Fragmented & Forgotten: Tracing the Tannery Brook

When:

March 25, 2018: 3:00PM to 8:00PM

Where:

The Lace Mill, East Gallery 165 Cornell Street, Kingston, NY map

Original maps of the Tannery Brook, paired with historic maps, images, and text, visualize changes in and around the stream over time.

The Tannery Brook is a small stream in Kingston. The brook flows out of the Twin Ponds, travels downhill along Linderman Avenue, crosses under Washington Avenue, skirts property lines between Washington Avenue and Green Street, and then vanishes beneath the parking lot behind the Ulster County Family Court building. It makes the rest of its journey underground, in a pipe, until it meets the Esopus Creek behind Kingston Plaza.

Although the Tannery Brook has worked hard for Kingston over the centuries – including powering mills, irrigating crops, and carrying away waste – it has been increasingly fragmented and forgotten. It hasn’t been forgotten by everyone, though; it continues to make its presence known through flooding, infrastructure failure, and other damage.

The Tannery Brook is a microcosm of the ways that we perceive and manage water in cities. Its history and present state can provide context for modern stream and urban water management, as we ask: What should we expect from a stream with such a long history of use? How can this history relate to future restoration projects?

With these questions in mind, Emily Vail and Jiamin Chen trace the Tannery Brook’s history from colonial settlement in the 1650s through today using historic maps, historic images, local history narratives, newspaper articles, and other original documents.

This work is supported by the NYS Water Resources Institute at Cornell University and the Hudson River Estuary Program of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, with support from the NYS Environmental Protection Fund.