User:Dekema/sandbox/History of Utica, New York

Early history

Utica is located where it is because it was next to the shallowest spot along the Mohawk River that made it the best place for fording across. Also due to an Iroquois Indian crossroads and fording location it made trade exceedingly easy for local merchants. With a shallow spot on the river and that as already inhabited by trading partners, the location was ideal for a settlement.

Utica was first settled by Europeans in 1773, on the site of Fort Schuyler which was built in 1758. The fort was named Fort Schuyler after Col. Philip Schuyler, a hero of the French and Indian War. After the French and Indian War the fort was abandoned and then during the American Revolution the original settlement (Yunę́ʼnare·θ in Tuscarora) was destroyed by Tories and Native Americans. The settlement eventually became known as Old Fort Schuyler when a military fort in nearby Fort Stanwix in Rome, New York, was renamed Fort Schuyler during the American Revolution and evolved into a village.

In 1794, a road was built to Albany, New York known as State Road. By 1797 the road was extended and completed to the Genesee River and the full road was known as it is now, Genesee Road. The creation of the Seneca Turnpike was the first significant factor in the growth and development of Utica, as this small settlement became the resting and relocating area on the Mohawk River for goods and people moving into Western New York and past the Great Lakes.

Moses Bagg, a blacksmith, built a small tavern near Old Fort Schuyler to accommodate weary travelers waiting for their horse's shoes to be repaired. After just a few years this small shanty tavern became a two story inn and pub known as Bagg's Hotel. The first bridge over the Mohawk River was erected in the summer of 1792 by a Long Island carpenter who had settled in Utica, Apollos Cooper, although local and regional architects that had seen the bridge were very skeptical to use it, and the bridge was soon destroyed in the spring floods.

The perhaps apocryphal account of Utica's naming suggests that around a dozen citizens of the Old Fort Schuyler settlement met at the Bagg's Tavern to discuss the name of the emerging village. Unable to settle on one particular name, Erastus Clark's entrant of "Utica" was drawn from several suggestions, and the village thereafter became associated with Utica, Tunisia, the ancient Carthaginian city.

Utica was incorporated as a village in 1798. Utica expanded its borders in subsequent charters in 1805 and 1817. Expansion and growth continued to occur in Utica; by 1817 the population had reached 2,860 people. Genesee Street was packed with shops and storefronts, a prosperous stagecoach line had expanded its business, a fully established bank was founded by Alexander Johnson, a newspaper company The Utica Observer established by William McLean, five churches as well as two hotels were all located within this center square of Utica.

Origins of street names

Utica's history can be evidenced in various street names. For example, Moses Bagg built a tavern in 1794 that became the center of all village activity. From this square came four streets: Southward, a trail that once connected the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca lands, became a road that led to Genesee country. To the east of Baggs Square, there was the Main Street of Utica which sprouted First, Second, and Third streets as the settlement grew.

To the west there was the road to Whitesboro. A shortcut was built in 1795 to facilitate the movement of stagecoaches coming from the west to Utica's Hotel, which the Holland Land Company funded. To the north, there was a street running along a river which during the spring would flood, earning the name Water Street. Heading northward from the Square, one would find himself at Deerfield Corners; from there he could go west along Riverside, northbound to Trenton (through land once owned by the Weaver family, or along Dr. Alexander Coventry's, the village's first physician, property.) East of Deerfield Corners one would travel along the road where General Herkimer led his troops to the Battle of Oriskany.

Once the land known as Cosby Manor, situated along the Mohawk River, was surveyed by John Bleeker, son of Rutger Bleeker - an original owner of the lands - the southern side was further divided into separate plots. To distinguish this set of plots from the land belonging to General Bradstreet's progeny, Division Street came into being. In the initial developments of the Bleeker property, the land was surveyed to its southernmost point at South street and as far west as West street. The streets within the property became named after Rutger Bleeker's family: Catherine Bleeker, his wife; Elizabeth Brinckerhoff, Mary Miller, Blandina Dudley, and Sarah Bleeker, his daughters; John Bleeker, his son; Morris Miller, his son-in-law, and Horatio Seymour, his grandson-in-law.

John Lansing was an executor of Rutger Bleeker's will. Charlotte and Neilson are believed to be related to the family somehow but by undetermined links.

Italians in Utica

The largest nationality group of the great migration to America between 1880 and 1920, Italians trace their presence in Utica to the arrival of Dr. John B. Marchisi in 1817. A prosperous pharmacist, he was the first of thousands of Italians to arrive in Oneida County over the next century.

Centered around the parishes of St. Mary of Mount Carmel and St. Anthony of Padua, Italian life and culture flourished, spreading throughout the county to cities, towns and small villages alike. While the immigrants arriving in the great migration usually found jobs in the local textile mills, brickyards, construction companies and unskilled manufacturing occupations, numerous entrepreneurs soon began small businesses running the spectrum of economic activity from push-cart peddlers and olive oil merchants to haberdashers, bankers and insurance agents. Italian language newspapers such as Il Pensiero Italiano, La Luce, and Il Messagero dell'Ordine, along with the humorous Il Pagliaccio and various organizational and cultural publications reflected the richness of Italian life in Oneida County. The Italian population was also served for more than ten years by the "Italiannaires Program", hosted by Rena Bonapart, on WIBX radio.

