An anonymous donor dropped in my mailbox this week a February 1970 copy of American Heritage (the rare publication to appear regularly in hardcover).
The issue contains an article of local interest by David G. McCullough, who at the time was the magazine's Conservation Editor, but went on to much greater fame as a biographer, TV narrator, and Presidential Medal of Freedom award-winner. (Its Senior Editor at the time, coincidentally, was one my grandfather’s favorite clients—the Civil War historian Bruce Catton.)
Pages 104-105 feature McCullough’s essay entitled “A Wrecker’s Dozen.” McCullough wrote:
There are places on this earth... where conservation is taken to mean the preservation of the notable works of man as well as nature. Magnificent old railroad stations and churches, public buildings, historic houses, architectural landmarks of all kinds, are valued for their beauty or for the memories they evoke, for the sense of continuity they give a place, or, often, just because they have been around a long time and a great many people are fond of them. But here in America we don’t—most of us, anyway—seem to feel that way.We have, apparently, a traditional, perhaps congenital, passion for forever destroying and building anew. [...] Now that spirit has been institutionalized officially: we call it urban renewal. [...] The wrecker’s ball swings in every city in the land, and memorable edifices of all kinds are coming down at a steady clip.
McCullough then goes on to list his “wrecker’s dozen” of “thirteen doomed landmarks.” Of those, two were in our area:
• The General Worth Hotel, built in 1837 and a prime specimen of Greek Revial architecture in America.
• The Hill [was] built in 1796 by Henry Livingston, Revolutionary soldier and Supreme Court justice. This historic mansion overlooking the Hudson River is modelled after a Palladian villa.” The Hill was spared, being added in 1971 to the National Register of Historic Places, and it remains today in the Livingston family.
But The General Worth, infamously, was doomed indeed—demolished to make way ostensibly for a downtown Dairy Queen. (40 years later, residents fought to prevent an historic firehouse from becoming another ice cream shop, and prevailed. Washington Hose now houses the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce.)
A blogger who calls herself Vassergirl notes that American Heritage revisited its story 20 years later, writing that the 1969 demolition occurred
in late 1969 after a long and heated battle between concerned citizens and the town's mayor, Samuel T. Wheeler. The hotel was designed by Isaiah Rogers on the model of the Tremont House in Boston. Lincoln stopped at the Worth during his inaugural trip to Washington in 1861, and it was long considered the finest hotel in the northern Hudson Valley. In its place today is an electrical supply company and a parking lot.
