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ARA
News
by Keith Abatto, Pres. ARA
Yates
Farm Townhouses. A
Planning & Zoning Commission Public Hearing scheduled
for May 14th related to the Yates Farm Townhouse
project was postponed due to the applicant needing more time
to prepare. The next Planning & Zoning Commission
Meeting will be June 11th at 7:00, but I do not
know if the Yates Farm public hearing is on the agenda.
I will send a group e-mail as soon as I learn of the
revised Public Hearing date. If you have any interest in
this project and its success or failure please contact any
of the members of the Glenville Town Board and/or the
Glenville Planning and Zoning Commission prior to the date
of the public hearing.
Fourth
of July.
The Fourth of July in Alplaus is the best time of year to
experience that small Town feel and reset the clock 30 years
or so. The more
things change the more they stay the same.
Alplaus needs you to help with Fourth of July
festivities. It
requires a small group of people to set up, work at, and break down the various
activities for the week.
There is a sign-up sheet in the post office (or you
can contact Mike Sheppeck at 701-9245or Keith Abatto at
399-6614 if you’d like to help out in some way), but
please join us. It’s
not much work, it’s a lot of fun to get to know your
neighbors better, and it can’t happen without you. |
Another way to show your support is to make
a monetary contribution to the effort.
All donations are welcome and can be sent to ARA, PO
Box 185, Alplaus, NY 12008.
If you’d like it to be a contribution in honor or
in memory of someone, please let us know and we’ll include
that information in the list of activities we publish.
The schedule of events for the 4th of July in Alplaus
is given on the front page of this Home Town News. A parade
entry form is also included in this month's HTN. Contact
Mike Sheppeck for more information.
Please join us for all of the activities. Contact
Mike or Keith with any questions or to volunteer.
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Sewer Update
by
Barb Casey
I have good news and bad news. The good
news is that the state comptroller's office approved the
newest Alplaus application for $904 per year with excellent
work by town board member Val DiGiandomenico in moving that
process along. Last time, the application took 17 months,
this time only 4-1/2 weeks--this after we'd been told the
best we could expect was 8 weeks. We learned as well that
the low bidder was still willing to hold their low bid so
that we won't need to re-bid the project.
We got the first inkling of the bad news in a Gazette
article on the comptroller's approval. The article said that
preliminary work would begin in the summer, with
construction beginning in the fall. Huh? We'd heard at the
public hearing in April that with a speedy comptroller's
approval, we might begin construction before July. It turns
out that while the contractor held the bid, they did not
hold the July construction start, and as contractors must
do, they filled the schedule not knowing when Alplaus would
be ready to go.
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I'm
told that with good weather in the fall, people could still
connect by early next year. If you have questions or
comments about the process and logistics of all this, you
can either send them to me so that I can pose them to the
town or call and e-mail directly to Rick LeClair,
Commissioner of Public Works, or Tony Germano, Town
Administrator.
The town is working to bring in not just Glencliff
School, but also the Olde Nott Farm development in Rexford
to help reduce our debt service. More on that and how much
it would save us as the situation develops--it's still very
preliminary. Again, I'd appreciate your thoughts and
questions about the specifics of how outside users (that's
what they call any users outside Schenectady County) and
additional users (those added after the system is built)
will save us money and what types of agreements we should
ask the town to pursue.
Pump station locations are not yet finalized, and I'm
told that surveying work is being finished on possible sites
so a final determination of the best sites can be made.
Thanks for your continued interest in the
project.
Barb
Casey
bcasey@skidmore.edu
399-5714
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Old
Alplaus School listed in Historic American Building Survey
Researched by Mike Sheppeck
The Historic American Buildings
Survey (HABS) began during the Great Depression in December 1933,
when Charles E. Peterson of the National Park Service submitted a
proposal for one thousand out-of-work architects to spend ten weeks
documenting "America's antique buildings." HABS became a
permanent program of the National Park Service in July 1934 and was
formally authorized by Congress as part of the Historic Sites Act of
1935, it continues to this day.
