Troy, NY | So ignored by the 20th Century that there's still a city there
 

"Troy, NY was so ignored by the 20th Century's progress that there's still actually a city there."

- Paraphrased from Jim Howard Kunstler.

Who's heard of Jim Kunstler? He famously wrote The Geography of Nowhere in the early 1990s, giving language to why so many people at the time felt suburbia was unsatisfying. He's, well, a bit of a crank. Pretty much hates anything new. But his book was justifiably influential, and he went on to a long (and still going) career criticising 20th Century ideas about city-building.

Somewhere along the line, I have no idea where or when, he said this about Troy, and it stuck in my mind for years and years.

It's not *entirely* true. The town's not stuck in amber and does have some shitty car-brained scars. But there *is* a lot of truth to the statement. In SSP parlance we'd say Troy has great bones.

How's the 21st Century treating it? I'd say "slowly," just like the 20th. Troy's urbanism mostly outlasted that century's retreat to the suburbs. And sure, it's probably doing better economically today than it was in 1993. But it's not a superstar city. The reclamation of cities by the affluent is clearly proceeding here, but at a slow pace, with a lot of room still to go.

So here you are, Troy, NY. I took these photos last summer, on a hot, drizzly Monday.

I, uh, may have overcorrected them a bit in Photoshop. Sorry they're a bit... beige. Ah well.
































The 19th Century city is pretty unmistakable here.














But despite Kunstler's quote, the 20th Century did happen here, and the 21st hasn't fully caught up.

There's still a fair amount of neglect.




And some really, really awful urban design interventions.

This here building and parking lot is one of the worst city planning middle fingers I've ever seen. It is truly awful.




See the stairs in the background? Those are the Memorial Approach Steps. They connect Broadway (one of downtown's most important shopping streets) up a steep hill to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a large and prominent university, and for many years the engine that kept the city alive.

They're also probably Troy's most prominent landmark.




Legit.




Here's the view from the top. It's gorgeous.




That's Broadway, running straight down the center.




Except look closely at the bottom of that last photo. A building blocks the close end of the street.

Let's shift our angle down a bit.




AYFKM? They blocked the base of the steps with a shitty suburban building, surrounded by a shitty surface parking lot?

You betcha they did. Assholes.

And if you actually want to take these steps between downtown and the university, the bottom half are as ignoble as you can imagine.




Narrow brutalist concrete, ending in a drainage hole in a parking lot.

Just amazing work, all around. The highlight would be keying someone's SUV as you trespass through the parking lot.




Fuck you very much too, whatever parking-pilled planning commission OKed this.

:whatthefuck: :whatthefuck: :whatthefuck: :gtfo::gtfo::gtfo:

Some wonderful scenes, except for that atrocity at the end.

Thanks for sharing.

If I remember correctly, they filmed some scenes from The Gilded Age in Troy.

Looks pretty good. I visited Troy once, and liked it.

It's cliche, but yeah, it has really good bones.

Beautiful! Obviously except for the steps and bad post modern office building.

I would actually be curious if there's a list of other small cities like this that weren't totally destroyed by surface parking lots.

I'd say about half of the mid-sized northeast cities made out pretty well. It's all a spectrum but off the top of my head:

Pretty intact: Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Reading, Frederick, Annapolis, Wilmington, New Haven, Lowell, Manchester, Portland, Troy, Saratoga Springs

Not so much: Trenton, Scranton, Poughkeepsie, Schenectady, Bridgeport, Springfield, Worcester, Nashua, Lawrence

Kunstler writes a lot about the Hudson Valley because he lives there, but it's not all that different from Pennsylvania especially.

Troy is my favorite of those mid-small sized cities in New York. I stayed there for a couple of days with (former) SSP forumer bpg88 and found the city fascinating. Did you go to Cohoes?

I like Troy... and the whole capital region/Hudson-Mohawk valleys. Nice tour!


I guess it depends on what we're talking about in terms of size. But just thinking of the northeast and mid-Atlantic... a few that immediately come to mind that have kept their historic cores pretty intact:

Frederick, MD
West Chester, PA
Easton, PA

Other cities in PA, like York and Lancaster could probably fit the bill too, though

Welll saying I went "to" Cohoes would be a stretch. I definitely went "through" Cohoes. Why?

Harrisburg doesn't have a lot of surface parking lots downtown, but it certainly engaged in widespread demolition from the 1950s-1990s for new buildings and parking garages. I don't think it really belongs on the same list. Reading is also a stretch.

Well, this.

https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadviso...200&h=1200&s=1
https://tripadvisor.com/

Haha, no but thanks to you I've pinned it on my Google Maps app for the next time I'm there.

Millennial.

10 miles to the nearest Cheesecake Factory

2005 called and they want their joke back. :runaway:

Oh my bad; sorry man I thought it was always 2005 in Ohio :elf:

I'd rather I'd be in 2005 than 1845 like your antebellum-living self south of the Mason-Dixon. :D

Nice pictures! I drove through the Troy area going from Vermont to Buffalo this past summer. It was my first time in that part of New York. I have to get up there and explore it for real.

Those steps are really feast and famine.

Troy is a very underrated town and just screaming for some investment.

An typical and tradtional North American city, I mean, you can easily and visually distinguish it from those in Germany and France by achitactural styles without any modern highrises in disturbance.