Almanack Contributor Anthony F. Hall

Anthony F. Hall is the editor and publisher of the Lake George Mirror.

Anthony grew up in Warrensburg and after an education that included studying with beat poet Gregory Corso on an island in the Aegean, crewing a schooner in Hawaii, traveling through Greece and Turkey studying Byzantine art and archeology, and a stint at Lehman Brothers, he returned to the Adirondacks and took a job with legendary state senator Ron Stafford.

In 1998, Anthony and his wife Lisa acquired the Lake George Mirror, once part of a chain of weekly newspapers owned by his father Rob Hall.

Established in the 1880s, the Mirror is America’s oldest resort newspaper.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Living Tradition: Lake George’s Chris Shaw

For much of the past summer, Chris Shaw was busy organizing workshops and staging concerts of the region’s traditional music at the Adirondack Folk School in Lake Luzerne. “It’s vital that we preserve these songs,” said Shaw. “Nothing gives you better access to the Adirondack experience than listening to the music.” But it’s not the mission of the Adirondack Folk School to display the region’s hand crafted products behind glass, nor to make craftsmen into re-enactors; it’s to ensure that the traditions will be continued, said Shaw.

“That’s what’s so cool about the Adirondack Folk School; you don’t just learn the history of Adirondack pack baskets, you make one. It’s the same with » Continue Reading.


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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Origins of Adk Land Use Planning

After publishing “Robert Moses and the Lake George Park Commission” in this space a couple of months ago, several people asked me to explain a reference  I had made in that piece to a proposed  Adirondack Park-wide authority or commission modeled upon the original Lake George Park Commission.

It’s not surprising that few people remember it. After the legislative session of 1964, the enabling legislation was shelved, and by 1967, the public’s attention had shifted to  Laurence Rockefeller’s proposal for an Adirondack National Park and later, to Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s Temporary Study Commission on the Future of » Continue Reading.


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Thursday, October 4, 2012

Remembering Warrensburg’s Movie House

“The movie theater and the church often existed side by side in a small town,” the late novelist John Updike once remarked in an interview. “The old Hollywood movies were very pious. Sins were punished in exact proportion to their seriousness. In many ways, the movies carried religious weight.”

Updike grew up in the 1940s, and by the 1960s, when I was growing up in Warrensburg, the movies may have played a smaller role in shaping moral habits, but they did help fire one’s own imagination, and, for that matter, the collective imagination.


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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Treme’s Donald Harrison Headlining LG Jazz Weekend

Fans of the HBO series “Treme” can turn off their television sets. The real thing is coming to Lake George.  Tenor saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr and his band, Congo Square Nation, will present a special Saturday night performance during this year’s Lake George Jazz Weekend, which opens on September 15.

“It’s tremendously exciting that Donald Harrison is coming to Lake George,” said jazz festival curator Paul Pines. “I’ve been doing the Jazz Weekend for 29 years, and to me, this is the full flowering of everything we’ve done.”


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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

One Adirondack Family’s Commitment to Equality

While opponents of same sex marriage deny the existence of any correlation between marriage equality and extending voting rights to women and civil and social rights to African-Americans, the three movements are clearly within the American grain. The famous photo by Mathew Brady of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad suggested that thought to me, in a round about way.

When my parents moved to the Adirondacks in 1956, they rented a cottage on the Lewis estate of John Milholland, who had made a fortune from the pneumatic tube.


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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Robert Moses and the Lake George Park Commission

Almost every park and camp ground in New York State is administered by the Office of Parks and Recreation, with the exception of those in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. The Department of Environmental Conservation manages those.

Wint Aldrich, a Deputy Commissioner for Historic Preservation at Parks through four administrations, once explained that anomaly to me. “The Conservation Department didn’t want Robert Moses anywhere near the Forest Preserve,” Aldrich said.

Moses, who had controlled everything even remotely related to New York’s parks since 1924, was notoriously averse to wilderness preservation.


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Monday, June 13, 2011

Conflict Over Snowmobile Access Threatens Bike Trail

If Warren County permits snowmobiles to use the Warren County Bikeway where it traverses land owned by the Magic Forest theme park, the trail could be barricaded, severing the trail link between Lake George and Glens Falls. That, at any rate, is one option available to Magic Forest’s owner, Jack Gillette, said Gillette’s attorney, Mike Stafford.

Whereas Warren County owns outright or by easement most of the 17-mile trail, Magic Forest owns the 350 feet of trail over the park’s land, Gillette said.


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Friday, May 27, 2011

Bolton Plants a Community Garden

From the outside looking in, Bolton Landing is a tightly knit community. Jane Neil Caldwell, who’s lived in Bolton for almost 40 years, says she’s still searching for that community.

“We may be part of extended families, or be involved with the school if our children are students, or belong to clubs or a church, but we never seem to come together in one place, for one purpose, as a true community should,” she said.


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Friday, May 20, 2011

Lake George Water Tests Reduced Over Funding

The Darrin Fresh Water Institute’s (DFWI) annual program of testing waters near municipal beaches and town shorelines for coliform contamination will be less extensive this summer than in years past, according to Larry Eichler, a DFWI Research Scientist.

According to Eichler, The Fund for Lake George has withdrawn its financial support for the program.

While some municipalities may assume the costs of sampling waters near beaches, no organization has stepped forward to fund the monitoring of shorelines, Eichler said.“The FUND for Lake George has contributed more than $300,000 in cost sharing for this program over the past 25 years,” said Eichler. » Continue Reading.


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Friday, May 6, 2011

Lake George Marine Railway Headed to Historic Registers

To the casual observer, the Lake George Steamboat Company’s marine railway near the foot of the lake is unlikely to conform to any preconceived notion of a historic site.

Built in 1927 by Crandall Dry Dock Engineers, it’s a utility, used to haul vessels in and out of Lake George for repair, maintenance and storage.

But in the 19th century, almost every harbor on the eastern coasts of the United States and Canada had similar railways, almost all built by Crandall Dry Dock Engineers; the Crandall railway at Hart Bay is, according to New York State’s Office of Parks, Recreation and » Continue Reading.


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