The Psychic Highway: Part 2 - Troy and Schenectady

ContentsGehry and the MachineLand, People, and the MachineTroySchenectadyMohawkMoon and RiverGehry and The MachineFRANK GEHRY passed away today as I was sitting down to write about Troy, New York — December 5th, 2025. Gehry was a movement on his own, a whirlwind force that helped revive architecture at the end of the 20th century by insisting that architecture is art. I’m not an architecture student and know little about these issues formally, but I do have my opinions. It’s unfortunate to be writing this on the occasion of his death, but I don’t feel great about Gehry’s buildings. If the building is a self-contained artistic unit, is the city a museum, or even an exhibition? The answer to the latter, independently, is “certainly not,” which should cast doubts on such a vision for architecture.The closest Gehry building to me is 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s pretty cool, I guess — I like that I can imagine the feeling of its cold steel curvature in my hand — but it sticks out in a way that all of Gehry’s most prominent works do. “Hey! Look at me! I’m so zany,” they insist, while serving a fundamentally obfuscatory purpose. That purpose is articulated more plainly on 8 Spruce Street’s website, which says, “8 Spruce means peak luxury, soaring famously above the rest in design and amenities.”I first encountered Gehry’s works in City of Quartz, Mike Davis’s stirring and kaleidosopic book about the history, present, and future destiny of Los Angeles. Davis described Gehry’s LA buildings as “fortress architecture,” intended to secure items and ideas of value in a physically delineated private space inaccessible to the roving hordes of the city. Davis’s reading of the role of Gehry’s architecture in LA predisposed me to look upon Gehry’s prancing steel curtains unfavorably, but it continues to be insightful (and correct). Unless you are one of a small class of global elites whose interests may, in walking by 8 Spruce Street, be fancied by “DESIGNED BY FRANK GEHRY,” 8 Spruce Street is a fortress: there are things of great value inside, but you may not learn what they are, and you certainly may not see them. You’ll hear the humming and gnashing of the gears of power, but the sounds will not be intelligible.When I lived in Atlanta, I felt John Portman’s Downtown buildings engender a similar sort of implacable psychological discomfort, as if I didn’t know what I was looking at and that someone was laughing at me for trying to make sense of them. Following the gradual migration of financial capital Northwards, from Downtown Atlanta to Midtown and then Buckhead, I discovered increasingly opaque architecture that offers less and less information about the relationship between buildings and people. Going Northwards, this occurs both at the theoretical level, in that the buildings become less attributable to any one time or architectural style, as well as at the practical level, in that they are generally unfriendly at the street level and alienating from afar. The late Fredric Jameson wrote about both Gehry and Portman in the early 1990s and had this to say about the relationship between postmodern architecture and people:“This latest mutation in space… [transcends] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world… this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment… can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”I’ve been trying to understand why I’m so taken with industrial history and industrial forms, and I think Gehry’s passing and the subsequent appraisal of his work happened to shed some light on the matter, if only in providing a foil. About a year ago, I wrote about the historical “legibility” of Allentown and Pennsylvania steel mills and the relative “illegibility” of Atlanta’s skyscraper architecture. Now, I understand what it is I meant by legibility, which, for a physical place, is really about its articulation of human relationships: what does the built environment suggest I do for you and you for me, and what does that mean for how we view one another? This question has been rendered incoherent by the omnipotence of the global real estate market, which flattens our relationships — and thus our architecture — in the service of land rents.Gehry’s alien forms, subjects as they are of the global real estate market, induce in the spectator an “incapacity… to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network.” The industrial forms of 20th-century America provided the opposite: a clear, hyper-legible mapping of the nation, its people, and their relationships with one another. The terrain of class society was unobstructed, widely known, and contested. The sites of gathering and resistance — the factory, the rowhome, the Church — were universal and necessary: you cannot work 68 hours a week in a steel mill forever.These sites and cities have been emptied, and many of their former tenants now inhabit the spaces between the towers, museums, and hotels of Gehrys and Portmans: they may look around and see only a precarious gig economy available to them, but is 8 Spruce Street really to blame?To put it another way, try imagining overlooking early modern industrial infrastructure, like the Ford River Rouge Plant in Detroit. The machines are complex and colossal, but there is an austere, comprehensible harmony to their functions: the smokestack emits into the air the noxious byproduct of a chemical reaction; the desired products of that reaction are cooled and placed on a belt; in an adjacent warehouse, a cadre of skilled workers fasten that item to a larger piece; out onto a huge cargo ship goes a steering wheel, or a carburetor, or even a fully equipped Ford Model T. Though the advance of modern machinery and industrial capitalism was, as I noted in the last essay, also met widely with hysteria, there was an intuitive logic and order in 20th-century industry that is missing in the (post)modern world. “Postindustrial” modes of production — and consequent modes of consumption — are decentered and colossal on the scale not of a Ford factory but of the planet; not illogical, per se, but fundamentally alienating. The shipping container is an illustrative postmodern analogue to the Ford Plant: ubiquitous, anonymous, and decentered.With the allegiances of the workroom floor no longer dictating relations, it is unclear whose interests are shared and even more uncertain how we might advance them. The architectural superstructure that has emerged from this new set of human relations is thus equally ambiguous. Any revolutionary potential of the early industrial machine has been dismantled and shipped across oceans and dimensions to a far more complex mechanism of production, speculation, and representation.In traveling the Psychic Highway of industrial Upstate New York, I got a glimpse of that potential, observed what seemed to be its passing, and found people bravely piecing together the aftermath.Land, People, and the MachineTroy, New York was nicknamed the “Collar City", as it produced 90% of America’s detachable shirt collars during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gloversville, NY, was the “Glove City” for similar reasons; Cohoes, NY was the “Spindle City,” Rome, NY, the “Copper City;” Syracuse, NY, the “Salt City,” and so forth.These are fun little pet names, but consider what it might mean for a city to rely so heavily on the physical, social, and psychological ecosystem surrounding one or two industries. The resulting principle, that the types of industry housed in a city determine its land use and social relations, is one of the defining characteristics of the urban cores of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. Its application follows a general rule of thumb: as America moved