August News from State Parks

Supported with $1.5 million in grants from Empire State Development and State Parks, the project also restored park-like aesthetics to the grounds and opened up original sight lines from the Route 50 gate to the Victoria Pool. It provides new spaces for gathering outside of the amphitheater: The Julie Bonacio Family Pavilion; The Pines Terrace; and the Nancy Di Cresce Education Room at The Pines, SPAC's first year-round space for education and community outreach. Photo Album

Friends Groups Get $900,000 in State Grants

Thirty not-for-profit organizations across the state involved with stewardship of state parks, trails, historic sites, and public lands recently received $900,000 in funding under the state Park and Trail Partnership Grants program.

Supported through the state Environmental Protection Fund, the grants support partner group efforts to raise private funds for capital projects, perform maintenance and beautification undertakings, provide educational programming, and promote public use of the parks through hosting of special events.

Grants are administered in partnership with the not-for-profit advocacy group Parks & Trails New York. Recipients must raise outside funding of at least 10 percent of the grant amount received. Press Release

Accessibility Enhanced at Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site

Grounds and parking at Washington's Headquarters State Historic Site in Newburgh, Orange County, are now more fully accessible to all visitors.

The nation's first publicly owned historic site is more open and accessible to all under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) through a $1.8 million project funded by NY Works. The project included repair of existing bluestone walkways, enhancement of accessible parking, new fencing, and improvements to accessible paths on nearly seven acres of grounds overlooking the Hudson River. Pathways and parking are now ADA compliant.

Work also reinstalled the East Gate and established an ADA-compliant path to the recently restored Tower of Victory, which was built in 1887 to mark the centennial of victory in the War for Independence. Improved exterior lighting and drainage were also installed. A new 60-foot flagpole and new flags also were added with support from the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and Friends of the State Historic Sites of the Hudson Highlands (FSHSHH).

Site staff also is launching a new program, ‘Framing History: A Year in Pictures,' where the public will be invited to submit photos of the site throughout the four seasons for a virtual image gallery. Press release
For information on the program visit: Palisades Park Conservancy  

Rail Trail Improvements Coming in Hudson Valley

State Parks is partnering with the Open Space Institute and the Town and Village of New Paltz to improve a 3.5-mile section of the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, a key link in the Empire State Trail in Ulster County. 

The 3.5-mile trail segment runs from Cragswood Road in the Town of New Paltz, south through the village to the Empire State Trail trailhead at Sojourner Truth Park. The project will remove the aging trail surface and install a new 10-foot wide bicycling and walking path, install drainage improvements to prevent trail erosion, and make safety improvements including installing signage and marked crosswalks at eight locations where the trail crosses public roads. 

The Hudson River Valley Greenway has committed $900,000 to complete the project, with construction overseen by the Open Space Institute, a non-profit organization which completed a similar project in 2020 to improve an adjoining nine-mile trail section in the towns of Ulster and Rosendale which is also part of the Empire State Trail route. Press Release

Allegany State Park includes rare remaining portions of old growth forest with trees more than a century  old that were left undisturbed during the area’s lumbering and petroleum boom that ran from the early 19^th century to the 1920s. Park naturalists have mapped more than 5,200 acres of old growth forests of hemlocks and hardwoods, with the majority of that in the Big Basin area. Some experts believe this is the state’s largest contiguous track of old growth outside the Adirondacks.

Learn more about this venerable park and its history in this edition of the New York State Parks Blog. The blog features weekly posts on a variety of historical, natural, and other Parks topics.

Behind the Scenery

Travis Bowman: Historic Preservation Program Coordinator (Collections), Bureau of Historic Sites

How long have you been with the agency? In graduate school I interned with the Collections Management Unit at Peebles Island from 1998 to 2000. I briefly worked for an insurance company before the curator job opened at Clermont State Historic Site in the fall of 2001. I’ve been with the OPRHP family ever since.

What does someone in your position do? I coordinate the collections-based units at the Bureau of Historic Sites: Curatorial, Collections Management/Registration, Museum Security, and Conservation. These units are responsible for the care and stewardship of OPRHP’s massive museum and archival collections across all Historic Sites and Parks. We do everything from research on exhibitions and coordinating loans of our collections all over the world to monitoring fire suppression systems and the incredibly skilled work of conserving paintings, uniforms, canons, manuscripts, and (literal) kitchen sinks.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen or done? New York State has been so important, for so long, if there was a person or event significant to state or national history, we probably have a piece in our collection related somehow. The fun part is we also have vast collections from everyday New Yorkers, too; getting to tell the public about an amulet likely worn by an enslaved person, a bloody shirt from the Civil War, the logbook of an Erie Canal boat captain, or a 12,000-year-old spear point used for mastodon or mammoth hunting is just as exciting to me as a painting by Dutch Old Master, the buttons Robert Livingston wore when he swore in George Washington, or letters from John Brown to his daughter.  It’s all an amazing privilege.    

Is there a destination you’d recommend to someone? I’d have to plug the Revolutionary War history in our sites and parks. It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in battlefields and forts (we have several…of each), political history, conspiracies and intrigue, the homes of generals and politicians, the role of Native Peoples, or learning about the everyday men and women who fought (go look up Deborah Sampson), and lived in camp, OPRHP has it all. You can’t understand the American Revolution or its effects without understanding New York. The 250th anniversary of the war is coming up soon we’re working hard to make our facilities a true destination. If your patrons ask, just tell them we historians can’t agree if it’s called the Semiquincentennial, the Bicenquinquagenary, the Sestercentennial, or the Quarter Millennial. 

What inspired you to work in the park system? Like every other seven-year-old kid who watched Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Until I got to college, I had no idea what an archaeologist was, but I knew I wanted to be one. After undergrad I got to briefly live my dream for a few years until I tore the ACL in my right knee (knees are usually the first thing to go on archaeologists), so I decided to switch to being a curator. Curators still get to play with the all the cool old stuff (albeit cleaner and more whole) and get the added bonus of being able to tell some amazing history to thousands and thousands of people.  I got lucky to get the Clermont job and ever since I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be a public servant with a platform!