Landslide: Adirondack Gentrification and the Erosion of Local Memory with Dr. Eliza J. Darling

The Adirondacks are gentrifying, displacing working class residents in the wake of rising rents, a depleted year-round housing stock, the domination of the AirBnB economy and the overall casualization of the built environment. When longtime Adirondack locals leave, they take more than their possessions with them: they take their experiences, their stories, their memories and their family folklore, leaving behind gaping holes in the social history of a wilderness landscape where human artifacts struggle to endure in the face of harsh climate, acidic soil, public retrenchment and bureaucratic indifference. Does it matter? What is at stake in the loss of working class histories in a region where the very nature of work itself has changed so drastically with the deindustrialization of the twentieth century? This talk considers the postwar challenge of historiography in the southern Adirondack foothills in at the intersection of housing, memory and labor.