From a small group of early immigrants, the Italian community rapidly grew to political prominence, forming an important voting block in elections as early as 1888. By 1910 Italians were being regularly elected to office in Utica, while some historians credit the East Utica Italian community as the spark that ignited Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign for governor of New York in 1928. From the early 1940s the Italian community has played a dominant role in Utica and area politics.

Welsh in Utica

Suffering from poor harvests in 1789 and 1802 and dreaming of land ownership, the initial settlement of five Welsh families soon attracted other agricultural migrants, settling Steuben, Utica and Remsen townships. Adapting their traditional agricultural methods, the Welsh became the first to introduce dairying into the region and Welsh butter became a valued commodity on the New York market. Drawing on the size of the local ethnic community and the printing industry of Utica became the cultural center of Welsh-American life by 1830. The Welsh-American publishing industry included 19 different publishers who published 240 Welsh language imprints, 4 denominational periodicals and the influential newspaper Y Drych. However, the Welsh community in Utica was never very large and was often dwarfed by other ethnicities, most notably the Italians and the Polish.

Erie Canal & Textile era

Bird's-eye view of Utica in 1855

Utica's location on the Erie Canal stimulated its industrial development. The middle section of the Canal, from Rome to Salina, was the first portion to open in 1820. The Chenango Canal, connecting Utica and Binghamton, opened in 1836, and provided a further stimulus for economic development by providing water transportation of coal from Northeast Pennsylvania.

Utica was well positioned to benefit from the Erie Canal, the civil engineering marvel of its time. Utica’s population with the creation of the canals began to skyrocket. The population began to increase threefold over a span of ten years since the first section of the canal opened in 1819. Utica was the virtual half-way point for canal travelers, thus making the town the perfect stop-over point. During the planning stage of the canal the cotton looms that would make Utica famous were in their infancy, and a vigorous real estate market in the town had ballooned lot prices tenfold since 1800. An anonymous traveler noted that by 1829, about five years after the canal's completion, Utica had become "a really beautiful place . . . [and Utica's State Street] in no respect inferior to [Broadway] in New York." Utica, along with other burgeoning towns such as Syracuse, would benefit from the fact that the Erie Canal ran directly through town.

By the late 19th century, Utica had become a transportation hub and a commercial center of considerable note, but was not like the heavy industrial towns in New England. Utica, in particular, was limited in its capability to produce industrial goods because the Mohawk River did not run fast enough to turn the industrial machines. Upon investigating the New England style of steam production, they found how to use coal in their manufacturing. Now with the recently completed Chenango Canal that connected Utica to the coal field in Pennsylvania, there was a vast supply readily available. Because of the Embargo Act of 1807 that cut off the English textile production, the Northeast had a firm grasp on the textile industry. With investments from local entrepreneurs Utica’s textile industry was starting to really take off.

The city still served as a Northeast crossroads, hosting the day's most celebrated personalities. Samuel Clemens lectured to a sold-out Utica crowd in 1870, where Clemens noted in personal correspondence that he brought down the house "like an avalanche." It was during this time that Utica hosted the 1884 New York State Republican Convention, an event covered in great detail in Edmund Morris' Pulitzer Prize winning biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, in which Morris describes Utica at this time as "a shabby canal-town in the middle of the Mohawk Valley.". Senator Roscoe Conkling, a leading GOP lawmaker of the Stalwart political faction, resided in the city at this time, and figured as the region's most historically significant politician until local native James Schoolcraft Sherman was elected the 27th Vice President of the United States, serving under President William Howard Taft.

Loom to boom era

In the wake of the demise of the textile industry, Utica became a major player in the tool and die industry, which thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eventually declining in the late 20th century. Like the textile industry before it, the machine tool industry largely forsook Utica for the American South, with one notable example being The Chicago Pneumatic Company, which shuttered its extensive manufacturing facility in Utica in 1997 and relocated to Rock Hill, South Carolina.

By the mid-20th century, virtually all of the textile mills closed and migrated to the American South. In the 1930s through the 1950s Utica became nationally if not internationally known as "Sin City" for the extent of its corruption and control by the political machine of Rufus P. Elefante.

In the early and mid-20th century, Utica had become a major manufacturing center for radios, manufactured by the General Electric company, which, at one time, employed some 8,000 workers there, and was once known as: "The radio capital of the world." However, by the mid-1960s, General Electric had moved its radio manufacturing to the Far East. In the early 1990s, GE's Light Military Electronics operation in Utica was sold to Lockheed Martin and soon closed altogether.