Realizing even then the pressures and difficulty maintaining
historic structures, Peterson wrote in 1933: ‘It is the
responsibility of the American people that if the great number of
our antique buildings must disappear through economic causes; they
should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.’ [Excerpted from: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/hhhtml/hhintro.html]
Of the four buildings in Alplaus listed in HABS, only two
remain. These are the
Old Alplaus School [see picture, circa 1937] at the end of Alplaus
Avenue, and Governor Yates Summer Home.
[Note the ‘new’ Alplaus School in the background of the
picture, was still in operation at that time.]
The proposed Yates Farm Townhomes project will demolish the
old school, and will encroach very close to the Governors mansion.
Unfortunately, simply being listed in HABS affords no
particular protection to an historic structure.
The
school when listed was a ‘typical early District school’, was
built in 1847, and was then owned by the D & H Railroad.
It was further described as ‘1 story, brick construction,
frame addition, pitched roof’ and ‘in fair condition at
present’ [again, circa 1937].
[Picture Credit:
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS,
Reproduction number HABS NY, 47-ALP, 2-1]
From
the Archives
by Cliff Hayes
A
recent acquisition by the Historical Society is a copy of a letter
submitted by Gloria & Jack Ericson.
The letter, dated in 1951, was from Jane & Kurt
Vonnegut after they had moved from Alplaus to Cape Cod.
When Jack was gardening in the lemon lily patch at 17 Hill
St. & neighbor Mrs. Larsen walked by telling Jack not to dig
to deep, Jack thought that was a little strange, but didn’t ask
why. However, soon to
come was the answer from Jane (& Kurt). A little Alplaus lore
revisited 56 years later. It
was a story then & a story in 2007 after Kurt has passed.
Below
is an excerpt from that letter:
August 3, 1951
And now I have a Saga to unfold. ------
Perhaps, it should have been unfolded
sooner, or so a still, small voice prompted me now and then; but a
loud, strong one (Kurt's) kept forbidding me to mention it. He
seemed to think it would be more dramatic this way:
I remember telling you a little about the debris we found all
over the place when we bought it; well, I neglected to mention that
included in it were the earthly remains of the first Mrs. Grudgings
-- her ashes, all nicely, done up in a copper urn. Perhaps your
neighbors have told you the story by now, as it is famous, -- if so,
sorry to bore you.
Anyhow, like I said Ramee and George were drunk
all the time, and carried on while poor Helen was dying When she-,
finally did die, they quickly got married, had her cremated as a
kind of afterthought, put the ashes in the garage, forgot all about
them, and lived their lives out in a drunken stupor.
That copper can was an alarming thing to discover we
had bought. When we found it we called Ramee and asked about it, and
she told us they were the ashes of her "prize blue-ribbon
Collie", whom she "couldn't bear to put underground",
and would we please save them for her. Truly. But she never came for
them, and then she died, and it was only slowly that we realized
that a Collie would have cooked down to many fewer ashes.
Finally, and reluctantly, we called the Troy
Crematorium, and sure enough it was Helen. We lost a lot of sleep
wondering what to do with her. 17 Hill St. was laughingly referred
to as the Vonnegut Mortuary. Everyone in Alplaus volunteered ideas
-- like digging up George and putting her in with him; but we knew
they hadn't gotten along, to put it mildly; and didn't exactly want
to continue their proximity.
Someone with an airplane wanted to scatter her
over Alplaus Creek from the air; that didn't seem appropriate
somehow. The Masons offered to take over; but she was never a Mason.
We tried to get the Catholic Church to bury her (she was a
Catholic), but the priests said they couldn't because she had been
cremated, -and-, that is not in accordance with Catholic doctrine.
Damned uncharitable of them, we thought, as the cremation was
undoubtedly against her wishes and simply the easiest, cheapest
thing for Ramee and George to do with her.
Well, we struggled with this problem for weeks -- and
then, Mrs. Larsen, down the street, came up with what seemed to us
the best idea and the kindest and what Helen would have wanted.
Said Mrs. Larsen: "Helen loved her garden; she
would have liked to be buried under the lemon lilies." So,
that's where we buried her. Two of her old friends really did it,
while we stood somberly by, thinking how queer life can be
sometimes. And that was the end of Helen Grudgings.
If there is a spirit around the premises, I promise
you it's a nice one. She was a good woman.
Jane & Kurt Vonnegut
