Just before everything changed

I’ve been enjoying exploring historical sources to find images to feed the weekdaily “Backward Glances” photo feature for the NCPR website and Facebook page. In recent weeks I happened upon the digital collections of the New York State Archives, which is a wonderful, deep source of material on the North Country. And yesterday I found this aerial photo of my home village, Potsdam, taken in May of 1946.

Aerial photo, Village of Potsdam, NY. May 17, 1946. Photo: New York State Archives Digital Collections

My first thought was “Gee, just 11 years before my family moved here. This will be the village I remember from childhood.” In many ways it is, but those few years between the end of World War II and 1957 were a time of huge change in the whole country, the North Country, and, as I can see here, in my hometown.

In this photo, going out Route 11 towards Winthrop, the village ends at the Catholic church. By the late ’50s, the farm pastures beyond would be occupied by the new central elementary school that I attended, and across from it the new Catholic elementary school, St. Mary’s. In 1946, both SUNY Potsdam (at this time Potsdam Normal School) and Clarkson University (then Clarkson College of Technology) faced each other across Main Street in downtown.

But by 1957, Clarkson had taken over all the downtown campus and also had begun its long, slow migration to the new campus west of the river on the old Clarkson family estate. And the Normal School had become the State University College on a whole new campus built on fields south of the village proper along Pierrepont Ave. Student populations at both had exploded after this photo was taken, and the village had turned the corner from being a small retail/agricultural/light manufacturing hub to becoming a full-blown college town.

While downtown is much as I remember from before urban “renewal” leveled much of it in the mid-’60s, I see that the Roxy Theater, where my older brother dragged me to age-inappropriate horror movies and to epic westerns is not yet built. Instead, the old Rialto is in operation on Market Street.

It’s impossible to see how the residential neighborhoods had changed, since in the season this photo was taken, the freshly leaved elm trees that lined every street conceal most of the houses. My earliest memories of Potsdam buzz with the sounds of multiple chain-saw crews working from morning ’til night cutting trees killed by the invasive Dutch elm blight. The elms began dying when we moved to Potsdam, and by the late ’60s there would be none left.

All these changes that began in the post-war years have continued, moving faster and faster, and someone without my long history in the village will find little in this photo but the downtown blocks and the older churches and public buildings recognizable today. It’s an entirely different place, except in memory.

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