Organized Crime in Utica

Utica, from the turn of the 20th century, and probably to a lesser extent even today, is and was a center for organized crime. It was a city where rackets were and are reputedly controlled by the Buffalo Cosa Nostra family and at least three other families, including the Scranton, Colombo, and Genovese family which had and likely still have a local presence. At least three Uticans attended the infamous Apalachin Meeting mafia summit. Utica was a battleground in the late 1970s and early 80s when the Buffalo Family was weakened after the death of Boss Stefano Magaddino and other families and influences jockeyed for power and influence, and multiple gangland style homicides took place between 1979 and 1986. More recently in the 1990s, the infamous "Falange Crew" (A group who seemed to have highly unusual multiple and somewhat ambiguous ties to the Buffalo, Scranton, and Colombo families) ran the rackets, until they were decimated by federal indictments and convictions.

Rust Belt era

Like many industrial towns and cities in the northeastern Rust Belt, Utica has experienced a major reduction in manufacturing activity in the past several decades, and is in serious financial trouble; many public services have been curtailed to save money. Suburban Utica, particularly the towns of New Hartford and Whitesboro, have begun to experience suburban sprawl; this is common in many Upstate New York cities, which are suffering from what the Sierra Club termed "sprawl without growth," although recently notable efforts have been made to revitalize the Downtown and Oneida Square areas of Utica by planning the construction of quality apartment housing. The city's economy is heavily dependent on commercial growth in its suburbs, a trend that is characterized by development of green sites in neighboring villages and does little to revitalize the city itself. Because of the decline of industry and employment in the post-World War II era, Utica became known as "The City that God Forgot." In the 1980s and early 1990s, some of Utica's residents could be seen driving cars with bumper stickers that read "Last One Out of Utica, Please Turn Out The Lights," clearly taking a more humorous stand on their city's rapid population loss and continued economic struggles.

Utica in the 21st century

Boehlert Center at Union Station

City leaders and local entrepreneurs tried to build on the city's losses. In 1996 the former GE-Lockheed facility was purchased by Oneida County's Industrial Development Association for lease to ConMed Corporation (founded by Utica local Eugene Corasanti) for use as a manufacturing facility and the company's worldwide headquarters, bringing 500 new jobs to the area. The Boehlert Center at the newly restored, historic Union Station in downtown Utica is a regional transportation hub for Amtrak and the Adirondack Scenic Railway. Next door to Union Station is The Children's Museum of History, Science & Technology, a 5 story building built in the 1890s.

Despite the obvious economic growth in its suburbs, downtown Utica continues to be the focus of regional economic revitalization efforts, most notably in the area of arts and entertainment. Anchored by the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, the construction of a new home for the Players of Utica, and the recent expansion of the historic Stanley Theatre, the Oneida Square Arts District is becoming a vibrant neighborhood once again. The popularity of Utica College Pioneer Men's Division III Hockey continue to attract people to a downtown that was quite desolate in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Night life in Utica has been significantly affected with Utica Monday Nite and the recent Saranac Thursday Night party with proceeds being donated to the United Way. Since its inception in 1998, the festivities, which include beer, soft drinks, food, and live music, has continued to draw thousands to Utica's westside brewery district, invigorating nearby taverns and eateries.

Recognizing this trend, current Mayor David Roefaro gave Utica the moniker "Renaissance City." In 2010, Roefaro fulfilled a campaign promise and delivered the City's first Comprehensive Master Plan in over 50 years. http://www.uticamasterplan.org/

Roefaro has also been working to "green" the city and develop a sustainability plan by partnering with a Cornell University program called, “Rust To Green." http://www.rust2green.org/ R2G is an action-research and service-learning project to get faculty and students working together with local community partners in Upstate NY cities to encourage sustainable urban development. The program builds on the findings of the Brookings Institution’s 2007 report entitled “Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities”. Among its findings, the report concludes, “Given their assets, the moment is ripe for the revival of older industrial urban economies… Older industrial cities possess a unique set of characteristics and resources that, if fully leveraged, could be converted into vital competitive assets.” The authors analyzed New York State’s older industrial cities, and determined that seven of them - Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Rochester, Schenectady, Syracuse and Utica - had “a range of existing assets that, if fully leveraged, would serve as a platform for their renewal.” Two of these cities, Utica and Binghamton, were selected by Cornell University as the pilot sites, and in February 2010 the City of Utica convened its first meeting of the Rust to Green Utica core team. Rust To Green Utica launched New york State's first local Food Policy Council in 2010.

21st Century immigrant influx

The arrival of a large number of Bosnian immigrants over the past several years has staunched a population loss that had been steady for more than three decades. Bosnian immigrants now constitute about 10% of the total population of Utica. Other recent immigrant groups have arrived from Somalia, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), and Iraq.

This influx of refugees from many war-torn nations and politically oppressive regimes has drawn mainstream national media attention, from The New York Times (see citation above) to Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest dubbed Utica the "Second Chance City" in an article chronicling the crucial role that immigrants have traditionally played in invigorating Utica's political, economic, and social life; the article argues that Utica now hosts thousands of immigrants that have taken advantage of the city's social services benefits, welfare, public and private sector affordable housing, and entry-level skilled manufacturing jobs to start a new life, a trend that began nearly thirty years ago. In a cover story in their 2005 REFUGEES Magazine, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) wrote an extensive article on refugees in Utica, titling the publication, "The Town That Loves Refugees".