landowners.

Illustrating the importance of Adirondack preservation will be Nineteenth and Twentieth Century maps of the park, illustrations by Verplanck Colvin of sites he surveyed in the 1870s, historic prints including Winslow Homer's "Lumbering in Winter," historic photographs of the region, and an original Smokey the Bear costume.

The fourth and fifth sections of the exhibition will explore the changing recreational uses of the Adirondacks over the years.

Before the Civil War, the majority of visitors were gentlemen of means who visited to hunt and fish and sleep under the stars. These men would stay for weeks and hire local guides who knew the best spots for trout and deer, how to cook, and how to build an impromptu shelter of saplings and bark called a "lean-to." A lean-to will be re-created in the exhibition and will include late Nineteenth Century camping artifacts such as a rifle, woven packbasket, cook pot and ax.

Evolving means of transportation opened up the Adirondacks to a growing number of visitors. By the 1870s, the region had become a holiday destination for middle-class visitors traveling on railroad and steamboat lines, many of whom came not to hunt and fish, but just to enjoy the magnificent scenery.

The advent of the automobile after the turn of the century brought even larger numbers of vacationers who relied on maps instead of guides, and ready-made tents and motels instead of lean-tos. On display will be a typical mass-produced pitch tent from the 1920s called a "Jiffy Bungalo."

By 1925, camping had evolved even for children, with the Adirondack Park boasting 54 children's camps that allowed city children to spend their time in the great outdoors. Many of these camps are still operating today.

Prior to the automobile, the waterways of the Adirondacks were the primary transportation routes. Local craftsmen built Adirondack guideboats and lightweight open canoes of portable design that were ideal for traveling the rivers and lakes that laced the mountainous region. Guideboats were light enough to be carried overland, but sturdy enough to carry two men and a deer over tumultuous Adirondack waters.

This section of the exhibition will show these early craft, including a Johnson outboard motor and an Indian Girl canoe, as well as photographs of a number of later pleasure craft that were brought into the area.

The attention in newspapers, magazines and books to the "Central Park for the world" helped make the Adirondacks one of the more popular vacation destinations. Articles appeared in many New York publications, including the Times and Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

Many such articles will be on display, as well as the early sports equipment used by the inspired visitors, including Nineteenth Century fly rods and reels, nets and rifles, bug dope, hunting costumes, guidebooks and camping equipment.

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Artists have long documented the beauty of the Adirondacks in paintings and prints, and photographers now use their medium to celebrate the region and its people. The Adirondack Museum commissioned two photographers, Eliot Porter and Mathias Oppersdorff, to interpret and document the Adirondacks of the Twentieth Century.

Porter's evocative landscape photographs, created in the park over a two-year period were published in the 1966 large-format book, Forever Wild: The Adirondacks. Oppersdorff captured the occupations and the character of the year-round residents of the park in portraits taken in the 1980s, which resulted in the exhibition and book Adirondack Faces. Twenty Porter and Oppersdorff photographs will be on view.

"Adirondack rustic" architecture, furniture and furnishings have become increasingly influential and popular. This section of the exhibition will include examples of furniture and structures fashioned by local Adirondack craftsmen with roots, trunks, branches, twigs, bark and burl.

In the late Nineteenth Century, entrepreneur William West Durant built large rustic woodland retreats called "Great Camps" for wealthy financiers and industrialists in the central Adirondacks. Durant utilized local materials as well as stylistic elements from vernacular log cabin construction and high style architecture to define "Adirondack rustic," which was later adopted for vacation homes across the country.

The Adirondack Great Camps employed the Adirondack rustic style throughout. Rustic, or stick furniture, took cues from Eighteenth Century English and Chinese garden furniture and were made of peeled or unpeeled cedar, spruce, or yellow birch. Cabinets were often decorated with sheets of bark, usually white birch, or with elaborate and inventive geometric patterns of twigs or sticks.

Examples of Adirondack rustic furniture will include an Ernest Stowe table and armchair, made between 1904 and 1914 for Camp West Wind at Upper Seranac Lake. Other creations will include an umbrella stand, bench, birdhouse, sewing box, hat rack, and a cellaret designed by architect Augustus Shepherd for a cottage at the Adirondack League Club near Old Forge at the turn of the century.

Called "...the best of its kind in the world" by The New York Times, The Adirondack Museum, five hours north of Manhattan, overlooks Blue Mountain Lake and its surrounding mountains. The museum's 23 indoor and outdoor exhibit areas focus on the history and culture of the Adirondacks and the Adirondack Park, the largest state park in the contiguous United States.

The Adirondack Museum organized "A Central Park for the World," which includes an introduction to its full collection that reflects two centuries of human endeavor in the region.

This museum of history and art examines the subjects of logging, boating, road and rail transportation, mining, outdoor recreation, schooling, rustic furniture, paintings, prints and historical photographs of the region. Highlights of the museum include "The Oriental," a luxurious private railroad car, and Bull Cottage, an example of Adirondack architecture furnished entirely with rustic furniture made with roots, burls, branches and twigs.

The Adirondack Museum is open daily from 9:30 am to 5:30 pm from Memorial Day weekend through mid-October. It is located halfway between Lake George and Lake Placid, on Routes 28N and 30 at Blue Mountain Lake.

The PaineWebber Art Gallery, located in the lobby of 1285 Avenue of the Americas, on the ground floor, is open Monday through Friday, 8 am until 6 pm. Admission is free.