Westward from the Atlantic Ocean — slowly at first, then faster after the construction of the Erie Canal, then at breakneck pace after the Civil War — manufacturing activities grew in size and scale. Later-developing cities industrialized under different conditions: cheaper and flatter land, extensive rail infrastructure, and more centralized capital, resulting ultimately in titanic Fordist industrial complexes — cities within cities.On one end of the spectrum is New York City, which had a globally significant and diversified manufacturing base that relied on flexibility and small production runs in variable, manual trades like women’s garments. On the other side of the spectrum (and the Appalachians) is Gary, Indiana. Gary was established as a company town for U.S. Steel and houses its Gary Works, which in the 1930s was producing more steel than the entirety of Germany. Together with the neighboring Indiana Harbor Works, the largest steel plant in the country, the steel manufacturing activities on the South Shore of Lake Michigan require as much space as half of Manhattan, which in the 1930s was itself home to thousands of small manufacturing enterprises.Simply put, a sheet of steel is much larger than a handkerchief, so steel plants dwarf handkerchief looms. The implications of industrial scale for land use are doubly important when considering what is left when a steel plant closes versus when a cottage industry closes: is there a more ominous psychic symbol than the shuttered behemoth factory?We must also consider the social relations that follow from different types of industrial activities. New York’s garment, printing, and flower industries, amongst hundreds of others, required immense flexibility to maintain pace with the speed of technological change and consumer demand. Flexibility in production required highly skilled laborers who understood the fundamentals of operations around the factory and could easily alter production styles or take up other production responsibilities. This often made New York laborers harder to replace, especially in more craft-oriented roles, even as employers churned through low-wage workers at the bottom. It also meant that women and a wider range of men could participate in the labor force, which had profound effects on organizing activities and by the mid-20th century had made powerful political blocs out of seemingly trivial industries.Steel manufacturing, on the other hand, is extremely dangerous, and, relative to many of New York’s industries, requires less craft skill and more brute strength (not to slight the technique required to operate a blast furnace). As technology improved throughout the early 20th century and the marginal labor required to produce steel fell, Midwestern steel-producing regions housed a growing surplus of steel workers whose living conditions became increasingly precarious. The steel plants of the Great Lakes, the mid-Atlantic, and even Birmingham were sites of Olympian class negotiation, where massive industrial labor unions fought a seemingly interminable war with the burgeoning managerial class of America.The early 20th-century mass exodus of sharecroppers from the South became a most effective anti-labor tool for factory managers, who at any moment could threaten to break strikes by hiring those non-unionized workers, turning first to Black men who were initially denied entry into industrial unions. This general idea — pitting workers against each other and inspiring a race-to-the-bottom — found its final form when US Steel and co. abandoned the terrain of Northern class conflict altogether by decamping for the no-rights, no-fights regimes of the American South. By the late 20th century, industry, at least as it had come to be known, had left the Northeast and the Midwest, with varying degrees of catastrophe awaiting its former hosts.I hope to have established two frameworks here that may help us understand the cities of the Mohawk Valley: first, a description of the elements of “modernity,” contrasted with “postmodernity,” that lend themselves to instantly comprehensible and richly articulated human relationships; and second, the implications of a given means of production (e.g., steel vs. garment manufacturing) for physical and social space. America’s formerly industrial cities tell us a great deal about the struggles into which we were born, and the outcomes of those negotiations are visible even in the minutest details of a grain elevator or an interstate highway.PS: Detroit is a great case study under these two frameworks. The history of Detroit, the blue-collar American dream in miniature, is clear as day as narrated by its built environment, but understanding Detroit today (“postindustrial” Detroit) is difficult, especially if your only reference point is physical. In 2013, Detroit became by far the largest municipal body in American history to declare bankruptcy, which concluded the painstaking process of transferring control over the city from a shrinking class of homeowners to purely speculative capital. The labyrinthine financial dealings that have driven real estate speculation in Detroit’s Downtown were performed behind closed doors, which is to say that they are profoundly undemocratic. These deals, financial instruments, and institutions will continue to elude public scrutiny as they are not bound by the public disclosure rules that a public entity traditionally would be. It is thus a doomed effort to try and understand the details of the “postmodern” framework of power that now governs Detroit, which includes such corporate players as Little Caesars, Ernst and Young, and Bank of America.To further obscure the real mechanisms of power, mainstream media outlets continue to write fawning hagiographies of the billionaires that have “revitalized” Downtown Detroit without mention of the enormous public subsidies that have helped them turn profits. Chief among these billionaires is Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans fortune, who was gifted a major Downtown site during the city’s bankruptcy negotiations, the former Hudson Building, which he’s now renting as Class A Luxury office space. Needless to say, such puff pieces also do not mention that the same public subsidies that boost the fortunes of Downtown come at the direct expense of Detroit’s long-time residents, many of whom face consistent threats of municipal service cuts as public coffers are emptied for new Downtown arenas or food halls. This Fortune article lauding Gilbert’s “transformation” of Detroit contains, laughably, not a single mention of Gilbert’s involvement with the city’s bankruptcy dealings, nor a sentence that ventures out beyond Downtown offices into Detroit’s expansive plains of foreclosure, which have grown markedly since the turn of the century. Compare such treatment of Gilbert to the sad reality unveiled in this article from 2015, when Wayne County threatened to evict tens of thousands of residents who could not afford to pay property taxes that were based on assessments from before the bankruptcy. From 2013 to 2025, Detroit lost 72,000 Black residents. So while the process of power may be opaque, the outcomes are astoundingly clear, constituting not a “revival” of the city but a wholesale replacement.This process began decades ago when Ford hired (drumroll please…) John Portman to design its new headquarters, the ironically named “Renaissance Center” (a.k.a. the RenCen), which was at the time of its completion the largest private development in the history of the US. The RenCen, which houses the second-tallest hotel in North America, was designed in the same inscrutable but spectacular postmodern style as much of Downtown Atlanta. Crucially, it was envisioned around the same time (the mid-1970s), meaning it’s surrounded by a sea of surface parking lots and has a bleak, decrepit interface with the surrounding public realm.GM purchased the RenCen in 1996 to serve as its new corporate headquarters, but in 2024 (just 28 years later!), GM threatened to vacate and demolish the complex unless taxpayers floated $250M for renovations, sweetened by the promise of some housing on the site. Dan Gilbert is a major partner for GM in the RenCen’s real estate activities, prompting public outrage that he is effectively extorting a quarter of a billion dollars from taxpayers to subsidize his investment. If they don’t cough up the money, he’ll demolish the office complex, and GM will move to… his new tower on the Hudson site. And consequently, Gilbert’s Downtown would become the sole business district for corporate tenancy in the city.As Gilbert and co. usher in further postmodern downtown skyscrapers, Whole Foods outlets, and performing arts centers, you may in the future visit a Detroit that, as Jameson prophesied, “transcends the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” Then Detroit will no longer be the Motor City, heartland of American industry, but something else entirely or maybe nothing at all.