Heritage Tourism: the quest fоr things historic by well-heeled tourists.

Yes I borrowed the part of the line (from the NYT), elevated it to a title and am now calling it my own. It so described my journeys, I just had to have it. That it was in the New York Times as а new travel phenomenon, makes me un-unique, something we all want to be told on a regular basis. That there are about 7 billion humans and growing would sort of give one the sense, and yet we forge on as if...

Hello, you are not alone. But still, the desire to go out and look at other people's stuff, mostly their decaying historic shit, puts me in another category- some may call it weirdo's, but there a plentitude of other titles and blogs for what we do. I call mine walk-about's although at times this is even a misnomer, as it is more like drive-by's, which this one most definitely was.

Deep traveling, or traveling "on the hunt" means I am looking for rust. decay. rot. broken windows, and blighted blocks. The first sign usually is tall, brick, with broken windows. Then I off-ramp it and wend my way towards the structure. All the rest unfolds along the hunt. The pathetic Main St., in this case what little was left of Main St. Worn down looking people and a first- a motel advertising rooms available in an empty facade. A town that now can only really hold up one thing, the glory of an aged actor named Kirk Douglas (whom now has a park and a plaque).

I am talking about Amsterdam, NY. Accessed of Interstate 90, on the "Rust Never Sleeps" non-musical tour (yup, I borrowed that one too from Neil Young) to Central NY.

What I saw from the highway was a huge factory complex with "FOWNES" in large white capitalized letters. So I exited to have a look-see. Fownes was a glove factory once upon a time owned by brothers, which later also became known as the Mohawk Carpet Mills. It is a 6 story building built in 1926, which in my mind makes it a not very old applied masonry brick bldg. Some would call it early modernism for the type of factories being built in that era. I call it boring and ugly. Sorry Fownes.

Apparently Amsterdam was once a huge carpet manufacturing town and Fownes came about as a later entitiy. By the turn of the century there were mills in the Church St. area, down near the RR (the lower mills), namely the Sanford Mills. 

This article gives a nice little synopsis of the later mill history of Rug City Amsterdam:
http://www.dailygazette.com/weblogs/bcudmore/2010/aug/30/83010_cudmore/

I found it mildly amusing that once upon a time the Yankees had a farm team named The Rugmakers!

Also somewhere in that article is the line, "but eventually manufacturing moved South...labor was cheaper there." Can you hear the death toll bells? I can. I saw. Death and decay. Not quite death but dying a slow death I'd say.     

But wait a minute here. I know I saw the Mohawk River and many names that had Native American roots, but when I tried to go to the "Indian Museum," guess what? It too was closed, like in permanently. So once again I hit the internet to find out:
http://www.amsterdamny.gov/visitors/about-amsterdam.php

So Indigenous, then Dutch, then Anglo, now polyglot. A rise, a fall, and a renewal (attempt, not going so well by the looks of it). It is the American Mill town story, told over and over and over again as I visit both large city, and small hamlet throughout the Northeast, and here in Central NY. Urban renewal and the splitting up of and destruction of a downtown. The seal of disapproval I say is the destruction of a community's downtown.

Anyways, here is my Amsterdam NY walk-about: