A debate that built a park

Modern Adirondack history began fifty years ago. On September 19, 1968, Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks. The terms of engagement that have dominated Adirondack politics and policy ever since—the Adirondack Park Agency and its regulation of all public and private land in the Park—were soon in place. What’s the backstory?

The first half of the twentieth century was relatively calm in the Adirondacks. We had the forever-wild Forest Preserve, constitutionally protected since 1895, and we had private land, still over half of the Park at midcentury and almost completely unregulated. The Forest Preserve had come to be a treasured mecca for wilderness recreation, with an increasingly sophisticated environmental lobby always ready to rise to its defense.

But the state conservation bureaucracy chafed under the stricture of the constitution, repeatedly pushing the limits of the forever-wild provision, building expansive campsites and roads, maintaining dams, and even maneuvering to construct a bobsled run on state land for the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. Conservationists took the state to court on that one and in 1930 won an important decision: notwithstanding the state’s relentless wish to develop recreational facilities and otherwise