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NY spreads the word about 1609 anniversary events

By Chris Carola

The Associated Press

ALBANY — When Virginia commemorated the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, the state spent about $15 million and had the queen of England and President Bush show up.

When New York state marks a pair of its own 400th anniversaries next year, it will have $4 million to spend, with possibly a member of the Dutch royal family on hand along with a player — most likely French or Canadian — to be named later.

The Empire State’s plans for the yearlong commemoration of the 1609 explorations by Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain have hit their share of snags, false starts and delays. The situation not only causes concern among organizers of local anniversary events, it potentially could diminish the public’s awareness of Hudson and Champlain’s accomplishments, which at least one New York historian believes deserve as much billing as Jamestown’s founding, if not more.

“Jamestown disappeared. New York City went to be the greatest city in the world,” Kenneth Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University, said in describing the original Virginia settlement’s eventual demise.

“New York history tend to gets a little bit overshadowed by Massachusetts and Virginia, so we need to tell our story,” Jackson said recently.

A state commission created six years ago is trying to do just that. But the commission only recently got down to serious work — then had its $7 million budget cut nearly in half by Gov. David Paterson.

The $3 million set aside for marketing the commemoration was eliminated, leaving local groups without official state-produced brochures to inform New Yorkers about the anniversaries’ significance.

“We have nothing,” said Celine Paquette, leader of the group that’s organizing Champlain events in a three-county region in northeast New York. “If you walked into my office today, I couldn’t give you anything.”

The Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial Commission was created by the Legislature in 2002 to help create, organize and market events commemorating the 400th anniversaries of the Hudson and Champlain explorations of the waterways that would bear their names, with Robert Fulton’s historic steamboat trip on the Hudson River in 1807 thrown in.

But little got accomplished in planning for the quadricentennial, and the commission literally missed the boat on marking the bicentennial of Fulton’s roundtrip voyage in a steamboat from New York City to Albany, a feat that forever changed transportation in America.

New York state didn’t really set things in motion until this past winter, when then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced his appointments to the “quad commission.” Spitzer resigned a month later amid a prostitution scandal, and a few weeks later Paterson and the Legislature reduced the commission’s spending to $4 million because of the state budget crunch.

As a result, the commission’s two paid directors have scaled back previous plans. Instead, they’re urging local communities in the Hudson-Champlain corridor to piggyback their already-scheduled 2009 anniversary events with the state’s official commemoration.

The idea, commission Director Robert Bullock said, is less celebration of three separate voyages and more recognition of what they helped create: The Empire State.

“It’s not just a celebration of the past, but also a celebration of what the future holds for New York state,” he said.

With their marketing funds cut, Bullock and commission Executive Director Tara Sullivan are paying visits to chambers of commerce, civic groups and local government leaders from Manhattan to Rouses Point, a border village on Lake Champlain, to get the word out.

“Breakfast, lunch and dinner and everything in between,” said Bullock, describing their weekly schedule of meetings.

He said it hasn’t been difficult getting groups to jump on the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain bandwagon, since many communities already had their own anniversary events in the works.

“It’s not our job to go out and tell localities how they should celebrate their own heritage,” he said. “They know their heritage best.”

Paquette, exasperated by regime changes in Albany and tight fiscal times, went out and formed her own local subcommittee to organize Champlain anniversary events. She said she’s out twice a week, speaking to groups in the three New York counties along Lake Champlain as well as making visits to neighboring Vermont and Quebec to see what they’re doing.

“I can’t wait for the ‘I Love NY’ people,” Paquette said, referring to the New York state tourism office. But, she added, things have improved since Bullock and Sullivan came on board late last year, a sentiment echoed by the head of the New York State Historical Association.

“A lot of us were concerned that opportunities would be lost, but we’ve taken heart with what’s happened in recent months with the commission,” said Stephen Elliott, president of the Cooperstown-based NYSHA. “It looked like some of the gears were slipping last year. Now they are gripping.”

“We’re right on track,” Sullivan insisted. “We’re convinced we have the right amount of time and right amount of resources to do an appropriate commemoration of our history.”

In fairness, Paquette points out that the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain events are taking place in an area spread over a large slice of eastern New York, while the Jamestown events focused on one particular location. The New York commemoration covers a 300-mile-long region stretching from Lower Manhattan to the Canadian border near Plattsburgh.

Still, events for Virginia’s Jamestown quadricentennial began a year before the actual anniversary. They were funded with a budget of $32 million, about half from state funds and the rest from private sponsors. The May 2007 Anniversary Weekend, the centerpiece of Jamestown’s 18-month commemoration, alone received $4.7 million in funding.

Of the $4 million set aside for New York’s Hudson-Fulton-Champlain commemoration, some $1.5 million will be split among 15 counties and 18 municipalities for their local events. Bullock said he expects overall spending to get into the “tens of millions” once money spent by local governments and corporate sponsors is figured in.

Meanwhile, the quad commission is working on getting some royals of its own to take part in next year’s anniversary events. Since Hudson’s voyages led to the Dutch settling Manhattan and Albany, the commission is in talks with The Netherlands to invite a member of its royal family to New York in 2009.

And Bullock said the commission will reach out to the French and Canadian governments and invite representatives to Champlain events in northern New York.

But the Green Mountain State already has the jump on New York. Paquette says Sullivan’s counterpart in Vermont was in France recently to talk to French officials about the state’s Champlain events for next year.

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