The word from Marbletown of late is that smarts are trumping sprawl and everyone looks to be a winner. With luck, you can note this date on your calendar as the end of the McMansion era in American architecture and the return to the cozy neighborhoods where those of us of an age grew up and perhaps even mastered Whiffleball.
As reported by our Lynn Woods, two slices of paradise in the upscale town of Marbletown are looking to buck the trend that can make it embarrassing to drive guests around our historic, bucolic region where developments lately too often look like millionaire”™s row in some distant state, but, until recent years, not here.
The two plans are notably different. William and Michael Warren are aiming for a “conservation subdivision” targeting the horsy set and incorporating, among amenities, houses starting around $500,000. At nearby The Inn at Stone Ridge, Dan and Susan Hauspurg are looking to create affordable studio and one-bedroom apartments on the Old Europe model, actually extending the village into the subdivision and capitalizing on their land”™s direct access to Route 209. Both the Warrens and the Hauspurgs had considered the old development model of isolated homes with big yards and, thankfully, they rejected the idea.
It was heartening to note 75 residents showed up for a presentation on the Hauspurg plan at Ulster County Community College, where award-winning architect Peter Reynolds, who is designing the new community, declared the cookie-cutter, gated-community mindset “dead.” To which we say: Amen and not a moment too soon. We laud those who showed up, a crowd wise to the knowledge it”™s easier to affect a development”™s outcome in the early stages than when foundations are poured.
For about three decades now, as Americans have largely prospered, we”™ve been told isolation is gospel: Paradise on earth is watching television in a 2,000-square-foot “great room” with a 25-foot ceiling. Concepts like “environmental responsibility” and “neighborhood” were for losers. The image of a 20-room monster on a clear-cut hillside proved a scent a shocking number of today”™s nouveaux riche could not resist. Now, the rest of us can smirk at the thought of their heating bills.
Something else was lost with our rush to slaughter the landscape in the name of too-big houses built too-far apart: community. When was the last time you saw half a dozen kids playing tag football in front of a house with a quarter-mile drive? There is little room for spontaneity in such a world and that”™s a real shame. Can kids who are driven everywhere and then supervised at every moment truly say they”™ve had a childhood? We suspect those who bought into this misguided way of life feel its isolation when they have to pile into the Range Rover and drive five miles for that forgotten gallon of milk, or when a after-school play means play-dates with bona fide commutes.
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The Marbletown plans are obviously a reaction to the McMansion trend, as if, having seen enough of the giants sprouting in this land of Colonial-era hamlets, residents are willing at last to get serious about shaping their futures. Helter-skelter growth with the thickness of the buyer”™s bankroll being the only consideration has proved a recipe for bad taste. And as energy becomes scarcer and more expensive, those big homes will prove poster children for excess and monuments to people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Certainly, dwellings do not a nice community make. But designers and architects well know that our living (and working) spaces affect us in profound ways we barely perceive. Everyone who has walked into Grand Central Terminal”™s massive main room, or perused a book in the Rose Reading Room in the Fifth Avenue public library, knows the power of architecture to inspire, even to elicit awe. The Marbletown projects are playing on a different scale than Grand Central or the be-lioned library on Fifth Avenue, but the idea of inspiring people via constructed spaces is the same. At the Hauspurg site, one idea being discussed would feature a building that”™s a natural draw, say, modeled on ancient Rome. Call it the “anti-isolation” scheme, where Saturday mornings might bring out tailgaters, antiquers and, especially, everyone else.
We congratulate the involved parties and offer praise for Marbletown Supervisor Vincent Martello, who is moving in the right direction when he praises denser development over non-clustered three-acre lots. The trick is to make that vision happen. As Martello said: “The old model of environmentalists and conservationists on one side and business people on the other is anachronistic. It behooves us to work together.”
Sounds like a plan where we all win.
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