* My one attempted nod towards impartiality on this matter is that Gilbert is clearly personally invested in the preservation of historic architecture, and he has invested a great deal of personal capital into the rehabilitation of some of Detroit’s great Downtown buildings. But of course this is part of the larger trend just described. *TroyIn Troy, I found one of the core oddities of Upstate New York, at least to my suburbanite sensibilities: urban decay is the norm, even to people who in other places might have “addressed” it comprehensively or moved away altogether. I have two key demographics in mind here: one is the affluent white pseudo-hipster, whose presence was marked clearly by a Montessori school right near Downtown. I know these folks very well, as I myself am in constant denial about being one, and because I live in Williamsburg in 2025, where high-paying marketing and other “creative” jobs fuel a spectrum of activities from Carhartt collecting to concierge chiropractic visits. In Williamsburg, these types of people are protected from the advances of the savages of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy by several blocks of buffer residents, whereas in Troy, I saw 2022 Subarus parked in front of condemned buildings. There was a period in the early 2000s when hipsters shacked up in the first confectioner’s warehouse they could find, but that type of person is largely gone, having been bought off by ascendant corporate living, much like the disaffected rebels of the 1960s.The other key demographic is the University, of which Troy has two conveniently located near its tight, compact Downtown: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and Russell Sage College. In Durham, NC, where I went to undergraduate school, Duke University had taken radical action against urban decay more than two decades before my arrival, purchasing and flipping 75% of the homes in Walltown, the neighborhood adjacent to Duke’s East Campus. This led to near-instant gentrification and the loss of a neighborhood fabric that was integral to Durham’s broader history and identity. It was hard to conclude, at least in my first impression, that either of Troy’s institutions had embarked on similar missions.Their presence alone, however, did facilitate some pedestrian activity on a wind-swept November morning, as well as a youthful vigor that made me nostalgic for the good old days (two years ago). Though Albany is home to the University of Albany and Excelsior College, both of those institutions are at the extreme Western end of the city’s panhandle, such that the city boundaries appear to have been extended solely for the purpose of integrating the two universities. They are minimally engaged with the city’s urban fabric, unlike Troy’s two universities, whose footprints are firmly visible in the city’s core.Despite the consistent presence of abandoned rowhouses, Troy’s residential streets felt very different from Albany’s. I realized this was visually about the quality of the mostly fantastic row homes, which proudly retained their original punch and splendor. In many, plywood lay where windows once were, and in some cases there was nothing but a void in the frame. But in almost all of them, you could see the wealth that once endowed them, as well as some neatly navigated historic preservation programs that had kept them from complete dilapidation. I found out only after leaving that Troy was once the fourth-wealthiest city in the country, per capita, which certainly distinguishes it materially from Albany.Troy came into such fabulous wealth on the backs of its industrial workers, including the mostly Irish women who worked in the city’s detachable collar factories. That’s right — detachable collar factories. Throughout the 19th century, men trudged to work in factories wearing collared shirts and vests that covered their torsos. When they returned home, their collars were stained with various types of industrial discharge, but the shirts themselves were “clean,” earning the ire of their wives, who had to clean whole shirts just to scrub out some soot from collars. So scornful was one woman, Ms. Hannah Lord Montague of Troy, New York, that she took a pair of scissors to one of her husband’s blue shirts and cut the collar clean off. One hundred years later, the women of Troy were manufacturing “100 per cent of the detachable collars worn in the world of men, and [had] caused the sign of ‘Troy Laundry’ to be seen from the snow-covered wastes of the Arctic to the golden sands of Guam (New York Times, 1925).” (Look at how NYT used to write!)Shortly after the detachable collar took the world by storm, mid-19th century industrial practices came for Troy’s women. They routinely worked 14-hour days in the city’s collar factories, where they daily burned their fingers and arms and inhaled the cruel vapors of industrialized clothing production. In February 1864, a 19-year-old Irish immigrant woman (a girl, we might say now) named Kate Mullany organized about 300 female collar workers in Troy into the Collar Laundry Union, the first all-female labor union in the country. Within the same month, the women went on a six-day strike and achieved a 25% raise in wages, which would be replicated across the East Coast as Mullany dispatched members of the Collar Laundry Union to help organize women in other factories.(A brief aside — the largest detachable collar factory in Troy was that of Cluett, Peabody, & Company, a menswear mainstay from the 19th and 20th centuries that has numerous modern descendants after decades of corporate mergers and takeovers. One is the Arrow clothing line, which originally made Cluett-Peabody famous and is now an Amazon exclusive. Another is Gold Toe Brands, from whom I’ve purchased no less than 18 pairs of socks in the last two years. Supporting local business!)Troy’s “firsts” don’t stop there. If we go back in time a bit farther, we find that Troy was actually the short-lived steel manufacturing center of America, before it grew to the city-within-a-city scale of Great Lakes manufacturing. The revolutionary Bessemer Process, which allowed for the smelting of impure pig iron into usable steel, was first trialed in the US in Troy, where it benefited from the power output of the convergence of two great rivers and their many feeder streams.