As Schenectady Rusts, Experts Fear Policy Inertia
By LYDIA POLGREEN
SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — When Samuel S. Stratton became mayor of the Electric City almost 50 years ago, about 27,000 people worked at the General Electric plant at one end of Erie Boulevard and thousands more worked at the other end, at the American Locomotive Company. On Thursday nights, when the shops stayed open late, a human tide gushed onto State Street, and Mr. Stratton glad–handed voters as they thronged to the vaudeville theaters, elegant department stores and bustling restaurants that lined the city's busiest street.
In November, his son Brian was elected mayor. But the city the younger Mr. Stratton inherits is a shadow of the one his father, who went on to become a powerful congressman, once governed.
It has lost a third of its population. General Electric, which once defined this city, has moved tens of thousands of jobs elsewhere, and ALCO is long gone, having closed the Big Shop, as its locomotive works were known, in 1968. State Street is now a ghostly shell: empty storefronts stand between pizza parlors, a dollar store and a discount clothing shop.
In November, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the city's bond from Ba1 to Ba2, lowest in the state. Only 11 other municipalities and school districts in the country, including the town of Cicero north of Syracuse, are rated as low.
Schenectady's tale is in some ways a familiar story of Rust Belt decline. But experts on urban policy say its story also illustrates something else: how New York State, in many ways the quintessential urban state, has no real plan to save its cities. So Schenectady's long decline and uncertain future in some ways is not just its own story, but that of cities across the state.
It was not always this way. From 1886, when Thomas Alva Edison brought his manufacturing operations to this bend in the Mohawk River, the Electric City cranked out innovation, from the television to the Monitor Top refrigerator. At G.E.'s employment peak during World War II, 40,000 people worked at the factory.
Today it is a city that is too small for its britches. From its opulent marble City Hall on North Jay Street, built in 1931, to the outsize Roman Catholic Church, St. John the Evangelist, on Union Avenue — built in 1904 to accommodate thousands of Italian, Irish and Polish immigrants — to the row upon row of wood–frame houses in now–dilapidated neighborhoods, the physical dimensions of the city overwhelm its current occupants.
"We're a city built for 100,000 people that only has 60,000 people," said Marv Cermak, who writes a column about Schenectady once a week in The Times Union, an Albany newspaper.
"That's a lot of empty houses and empty streets."
