Recently, we spent several days in Potsdam, NY, at Clarkson University, my husband’s alma mater, where the president and his wife warmly welcomed us. The fall foliage colors are late in arriving this year and most of the trees were green and yellow with just a few dabs of red beginning to appear. I strolled a path along the Raquette River at the edge of the campus and spotted a red maple leaf on the ground, about the only one I saw. The river was calm and serene. Farther on, the path skirts the lovely and historic Bayside Cemetery with its impressive red sandstone gate.
Since then, we have re-connected with family in Albany—first, second and third cousins and some one or twice-removed (love that terminology!)—and dined and visited with former colleagues and friends at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. We had not been on the Lehigh campus for eight years and it was a pleasure to see how lovely it still is (but, oh, the hills, I had forgotten the steep grade). We kept running into people we knew so got a tour the new science building, walked through the Asa Packer Dining Room in the University Center, and of course, re-visited Linderman Library.
Recently, Architectural Digest included Linderman as one of the 12 most stunning libraries in the world! I had the privilege of being involved in this renovation project and now, this library is the place on campus to study and to be seen. It even has a café—a source of controversy for some students when it was being planned! Hard to believe given today’s café scene.
While in Bethlehem, we also visited the ArtsQuest complex located in Southside Bethlehem at the Bethlehem Steel plant which shut down completely in 1995 and sat untouched for almost twenty years. The complex includes: SteelStacks, a performance venue, the Banana Factory, an arts center offering classes and exhibits, a Sands casino, and the headquarters of the local PBS station. The highlight for us was the Hoover-Mason Trestle, Bethlehem’s answer to New York’s High Line.
This trestle walkway, on the site of an elevated track used for moving raw materials, takes you along side the blast furnaces and sheds where the steel was produced. These are massive structures and being able to walk closer to them gave me a better sense of the immensity of the operation and the dangers involved in the work. Information panels line the walkway and tell the story of the immigrants who labored here, the women who took over during WWII, and the steelmaking process itself. It was fascinating! What an effective transformation of these hulking edifices into an educational and fun attraction. The trestle only opened a few months ago so many of our friends haven’t yet visited.