(I have read some compelling arguments that the Bessemer Process wasn’t all that novel, and that it became the avatar for steel innovation because the arguably more important contemporary spike in power output was ambiguous and harder to name. The Bessemer Process is also the namesake of Bessemer, AL, an inner-ring suburb of Birmingham, where, crucially, Gucci Mane is originally from.)We’ve now pieced together almost enough to explain why there is a Montessori school in Downtown Troy: historical affluence, small-time industry (that led to a dilapidated waterfront but not an empty city), anchor institutions in the form of universities (though they have not been terribly involved with Troy’s urban trajectory, they have kept folks in Troy), and a small but burgeoning arts scene that has attracted well-to-do white families from downstate. The last piece of the puzzle, I realized as I walked around the city, is more a question of what’s missing than what’s there: urban freeways.It’s a bit tired to blame urban freeways for everything, but I can’t ignore the utter tranquility I felt walking around the streets of Troy, which stemmed mostly from its intact street grid and the lack of droning 70 MPH car noise. Walking around Albany, when I was not in some of its quieter, more disinvested neighborhoods, was often an exercise in trying not to get mutilated by an F-150 or blown away by a gust of wind run amok over a parking lot. Albany was cleaved by the meat axe of mid-century urban freeway planning, Troy was not, and we’ve yet to find the innovation or willpower to overcome those planning decisions.(There is a freeway that cuts across Troy and separates its lower-income neighborhoods about ten blocks North of Downtown — how would it be an American city otherwise — though it is a Parisian back alley compared to Albany’s urban autobahns.)As I concluded my dainty walk around historic Troy, I was approached by my first Enthusiasm Guy of the day. This is a genre of well-meaning man who watches far too much History Channel, has some deeply fulfilling hobbies, and engages in insufficient social interaction for his active mind. I was taking a picture of Poesten Kill, a small but mighty stream that runs down the middle of Troy, when Enthusiasm Guy #1 walked up to me, ponytailed and Patagonia-ed. In following the tradition of thousands of Enthusiasm Guys before him, he kindly waited for me to take a picture before asking what I was photographing. I usually have a pretty poor response to this type of question (“streets and urban stuff”), but in this case, I did mention that I was interested in local quirks and industrial history. “Oh my,” he blushed, as if he had been waiting his whole life for this opportunity. “There’s a lot of that around here.” He rattled off regional dishes that I had to try, like the Utica Black and White cookie and the Utica Chicken Riggie, before finding out that I was headed for Schenectady next and altogether losing it.Enthusiasm Guy #1 had a long history with Schenectady: his grandfather had moved to upstate New York from New York City for a job with General Electric (GE), and his family had remained in the area until he moved back to Brooklyn in the early 2000s in search of a more exciting life. He was back in Troy visiting a cousin, he said, and he told me how to enrich my short drive from Troy to Schenectady by passing through the abandoned spindle mills of Cohoes and across the final Eastern lock of the Erie Canal. Enthusiasm Guys are delightfully indifferent to the pressures and rules of modernity, so when I found out that this route would have taken me two hours instead of 26 minutes, I jetted straight down Troy-Schenectady Road, through the capital region’s true suburbs, to Schenectady.SchenectadyI’ve had “Schenectady” stuck in my head for a long, long time. Since I was a kid in elementary school and we learned a little bit about the cities dotting the rest of New York State, I’ve been fascinated by the way that Schenectady rolls off my tongue. The feeling of saying Schenectady is not dissimilar to the feeling of saying other American place names with Indigenous roots, which is to say about half of the places in America east of the Mississippi (try “Mississippi”).The genocide of Indigenous Americans by European settlers was America’s original sin, followed by chattel slavery. In the latter case, enslaved people trafficked from Africa experienced what sociologist Orlando Patterson called in 1982 “natal alienation”: they were ripped from their birthright cultures and forced to undergo a new process of identity formation in America from the foundational position of having no rights. There’s plenty to wade through here, including well-founded disputes about the essentializing nature of such a categorization. It’s impossible, however, to deny some of natal alienation’s components at their most basic levels, like the loss of African names and their replacement with mostly Anglicized Christian names, or sometimes no name at all. Enslaved African peoples lost thousands of years of naming customs the moment they set foot in this country, and a quick survey of place names across the Eastern United States confirms that there is little-to-no legacy of American places being given African names. They have simply been erased from the record.In the former case, that of the genocide of Indigenous peoples, we have the opposite phenomenon: more than half of America’s states have names with Indigenous origins (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Kansas, Wyoming, etc.), in addition to thousands of cities, counties, and natural features. The intuitive rationale for this is that Indigenous Americans had been occupying these places for thousands of years and had their own names for things, or at least their own names (like the Seneca Chief Buffalo, whose name informed the naming of Buffalo Creek and thus the City of Buffalo, despite the nearest American Bison being thousands of miles away). But the implication of such a naming scheme is similar to the reverse causal effect of natal alienation: erasure of history.To begin with, the colonial versions of Indigenous words are butchered. Much of the Eastern United States is an exhibition of the worst possible instances of mistranslation, but to illustrate the point, we can consider the great Yankee state of “Massachusetts,” whose name comes from the Massachusetts people. In their own language, the closest Latin alphabet translation is “Muhsachuweeseeak.” Translating the thousands of different languages spoken in continental America into the Latin alphabet was a classic, if unavoidable, project of colonial hubris that immediately flattened the enormous differences between peoples and languages. It is but a wistful counterfactual to imagine our experience in this country if we had some elementary training in or respect for these languages (Sapir-Whorf and all).There is, too, the matter of the meanings of these words to Indigenous peoples, as assembled by their own and disaggregated and spliced by the English, Dutch, and French: skahnéhtati, in Mohawk, is roughly translated as “beyond the pines,” as was immortalized by Ryan Gosling’s jawline in The Place Beyond the Pines but is otherwise illegible or forgotten. Today, the place beyond the pines is Schenectady. This is not to toot my own horn for having done the paltry work of reading Wikipedia pages and archived web articles, but really just to mourn a loss of meaning. The palimpsest that is a map of Upstate New York is a middle finger to the people who lived here first, and to all of us who have followed in their absence without the mental faculties to make sense of such strange syllables. (A concrete example of this is that most Iroquoian languages did not make use of spoken words formed by the touching of upper and lower lips, which is standard in spoken English.)You may read the above and find nothing aberrant to your historical expectation: of course, settlers came and did their best to “honor” Indigenous naming traditions. It is the crucial context of the formalized naming tradition that emerged in the late 19th and 