Inside the Blue Line of the Adirondack Park, only John Brown’s Farm and the Crown Point ruins are managed by the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (State Parks). All other public lands and amenities – camp grounds, picnic areas, hiking trails and lean-tos, camping islands – fall under the supervision of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
Wint Aldrich, a Deputy Commissioner for Historic Preservation at Parks through four administrations, once explained that anomaly to me. “The Conservation Department [precursor to DEC] didn’t want Robert Moses anywhere near the Forest Preserve,” Aldrich said.
Moses, who controlled everything even remotely related to New York’s parks from 1924 to 1964, was notoriously averse to wilderness preservation. He was the man who wanted to build a highway along the shore of Lake George at Tongue Mountain, a plan that conservationist John Apperson and the Loines family foiled.
To protect the shoreline, the Loineses agreed to donate land of their own to make an alternate route possible. By the time Nelson Rockefeller was elected governor in 1958, Moses had been chairman of the State Council of Parks since 1924.
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the state parks system, the current Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation has noted that in the years that followed the end of World War II, the increasing demand for outdoor recreation facilities led to the expansion of the park system with the help of so-called “partners” – the Lake George Park Commission, among them.
Interestingly enough, Robert Moses was the only figure of prominence, inside state government or out, to oppose the creation of the Lake George Park Commission.
Moses’ objections to the 1961 legislation creating the Commission and its “Lake George Park” were based in part upon the fact that the bill gave the proposed group “no power to develop parks or recreational facilities,” the only two things which, to his mind, justified the conservation of natural resources.
Since 1987, the year the state legislature empowered it with new functions, the Lake George Park Commission has (among other things) regulated marinas and private docks, drafted new rules to protect water quality from urban runoff and septic systems and waged war on many fronts against invasive aquatic plants and animals.
But as conceived by L. Judson Morhouse, the chairman of the New York State Republican Committee who owned a house on Northern Lake George, the Lake George Park Commission was to be something unprecedented in New York State at that time: a regional zoning agency.
“I have been working a year on the new Lake George Park Commission,” Morhouse wrote to one of Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s aides in January of 1961. “It permits people to establish areas where the scenic character and natural attractions will continue to be preserved.”
The zoning was to be voluntary, or “Do It Yourself” zoning, as the commission’s first members called it. Property owners in places such as Rogers Rock, Sabbath Day Point and Assembly Point were to be granted the authority to ban commercial development in their neighborhoods through restrictive covenants.
The fact that the zoning was to be voluntary did nothing to diminish Moses’ objections to that aspect of the proposal. “It should be borne in mind that the State has always refrained from entering the field of local zoning – a power which has been delegated to the towns and villages,” wrote Moses.
Moses believed that a regional zoning agency would set a dangerous precedent; and, in fact, it was viewed as a precedent, but a desirable one.
The enabling legislation, wrote the counsel for the state’s Office of Local Government, “embodies a new type of attack on the problems of preserving the natural beauty of lake waterfronts.”
(A few years later, legislation incorporating voluntary zoning for the entire Adirondack Park was developed, but died. In 1971, of course, the legislature approved the Adirondack Park Agency act, which mandated rather than permitted zoning.)
What truly annoyed Moses, though, was not the proposed Commission’s failure to adequately promote recreation, or its infringement on local zoning powers, but the fact that he would not control it.
Here, he suggests as much: “it is without logical relation to existing regional State park commissions.” Those regional state park commissions, it should be noted, were controlled by a State Council of Parks, of which Moses was, of course, the chairman. (He was also president of one of them, the Long Island State Park Commission.)
Governor Rockefeller ignored Moses’ opposition, and signed the Lake George Park Commission bill into law in 1961.
A year later, Rockefeller asked Moses to resign as the chairman of the State Council of Parks. If he did, he could remain at his four other state posts (as well as president of the 1964 World’s Fair and in his three New York City jobs.)
Moses rejected the offer, and Rockefeller stripped him of all the power he had arrogated to himself through forty years of government service.
Moses didn’t know it at the time, but his opposition to the Lake George Park Commission was the beginning of his end.
A version of this essay first appeared in the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustration: Nelson Rockefeller, Laurance Rockefeller, and Robert Moses (New York State Library).
