Amsterdam: The Lost Industrial City
I went to Amsterdam, New York to visit a friend who recently moved there during Labor Day weekend. She took me for a walk around the town and the experience is unforgettable. From Academy Street where she lives, we walked through the crumbling neighborhood with so many grand houses that are slowly falling apart. Usually it started with the added structure like the porch and then the roof. A lot of them is in need of urgent repair. We had to walk along a stretch of highway to get to the Main Street, which is abruptly blocked by the Riverfront Shopping Center, a suburban style mall. The shopping center is closed on a Sunday and you can find almost no one walking in the area. The walkway over the roof of the shopping center is the only way to get to Riverlink Park by Mohawk River. On a hot summer day, the heat and the humidity made the trip unbearable over the asphalt roof pavers. We then followed Chuctanunda Creek up and zigzagged through busy roadways and finally found peace in the well preserved Green Hill Cemetery. Across Church Street from the cemetery is largely abandoned industrial complex. Amsterdam was the Carpet City of America! You can imagine the hustle and bustle walking through the industrial buildings which are now mostly overtaken by nature. Imagine if we are in Brooklyn, this would be the Navy Yard or Industrial City! Can there be new industry introduced to Amsterdam? What about new manufacturing or technology companies? There could be so much life around here! I got excited and tried to brainstorm an alternative future for Amsterdam, where you can easily walk to the Mohawk River and enjoy the beautiful waterfront; where the Main Street is full of shops and restaurants; where the industrial complex can be retrofit into art galleries, museums and new manufacturing space. We hiked up Prospect Street and were back at Academy. That was the end of the walk but the start of a new project.
Amsterdam, New York is unknown to most Americans. It is a small city located about thirty minutes drive from Albany, New York. Amsterdam’s glorious past as a center of manufacturing in the early 20th century is largely buried since the shifting of the industries to the south and the aboard. Amsterdam is gradually torn apart by a series of urban renewal projects and arterial roadways construction. Today’s Amsterdam is a lost city. The downtown is divided by the Amsterdam Riverfront Center, a suburban-style shopping mall developed in the 1970s. Arterial roadways dissect the historic downtown and surrounding neighbourhoods. The Riverlink Park at the Mohawk river is completely isolated from the rest of the city. A narrow walkway over the downtown shopping mall roof is the only way to lead to the waterfront, which then connects to the south side of the Mohawk river through a newly built pedestrian bridge. The historic Chuctanunda Creek was the engine of the manufacturing center is now largely isolated by the roadways. Many industrial buildings are abandoned and deteriorated. Amsterdam is a mirror of a lot of small to medium post-industrial American cities. They usually rise on proximity to natural resources and transportation networks and fall with the shifting of manufacturing to the south and a series of unsuccessful urban policies largely developed by the politicians rather than evolving urban designers, architects, and communities. The research project centers on the question that how we may return Amsterdam to a livable city that flourishes on the symbiotic relationship between nature and development. The degeneration of some destructive buildings and roadways may be the start to reconstruct the urban fabric and to adaptive-reuse the existing industrial complex for sustainable new manufacturing, affordable housing, and mix-use development. The deterioration and abandonment lower the property values and attract a new generation of migrants from nearby cities. This gives Amsterdam another opportunity to envision the urban environment through restoration, preservation, revitalization and degeneration. The future of Amsterdam may be the future of many similar cities in America. Although the research project centers on one city, which may generate a far greater impact.