20th centuries that makes this history more sinister and reveals it as clearly part of the broader American imperial tradition.In the early days of America — the early 19th century, namely — place names were in flux. You might have learned that you named a town after the wrong tribe, or you might have decided to rename a town in honor of a general of the French and Indian Wars. But when the nation began to take its industrial form in the mid-19th century and immigrants poured in from County Cork and other far-off lands, etymology became a tool of assimilation. Naming places after tribes, chiefs, or Indigenous words of unknown provenance became a means of formalizing history.You, swarthy man of the isles, are here as part of a distinctly American tradition — how hard did the original colonists work to wrestle this project from the Mohawk, from the Cayuga! Be grateful for your condition. Put your head down and assimilate yourself into the ironworks, for you are not a Mohawk, nor a Cayuga, but a soon-to-be American. This sort of rhetorical device served to alleviate the rising tension (discussed in the last essay as part of the force unleashed by the Erie Canal) between old-stock Puritan Americans and the rising tide of Irish, Italian, and Jewish migration that was quickly washing over urban America. (For a deeper reading on this and its implications for the notions of “citizenship” in the American project, check out this wonderfully thoughtful essay.)There is, finally, the simple fact that the Indigenous naming schemes of Upstate New York abstract from the true history — and antagonism — of European colonization. The history of the relationship between European colonists and Indigenous Americans is the history of this country, widely acknowledged as a sin, yet we’ve done very little to ameliorate the generational effects of that history. So, it’s especially jarring to drive around a place like Upstate New York and discover that naming is essentially the only thing we’ve offered in exchange for such a violent history. It’s like saying, “Hey, we’re sorry about the biological warfare, but at least this city is now named after Pontiac, the leader whose uprising was met with smallpox blankets.” (The earlier, slightly less morose naming tradition of Upstate New York is after classical antiquity, which was common across the American Frontier. That’s why you have Great Lakes towns in Ohio called Mentor and Homer. It’s why you have, in New York, Troy, Syracuse, Utica, and Ithaca, and, less famously, Camillus, Cicero, Fabius, Manlius, Marcellus, Pompey, Tully, and Lysander (thank you, Reddit, for the latter list). It is said that a single early Revolutionary War veteran, who himself was born in Ireland, assigned most of these names in New York, though that claim is difficult to verify.)After all this, I can tell you now with confidence that it’s pronounced “Skeh-NECK-tuh-dee”. While its name takes some finagling of the tongue to master, Schenectady is an easy town to figure out as “The City That Lights and Hauls the World.” Lighting — that’s electricity, the domain of General Electric (GE). Hauling — that’s the prerogative of the railroad.Schenectady has a long industrial history due to its location on the Mohawk River and at the confluence of several major rail lines, but it is ultimately a company town. When I first looked at a map of Schenectady, laid out helter-skelter along a gentle bulge in the Mohawk River, I identified the historic Downtown and followed Union Street eastwards through the GE Realty Plot neighborhood. Strange name for a community, but, as I hope to have established, hyper-legible. GE purchased this tract from Union College many moons ago and housed its upwardly ascendant managerial class in quaint parlor homes, which today comprise one of Schenectady’s two immaculately preserved local historic districts (more on the other one later).In 1928, America’s first public television broadcast soared triumphantly through the airwaves from a family home in the GE Realty Plots. By 1940, GE employed more than 40,000 workers in Schenectady. Today, there are fewer than 4,000 employees of GE in Schenectady. Technically, actually, there are zero GE employees in Schenectady, as GE no longer exists. After decades of offshoring and cost-cutting proved insufficient to halt the freight train of market logic, GE’s market value dropped nearly $200 billion between 2017 and 2018, prompting its dismantling into several independent companies. GE Vernova, the Franken-child of four already independent GE energy spin-offs, maintains its onshore wind facilities in the city, not far from GE’s Global Research Hub in Niskayuna, New York, where the median employee has a PhD.Thomas Edison’s General Electric built, crowned, and abandoned Schenectady in less than 100 years. Some folks in Schenectady have lived to see the entire lifecycle of a place and its people. They’ve been present for the invention of the X-ray and the loudspeaker, and for the decline of a downtown area that is often incredulously described as the victim of an invisible bombing. They agitated and struck as Schenectady grew to house the highest concentration of union members in the country. They watched, powerless, as late-20th-century GE CEO Jack “Neutron Jack” Welch became famous for his love of union-busting, overseeing a decline in GE union membership from about 70% of the workforce to 35%. They’ve seen a city that was nearly 99% white in the mid-century become about 50% white, with the majority of its non-white residents living in downtown-adjacent neighborhoods that were redlined to hell during the New Deal, before Irish and Italian workers became “white.” This is the ominous shuttered behemoth — not the death of a niche garment industry as in Troy, but the supernova of one of America’s fantastical industrial visions.Of course, the death throes of America’s golden age are not limited to such fluffy human concepts as labor rights and demographic change. Beginning in 1947, GE spent decades pissing battery acid straight into the Hudson River. Well, not quite — GE’s major environmental sin was actually the release of Polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), which was used heavily in early industrial processes as a coolant and was widely known to be toxic by the 1930s, decades before GE stopped dumping it in the Hudson.Fish don’t like PCB, nor do creatures that eat fish. PCB is especially unsafe for human consumption, where it may cause dementia, cancer, and a host of other neurological issues. In the early 2000s, the EPA commissioned a study that found that 75-90% of fish and 90% of waterfowl in the Upper Hudson contain PCB levels well in excess of the concentration considered safe for human consumption (I imagine that number is preferably 0%, though we live in a world where GE exists).Initial organization against GE’s environmental destruction helped birth America’s environmental movement, which rightfully focused on the ecological consequences of PCB buildup in Hudson River sediment. Today, after decades and billions of dollars of State-subsidized cleanup efforts, the reverberations of pre-EPA American enterprise are felt most directly by predominantly Black and Hispanic communities alongside the Hudson River, who rely heavily on the River’s fish for both commerce and subsistence.Nearly 70% of fish consumers with household incomes between 25k and 50k consume Hudson River fish in excess of the State’s guidelines, compared to about 50% of consumers in higher income brackets. This is an example of a classic capitalist formulation: the State subsidizes private enterprise, while its less fortunate citizens bear the brunt of its negative externalities.As I walked the blocks of Hamilton Hill down towards the Mohawk River, skirting the GE Realty Plots, the