Adirondacks’ post-1970s economic shift: The rise of tourism, prisons

Following a decline of industry, the 1980 Winter Olympics, and prison construction projects provided a much-needed economic boost for the Adirondack region. Today, the prison presence is fading, and tourism continues to grow.

By Tim Rowland

Fifty years ago, the Adirondack Park was in search of a new employment model that would carry it into the 21st century.

As industry was closing and unemployment rolls were swelling in the early 1970s, a confluence of anger, bitterness and, as the Ticonderoga Sentinel called it, “gloom,” had settled over the mountains.

Ultimately, tourism and prisons would become two of the region’s biggest jobs drivers, and, counterintuitively, both could be said to be born of the same seed.

For years, a group of Lake Placid politicians, business owners and former athletes — known to the rest of the world as the “North Country Boys” — had been badgering the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for another shot at the Winter Games.

Olympic dreams, part 2

In 1932, the Olympics had come to Lake Placid, turning what Sports Illustrated called a “frozen flyspeck,” into a place of  some import. But four decades later, the Olympics were as much about economics as sport as, one after the other, heavy industries shut down and unemployment in the North Country approached 20%.

The region’s remoteness, scarcity of labor, and environmental regulations, plus the failures of corporations to modernize,  conspired to make industry infeasible.

 “The natural-resource-based economy simply ran out of steam,” said Garry Douglas, director of the North Country Chamber of Commerce. The Olympics would provide an injection of money and pride.

Because Lake Placid already was set up for winter sports competitions, the North Country Boys felt they needed to spend only $30 million — as  it would turn out, they were short by $333 million.

A shift to public spending, and the rise of prison projects

Fortunately for Lake Placid’s solvency, the state and federal government covered most of the costs (the rest came from revenue including ticket sales), representing a turning point in which the government, not industry, would be responsible for major job-creating initiatives in the Adirondacks.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in private capital that used to flow into the North Country for the payroll, mill buildings, machines and tools was gone for good, and in its place would be hundreds of millions in public money spent on snow-making equipment, sliding sports and other infrastructure for winter sports.

Yet there was a second public investment at the time that left a bigger and more consequential economic imprint. To keep the Olympic Village from becoming a white elephant when the games left town, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons agreed to build the facility for $20 million, with the understanding it would be converted into a federal prison. 

Some were horrified, including a group of Lake Placid clergy who thought it a “disgrace” to piggyback incarceration on a high-principled athletic competition — not to mention the athletes themselves, some of whom refused to sleep in future prison cells.

But the promise of 200 corrections jobs drowned out the  preaching, and the site of a former tuberculosis sanatorium was reborn as the Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook.

On the face of it, it made sense; the North Country needed jobs, and the state needed staff to handle the tens of thousands of (primarily) young, urban men of color who had become caught up in the web of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s draconian drug laws. The 1973 penal codes scrapped treatment programs and imposed life sentences for the sale of narcotics. 

The pros, cons of prisons

For a generation, prisons became an important piece of the North Country employment puzzle, and prisons as a jobs program still has its defenders today. But as the Lake Placid clergy had suggested, prisons were not a panacea.

As the unemployment rate in the park remained stubbornly in the mid teens on the eve of the 1980 Olympic games, some Adirondackers were already traveling hundreds of miles to work in state prisons.

After losing his job when the paper mill closed in Au Sable Forks, Geoff Hewston, whose wife Sharron was pregnant at the time, worked in the Green Haven prison in Stormville 230 miles away, renting a spartan room for $11 a week where he used the same electric pot to boil coffee in the morning and hot dogs at night. “I had a 1965 Pontiac LeMans 326 which took an entire tank of gas to come home,” he said.

The pay and benefits were good and an employee could retire with a healthy pension after 25 years. But corrections is a career no one remembers fondly. Jerry Delaney, now director of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board with a seat on the Adirondack Park Agency, said jobs were so scarce it was worth the drive south of Albany, where he would pull four or five double shifts in exchange for a week back home.

But much like the inmates, “I began counting down the 25 years from the first day I worked there,” Delaney said.

The deadly prison riot at Attica (which exemplified the inadequate state of New York prisons), the Rockefeller drug laws and the tough-on-crime era of the 1990s, were all swelled investments in prisons — and for North Country employment. In just 20 years, the prison population soared from 12,500 to 72,300.

Dismantling the corrections system

Twenty-five years after Gov. Mario Cuomo had pushed  the massive prison build-out, his son, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, began dismantling it. “”An incarceration program is not an employment program,” Andrew Cuomo said in a 2011 speech.  “Don’t put other people in prison to give some people jobs. That’s not what this state is all about.”

Local politicians pushed back, but to no avail. Prisons that had taken the place of private industry in places like Minevile and Lyon Mountain began to close.

According to the Department of Corrections, the prison population today is less than half what it was at its 1999 high point. Twenty-four prisons have been closed as a savings of nearly a half-billion dollars. Staffing statewide is down by more than 7,300.

And despite protests from upstate politicians, many prison positions are going unfilled. As of May, the number of state corrections employees was 22,357 —  with 4,136 openings. Where once prison jobs had lengthy wait lists, today fliers are up around the North Country bulletin boards seeking workers.

By contrast, the 1980 Olympics did not have as much immediate impact. After the games left town, unemployment in the Lake Placid region jumped to 16%. But ultimately, the recreation industry would win the race.

The growth of tourism

Employment at the Olympic Regional Development Authority is trending in the opposite direction of the prisons. David McKillip, ORDA’s director of human resources, said that as of the past winter, 1,681 people worked for the authority both full-time and seasonal. That’s an increase of nearly 500 from 20 years ago. And the nature of the work is changing as well.

Whereas in the last century ORDA might have hired more part-time ski bums not interested in permanent work, today there is more emphasis on recreation-related careers. “It’s not so seasonal in nature,” McKillip said. “We’re trying to provide year round offerings.” 

Other destinations such as the Deer’s Head Inn in Elizabethtown and New Vida Preserve in Jay encourage their workers to think in terms of careers, not just jobs. Like ORDA, this model depends on a travel-related industry that’s viable all year.

While tourism jobs are still often considered transitory, visitation to the Adirondacks has increased to the point where the Lake Placid-based Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism several years ago amended its mission to managing crowds of people instead of being fully focused on attracting more.

The pandemic, climate change and an emphasis on experiences have driven visitation. 1980 saw 76 new members introduced to the Adirondack ’46ers hiking club for having scaled all of the park’s High Peaks. In 2020, the number was 860.

No one would have dreamed in 1980 that a central problem in the Adirondacks 40 years later would not be a lack of work, but a lack of people to do that work. The only inkling might have come from Jack Shea, a speed skater turned businessman and a member of the North Country Boys contingent.

“We aren’t just trying to get a one-shot, one-week show from our Olympics,” he said on the eve of the games. “We’re tying our whole future to it.”

Photo at top: Inmates at Moriah Shock in 2018. Photo by Tim Rowland