2012 Walks & Talks Free Lecture Series Schedule:
see the Calendar page for details
* Get background info on Rutger Park *
* Get the latest on the Rutger Park Restoration Project *
  Old Main (New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica) is an internationally recognized example of Greek Revival Architecture. With its six limestone columns standing 48 feet high, William Clarke’s monumental building served as the site where innovative, compassionate approaches to treating the mentally ill were developed for 135 years.
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  Utica’s magnificent Italian Renaissance-style train station, designed by architects Stem and Fellheimer - whose work also includes N.Y.C.’s famed Grand Central Station - has been beautifully restored and today serves as both a transportation and municipal office center. The Landmarks Society actively encouraged the station's restoration.
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  The Miller-Conkling-Kernan House is one of the most important structures in Oneida County. Designed by Philip Hooker and built in 1830, this once grand structure was home to many notable persons, including Roscoe Conkling. It is located in the
Rutger-Steuben Park National Historic District, and is listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.
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The city of Utica, originally called Old Fort Schuyler, was incorporated first as a village in 1798, then as a city in 1832. Situated on a shallow spot of the Mohawk River, the site was of strategic and economic importance to the Native Americans, the British and the French, and later played an integral part in the Revolutionary war and the westward expansion. The original settlers were primarily New Englanders who migrated to Oneida County in the aftermath of the American Revolution.
From Roscoe Conkling (major political boss throughout the 1880s), Francis Kernan (US Senator), Elihu Root (Secretary of State and Nobel Prize winner) and James Schoolcraft Sherman (Vice President of the United Sates under William Howard Taft) to Dick Clark (TV and broadcast personality), Annette Funicello (Mousketeer/50s icon) and moe. (Contemporary rock band), those early Uticans and their descendants were to become some of history’s most prominent Americans.
The infant settlement was home to waves of Irish immigrants who came to Utica to help construct the Erie Canal in 1817, and the growing village soon became a stopover of importance. Thousands more Irish and German immigrants, who were brought by the completed canal, transformed the ethnic and religious composition of Utica, and pushed the population from 3,000 in 1820 to 56,000 in 1900, making it the most rapidly growing city in New York State.
The community, which had earned its livelihood catering to the needs of westward bound settlers traveling slowly by canal boat, was threatened in the 1840s as many travelers began to bypass Utica aboard newly constructed railway lines at 35 miles per hour. Uticans transformed their city by becoming one of the greatest centers of textile production in the world. (Its distinctive contribution to the industry was the invention of the one-piece woolen underwear known as the “Union Suit.”)
The industrial development of the city coincided with the arrival of new immigrant groups, including many Italians and Poles, creating a local construction boom, which lasted from about 1880 until 1930. In the 1920s, the city continued to expand by annexing land from neighboring New Hartford.
Even as the city grew geographically, its economic base was being threatened by competition from textile mills in the South. After World War II, the local economy collapsed as mill after mill shut down. Utica’s businessmen and politicians engineered an economic resurgence termed “loom-to-boom”, and many of Utica’s abandoned textile mill buildings became home to high-tech employers like General Electric’s radio production plant.
After a long period of decline following the loss of the manufacturing industry to offshore competition in the 1970s and 80s, Utica is again experiencing an economic and cultural revival. Fueled by an influx of refugees from around the world including Kenya, Bosnia and Vietnam, the population has stabilized, new businesses are opening all around the city and urban pioneers are rediscovering the rewards of Downtown living. If these settlers are anything like their forbearers, the renaissance is just beginning...