wind whistled in my ear. Not a shrill, violent blast like in Albany, but a softer tune, a murmur or whimper. Much of what I’ve just described of human and environmental triumph and anguish I only learned after leaving Schenectady. But I swear I felt those voices floating through the air. People say the same thing when they visit the Acropolis or walk the back alleys of Rome — that the air is thick with ghosts. Is Schenectady not a modern-day Rome, raised to imperial status by a Caesar and razed to the earth while an indifferent emperor fiddled?While I bloviate about ghosts, let me bring you to some real ones. At the end of my journey down to the riverfront, I entered Schenectady’s other major historic residential neighborhood, The Stockade. Plaques, signs, and online brochures shared several versions of the same truth, which is that in some way, shape, or form, The Stockade is one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in the United States. Spanning no more than a handful of blocks in either direction, the neighborhood is packed with glorious residences from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, which, in American historical terms, is prehistoric.As I meandered the streets alone, the wind continued to whisper, and time appeared to pause. There weren’t any other pedestrians, but there were a whole lot of important-sounding historical plaques. George Washington slept here, read one. Dutch Church, founded before 1680, read another. I also read that the neighborhood was mostly burned to the ground during the 1690 “Schenectady Massacre,” and that its prompt rebuilding shortly thereafter is what allowed it to stand today, unlike many other contemporary areas that were decaying by the early 18th century.The houses were blue, pink, yellow, and purple. They looked like they had all been repainted yesterday — a testament to the strength of the neighborhood’s historic preservation — but careful manicuring did not mask age, which showed most clearly in housing styles I was altogether unfamiliar with. In much of the Eastern United States, historic residences are from the Civil War era through the early 20th century, so the homes are easily identifiable as Victorian or Italianate. I don’t have the words to describe The Stockade’s dwellings, but these significantly older homes were less adorned, imparting a feeling of restrained elegance. A bright orange leaf took its time floating down to the sidewalk in front of a rich, forest green door. Another historic plaque heralded The Ride of Symon Schermerhoorn, who, hanging almost limp from his horse, rode to Albany to warn of the incoming French and Mohawk cavalry that had just executed the Schenectady Massacre.The sunlight poked and prodded playfully from behind the clouds as I entered the grounds of a church cemetery, just as placid as the surrounding neighborhood but all the more dreamlike. There was a small statue of a Benedictine Monk with his hands folded together in humility; a yellow Elm leaf fell and caught on his thumb. I imagined the chaotic, soot-filled Downtown Schenectady of the 1920s, and caught a glimpse of the now-tamed Mohawk River through a hole in the Church’s fence. For a century, the River had played host to wars between colonists and the soon-to-be colonized. Then for another century it bequeathed onto European immigrants a hundred thousand jobs and lives. And now, for who knows how long, it provides a stable basis for the property values of a handful of Stockade homes that are inhabited by who knows who.I was caught in my own world when an older man approached me to ask why I was there. Startled, I jumped back and laughed; he recoiled and mumbled an apology. A more timid Enthusiasm Guy, but #2 no less. We talked for a couple of minutes before he unceremoniously departed — I presumed from my life altogether. But I was standing in front of the “Lawrence the Indian” statue in the middle of the neighborhood when he squeaked back around the curb in an old, brown SUV. “Want a tour of historic Schenectady?” I got in the stranger’s car — see Enthusiasm Guy Tenet No. 1: the rules of modern life are off the table — and he drove me around The Stockade in not even the slightest rush. He paused in the middle of the street and pointed at a house: “That’s the second-oldest house in Schenectady.” Not much of a conversationalist, he was a veritable fact machine: he knew things, and he knew that I needed to know them.I learned a great deal from Paul and felt that he was about ready for me to get out of his car as we circled back to Lawrence the Indian. I thanked him profusely and started opening the door when his voice turned grave: “Wait. Do you know about the history of Lawrence the Indian?”MohawkAs it turns out, Lawrence the Indian does not really have a history. In fact, he is just “No. 53 Indian Chief,” from the catalogue of the J.L. Mott Iron Works in The Bronx. 75 years after his installation in The Stockade, however, he was reborn as Lawrence. “Lawrence” was a Mohawk warrior who traced French attackers back to Montreal after the Schenectady Massacre in the hopes of retrieving Mohawk and British hostages. If you’re paying attention, you’ll recall that the French battalion that initially attacked Schenectady also included Mohawk fighters, meaning the Mohawk were aligned on both sides of the conflict. This is what Paul told me:The Mohawk are the “Keepers of the Eastern Door,” the Eastern-most tribe of the five tribes that make up the Iroquois Confederacy, whose historic territory covers most of Central and Northern New York State. Alongside three of the other Iroquoian tribes, they fought with the British in both the Revolutionary War and the French and Indian War, intending to form treaties with the British that would prevent further European encroachment on their lands.From the first days of European exploration of New York State, colonists sought to convert Mohawk people to Christianity; first, the Dutch attempted to make them loyal Protestants; then, sporadically, the British; and, most notably, the French, who brought them to Jesuit Mission Villages along the St. Lawrence River in Canada. Initially, Mohawk conversion to the Jesuit faith was performed at the tip of the sword, but many Mohawks ultimately converted to Catholicism and, separately, became closely allied with the French. On the day of the Schenectady Massacre, a small band of Mohawks from Kahnawake, the most prominent Catholic Mohawk settlement on the St. Lawrence River, joined the French in their attack on the British and Mohawks of Schenectady. “Mohawk blood was let by Mohawk spears,” said Paul, a white man who claimed his family had been in Schenectady since the colonial period.Only later did I find out the gravity of this schism in Mohawk history. The Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, which is today one of the largest self-governing Mohawk territories in Canada, maintained close familial ties with the Mohawks in New York. Many of the Mohawks who converted and moved North left their brothers and sisters behind in the Mohawk Valley, only to encounter them again during the French and Indian War. When meeting each other on the battlefield, their blood bond was sometimes too much to overcome, as in this account from a British General:“In this confusion, a Mohawk Warrior happened to encounter his friend, a [Kahnawake]…they saluted each other, and shook hands. In the meantime another came up, who made a Blow at the Mohawk…the latter parried it and killed him… A Second instantly rushed on, making a similar effort…he killed him also; His friend stood a passive Spectator of the Slaughter of his Comrades: so strong was the Band of Friendship, that even when meeting in hostile array, it obliged them to spare each other. The [Kahnawake] then exclaimed “Oh – my friend, we