by Priyanka Sen, PhD Student, History of Architecture and Urban Development
What can a decayed site tell us about the memory of place? Tucked away on a deserted landscape, the former “Peg Leg” Bates Country Club in Kerhonkson, New York still stoically stands – the first black-owned resort in the Catskills’ famed summer vacation spot known as the Borscht Belt. Though this is no ordinary site, its initial appearance may seem visually unappealing, with its former buildings laying in dereliction and disrepair. The resort was opened in 1955 by the famed vaudeville performer Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates (1907-1998), who captivated audiences around the world with his unique style of tap dancing on one prosthetic leg. Despite his renowned career, Bates often performed for segregated audiences and venues and faced racism and violence throughout his travels. As he described in an interview with the New York Amsterdam News, he created a place that allowed fellow Black Americans to enjoy the same high-quality experiences and entertainment as white patrons without the worry of police and segregation laws. Bates and his wife Alice purchased the Kerhonkson abandoned turkey farm in 1950 and worked diligently in its first years of its existence to construct vacation bungalows, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and, according to The Chicago Defender, a club to attract “…nightly entertainment by top-flight Broadway Stars,” including the likes of Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.
The architectural and social heritage of the country club, however, urges a reframing of Bates’ contributions to the American cultural landscape and brings to light larger questions of memorialization and collective memory of place. Though the immense success of his resort showcased his entrepreneurial and business skills from almost four decades, the ultimate financial decline of the resort in the late 1980s left the resort in a precarious situation, posing questions about how a seemingly lifeless site still holds potential mnemonic capital.
Now as this rural, decayed site exists, its once-vibrant liveliness collapsed to its subsequent death in a dilapidated and ruined landscape with condemned buildings overgrown with brush. Place now only represents a fleeting memory in time, a mnemonic apparatus that harkens to a forgotten history. In The Power of Place, architectural theorist Dolores Hayden argues for the significance of ordinary buildings and landscapes in the narrative of public histories to elicit a visual, social and cultural memory of place. She cites philosopher Edward Casey’s phrase place memory: “It is a stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences…an alert and alive memory connects spontaneously with place, finding in it features that favor and parallel its own activities.” Though she focuses on urban contexts, the rural presents an even deeper challenge in this memorialization of often unseen and unknown sites that dramatically change over the course of time, becoming complete ruinations or a razed, empty site.
Though the “Peg Leg” Bates Country Club no longer functions as it once did, this place as a container still includes layered histories of the built environment, memories of individual’s experiencing the once-alive place, and regional narratives that connect to a larger American social story. Though there is still much to glean from the visual aesthetic character of this place – its rural setting, vernacular materiality and construction ethic, interior décor, floor plan and layout, and the opulent images and stories of place – its mnemonic capacity becomes a remnant of the past that must be collectively remembered by other methods. Whether the buildings exist on the site or not, the memorialization of “Peg Leg” Bates cannot simply be left to just a series of indiscriminate signs on a small stretch of the highway that end near the resort. For now, the site exists at an interstitial moment – one between ruined decay and complete obsolescence. The active deterioration of the site reflects the lapse of cultural memory, and in a way, becomes a mirror reflection of Bates as a forgotten character. And before these buildings are demolished and the open field transforms into the next capitalist venture, visual and narrative histories must find a way to be preserved; the emptiness of site must be memorialized.
Sources
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
“Peg Leg Bates to Open Huge N.Y. Resort,” The Chicago Defender, November 1, 1952.
“Peg Leg Plans Expansion in ‘70” New York Amsterdam News , August 16, 1969.
Priyanka Sen is a Ph.D student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program at Cornell University. Her research investigates the South Asian diaspora and its intertwined histories with architectural settlements, environmental histories, and material culture. Overall, her interests examine the historical consequences of the intersection of differing scales, including body, building and landscape, including the relationship of migration and the changing conceptualizations of citizenship, the connections between environmental histories and settlement patterns, and the translation of the “American Dream” through varying spatial geographies. Sen received a M.Arch from the University of Cincinnati, a M.A. in Architectural History and Theory from the University of Texas-Austin, and B.A in Architectural Studies and Art History from Boston University. She is also a practicing architectural designer who finds ways to combine history and praxis through participatory and co-collaborative design methodologies.