The story behind Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal

A few years after moving to Kingston’s historic waterfront district in 1996, I learned why Broadway, the main drag, was so schizophrenic, with capacious brick Italianate buildings lining one side of the street facing bland modern townhouses backed by huge expanses of grass on the other: most of the commercial district, which had belonged to the port city of Rondout before its incorporation into Kingston in 1876, had been torn down in a federally funded 1960s urban renewal project. One evening the community group I belonged to hosted a slide show by Al Marquart, a lifelong Kingston resident who had photographed the teardown. The images were a shock: entire blocks had been leveled. Wanting to know more about how the city could have allowed this to happen, I researched the Kingston Urban Renewal Agency files in the Ulster County Archives in 2009 and learned about the wholesale removal of thousands of people and the difficulties African Americans especially had finding alternative housing.

A year or so later, I was working with Geoff Miller, who is spearheading the creation of The Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History in the area’s last remaining intact storefront (and has since become Ulster County’s historian), on an exhibit at the Downtown Heritage Visitors Center on urban renewal, and we needed images. Mr. Marquart had passed away and I wasn’t sure where to find his photos, so I made a few phone calls and was directed to Gene Dauner. Gene had taken nearly 1,000 photos of the area just before and during the demolition when he was in his early twenties, delivering flowers for his father’s floral business; the rolls of film had sat in his attic for 40 years. We arranged to meet Gene and view his slides and were blown away, transported back to the doomed area which was in essence a late nineteeth-centiury time warp: because downtown Kingston had fallen on hard times, having long lost its vitality as a busy Hudson River port, many of the buildings had never been modernized. As depicted in Gene’s beautifully composed photographs, they still bore their original corbels, stained-glass transepts and iron pilasters. A year later I ran into filmmaker Stephen Blauweiss at a gallery opening and told him about Gene’s photos and my research, which resulted in one of us saying “let’s make a film.”

We envisioned a short film showcasing Gene’s photos, but as we began contacting sources it turned into a much more ambitious project. Over the course of three years, we interviewed more than 40 people and collected dozens of family photos, historic photos (most of them from the comprehensive collection of Jack Matthews) and archival film footage as well as images by other photographers to complement Gene’s work, editing and piecing together the material in front of Stephen’s computer at his loft in the Shirt Factory. In conceiving, researching, and writing the script, I sought to create a context for this tragic chapter of local history by describing the federal policies that worked against cities and their minority populations in the 1960s. The heart of the film, however, is people’s stories—their fond memories of the lost community and often-eloquent descriptions of the personal devastation they experienced. After the area was demolished, the promised new development failed to materialize, and the commercial buildings that remained were mostly abandoned. We chronicle the gradual revival of the neighborhood and talked with storeowners in Rondout today about the area’s appeal as well as urban renewal’s unfortunate legacy.

Gilles Malkin narrated and composer and musician Peter Wetzler composed the original score and wrote the title song. Peter recorded distinguished trombonist Roswell Rudd for much of the soundtrack, which also includes music by the late Pauline Oliveros and singer-songwriters A.J. Croix and Adam Snyder, among others. In order to cover our expenses, we raised nearly $20,000, partly through hosting numerous work-in-progress screenings, which helped us fill in the story and gather material.

The 69-minute documentary was completed in October 2016, and we have since screened it at dozens of museums, libraries, historical societies, theaters and other venues to enthusiastic audiences.