have met in disagreeable circumstances: Let us then part.”Scenes of anguished encounters were common throughout the French and Indian Wars as, by and large, New York Mohawks fought with the British against the French and the allied Kahnawake Mohawks.The world-historical forces unleashed by the Erie Canal had been bubbling for centuries before its completion and eventual obsolescence. If those forces in Upstate New York ushered in the modern era, they were experienced first by the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Mohawk people, specifically, whose traditions and notions of peoplehood had developed for thousands of years, were rended in just a century after their first contact with Christian European settlers. And just as the Erie Canal comprised a political economy that led to apocalyptic and utopian religious fervor, the entrance of the Mohawk people into the theatre of Western modernity was a cataclysmic event. Remembered by Mohawk historian Darren Bonaparte as “The Darkest Day in Mohawk History,” the Battle of Lake George saw “Mohawks fighting Mohawks in hand-to-hand combat with terrible losses on each side.” On that day, “a branch of [their] family tree was struck by lightning and utterly destroyed.”That is where Paul’s narrative concluded, but it would not be the final appearance of the Kahnawake Mohawks on the stage of modernity. In the Roaring 20s, 170 years after the Battle of Lake George, the Kahnawake Mohawks would again find themselves working at the vanguard of American empire. Only this time, it was in America’s self-assertion as the pre-eminent global cultural and financial hegemon, and it would occur thousands of feet in the air, rather than amongst the ancient woods of the Adirondacks.The 1965 Canadian documentary High Steel begins with about 10 seconds of industrial noises, in darkness: whirring, revving, and motoring. In my inability to identify the sources of those noises, I out myself as a child of the postmodern consumptive world. As the scene comes into focus, we see a lanky, muscular man hitched to the side of a slowly reversing pickup truck. He’s wearing a red safety hat emblazoned with the name of his employer, Bethlehem Steel, and he’s smacking on a piece of gum with a quiet self-assuredness. The truck continues to reverse and the camera shows us its payload, which I can identify as a set of steel beams. The man introduces himself succinctly:“That’s me, Harold McComber, ironworker. I’m a Mohawk Indian, born in Kahnawake, just outside of Montreal. Most of the men born in Kahnawake work on skyscrapers here in New York.”Six minutes later, Mr. McComber is puffing on a cigarette with no discernible means of removing it from his mouth, his hands ensconced in enormous leather gloves. The camera zooms out, and it is revealed that he his now 25 stories in the air, standing precariously atop one of the steel beams that was just in the bed of a pickup truck. No rope or tether attaches him to the shell of the soon-to-be building, and he loves it: “Boy, I was tickled to death at the top of that beam.”High Steel tells the story of the generations of Kahnawake Mohawk men who wrought and assembled the built environment we know today as America. From the late 1800s and through the present day, Kahnawake men have driven or sailed down to New York City — and sometimes across the country — to build some of America’s most enduring and iconic physical infrastructure, like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building. High Steel is relatively uninterested in the origins of this great seasonal migration, but it toys with some of the stereotypes that seek to explain it while acknowledging its roots in economic reality: “They say Indians have a special knack for high jobs, I don’t know. I guess a man takes the best thing that comes his way.”That Mr. McComber dreamed of being a steelworker since he was a boy is a testament to his own bravery and to the intensity of the legacy of Mohawk steelworkers, given his knowledge of their history. In 1907, 86 men were hammering at a set of steel trusses about 100 feet above the St. Lawrence River when the spans beneath them abruptly fell into the river. Within 15 seconds the South end of the Quebec Bridge collapsed, killing 75 workers, some dying from the fall and some mangled by the mess of steel beams. 33 of those who died were Kahnawake Mohawks. If census data from the time is to be believed, that represented nearly 2% of the entire population of the Kahnawake Mohawk Reservation. That would likely supplant the 1755 Battle of Lake George as the “Darkest Day in Mohawk History,” though that is certainly not my determination to make. After another collapse four years later, the Bridge opened in 1919 to great pomp and fanfare as the longest bridge in the world.High Steel briefly tells the story of the highly avoidable Quebec Bridge collapse, but it mostly splits its time between the dizzying heights of mid-century New York and the flowers and streams of the St. Lawrence Valley, where Mr. McComber returned every few weeks to greet his wife and children. Throughout the film, which is just over 13 minutes long, Mr. McComber is measured in his tone and matter-of-fact about his life. He admits he regrets missing the adolescence of his children, but it almost feels as if he doesn’t have the energy to regret it too deeply.Like Mr. McComber, many Kanahwake men spent most of their lives away from their families. But a few hundred in the early 1900s brought their families to New York City and settled in Brooklyn, building a community that in time would come to be known as “Little Kahnawake,” in present-day Boerum Hill. Over the years, nearly all of those families have moved on, and traces of Little Kahnawake are scant. In 2018, a journalist for Brooklyn Rail surveyed the neighborhood, hoping to find evidence of its former inhabitants from the North, like a fabled sign at the former “Wigwam Hut” reading “THE GREATEST IRONWORKERS IN THE WORLD PASS THROUGH THESE DOORS.” Sadly, though perhaps inevitably, she was only able to find a single image on the back wall of a small bar with an “all-white clientele,” depicting a group of Mohawk and Irish workers sitting on a beam suspended an ungodly height above 5th Avenue.(A brief note here: in the latter half of the 20th century, many Kahnawake families settled in Corktown and in the Cass Corridor in Detroit, where men found jobs working on large-scale public infrastructure projects. Both neighborhoods were important sites of Indigenous community and resistance. The Cass Corridor has been rebranded by a troop of boosters, including Dan Gilbert, as “Midtown,” which Detroiters will apparently tell you is not a real thing, but sounds delicious to real estate speculators. This rebranding, as many long-time residents of “Midtown” have been priced out, follows the logic of colonial expansion that first brought European settlers to America: the Cass Corridor was a postindustrial “frontier” (a word often used to describe Detroit in the late 90s and early 2000s) with untapped land value and proximity to rich resources and amenities, much like Upstate New York. Time is a flat circle.)Though I imagined the Psychic Highway initially as a psychological representation of the Erie Canal, maybe more broadly construed as the geography of New York State, I realize now it refers to the outcomes of history under capitalism. These outcomes are defined by an unfathomable rate of acceleration: the Mohawk people joined the Iroquois Confederacy sometime in the 1100s and remained a largely coherent group until the European colonization of America 600 years later, when some converted to Catholicism and moved upriver; Brooklyn’s Little Kahnawake, dependent as it was upon the ebbs and flows of real estate capital, came and went in less than 100 years. The Psychic Highway is really a description of the exponentially swelling flow of capital across space and time, and the way in which it swallows people and places to the bewilderment and awe of us all. It’s not an evil force, nor is it correct to describe it as a necessarily harmful one (see the image below in which folks from Kahnawake touchingly commune in YouTube comments). It just doesn’t care about anything other than accumulation; damned be those that stand in its way. Moon and RiverOne man who’s done his best to stand in the way of capitalist accumulation — though I wouldn’t describe him as damned — is Richard, the owner and sole employee of Moon and River Café in Schenectady. Whenever I visit a new town or city, I always try to find a vegan or hipster café of some kind, as they’ll often shed light on the state of local politics and reveal the undercurrents of local organizing, or lack thereof. (Fine. I also like things like vegan chicken sandwiches and seitan subs.)I knew as soon as I walked up to Moon and River that I had found the right spot for this type of investigation. The front window was plastered with signs demanding justice, both in the generic sense (“Justice Now!”) and more specifically (“Free Palestine!”). I opened the door to a warm, minimally lit home and the airy chime of a few bells. An older man mostly beyond his days needing a comb was sitting on a couch reading a thick booklet. He was the sole occupant. It was a shotgun-style house, long and narrow, with an eclectic set of seating options by the front door that included a table with four different chairs and a low green sofa presently occupied by dozens of stuffed animals. They sat in disarray underneath a painting of Martin Luther King Jr. bearing Jesus’s crown of thorns. If I had seen this kind of scene in, say, Manhattan, I would have rolled my eyes and prepared for a shotgun blast to my wallet, but here on a dead-silent street in Schenectady I damn near raised my fist in solidarity.Every inch of the home was covered in signs, paintings, and posters. Books and pamphlets were pouring out of shelves and fragments of political treatises were hastily taped to the walls. On top of a piano was laid out a group of items that can only be described as “objects.” There was a small bowl of yarn and two small knitted figures fronted by a Post-it that read “We need yarn! Give us some darn yarn.”There was an orderliness to the clutter, which was united not in color or texture but by content, which unambiguously decreed the equality of all human beings and condemned the tyranny of war and capitalism. And it smelled like cooking — nothing in particular, not onions or garlic or spices, but food nonetheless.Richard, as he’d soon introduce himself to me, gingerly placed his book on the seat of his couch and arose to greet me. “Hello, young man!” I like being called “young man” by older folks because it gives me a sense of agency and vitality. He shook my hand and gently pressed down on my shoulder to seat me at the table with the four chairs. He had a slight hunch that gave away his age, but he also had a twinkle in his eyes and a mouth creased from decades of smiling and perhaps formerly grinning. There was something from deep within him that animated him and gave his life meaning, which I learned to detect from the Enthusiasm Guys of earlier in the day.Richard was deeply gracious and interested in what I had to say, though it took some time for him to open up to me because he believed he was a radical and didn’t know if I was as well (I told him I doubted I was, but I could hope). In due time, I gathered much about him and his beliefs.Here are some facts about Richard: he grew up in Utica and went to college there, and he has lived in Schenectady ever since. He’s owned Moon and River for 20-something years, but since COVID the operation has been struggling; he told me I was the first person to enter in days. He has been involved in local political organizing for nearly his whole life, motivated by a hatred for war and a love for his neighbors. For two decades, he’s been building a list of “alternative media” that avoids the warmongering narratives of mainstream media. His selected media exposures have made him a huge fan of Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s spin-off of the UK’s Labour Party.Here was Richard, alone in his home café, a one-man bastion of progressivism and, really, idealism in a sea of growing conservatism in Upstate New York. He donated money to immigrant and refugee causes Upstate, which, as we will discover when I get to Utica, is one of the defining features of the region. He hand-made stickers and magnets advocating for a range of progressive causes and passed them out on the streets of Schenectady whenever he could. Richard’s lifelong pursuit of justice, which manifested in his kindness and thoughtfulness towards me, was an inspiration.We spoke at length before we returned to the motivation for my visit, which was hunger. He handed me a long, handwritten menu, which, as a vegetarian, appealed to me in its entirety. I tried to choose between the San Fran-nectady burrito (“I invented it!”) and a tofu and eggplant sandwich before realizing that it was a mere illusion of choice. I ordered both for a staggering total of $12. Richard made his way over to the back of the home, where he started to grill a slab of tofu on a pan and range similar to the ones I have at my home.From there, our conversation narrowed slightly to the domain of American politics and political history. He couldn’t quite hear me from my seat, so I walked over to the “kitchen” — though, having spoken only to Paul during the preceding 24 hours, I couldn’t tell if that was my fault or a symptom of his age. Over the muted sizzle of the low-heat pan (I wasn’t going to tell him that tofu needs a blast of heat to get that sear), I relayed to him in excitement the energy around Zohran Mamdani in New York. Mamdani excited him, too, though he was unsure of the implications of Mamdani’s brand of politics in a place like Schenectady.He knew a lot about Schenectady’s political history, of which two figures are worthy of description here. First is Schenectady’s own Mamdani, George Lunn. The first socialist elected to office in New York State, Lunn was the Mayor of Schenectady for three terms in the 1910s and 1920s. He campaigned and won on the issues that would define the “Sewer Socialist” platform of Milwaukee’s contemporary Mayors and Councilmembers, and New York City’s Mayor 100 years later. Lunn declined to accept the Democratic nomination for New York State Governor in 1928, which then went to the slightly more famous Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He has been rescued from relative obscurity in the 2020s as news outlets have performed some cursory historical research and found that there is, indeed, a precedent for socialism in electoral politics that cannot be hidden by the cult of Fiorello LaGuardia’s personality.Richard was especially thrilled to tell me about his friend, Orlondo Hundley, whose name I could not remember for the life of me until I hit the right combination of “Schenectady Rapper Mayor Candidate” on Google. Orlondo technically co-owns Moon & River Café with Richard, but he’s only in his late 20s and is a poet, rapper, and Schenectady native whose advocacy and dedication to his hometown have crystallized in a 2027 campaign for Mayor that is reminiscent of George Lunn’s. His website’s Policy page includes such straightforward Sewer Socialist-y declarations as “Improving Sidewalks Is Public Safety, Economic Policy, and Basic Dignity” and “[We Must] Cut Waste Through a Full City Audit.”You should never attach yourself to politicians, in general, and you especially should not form opinions based only on things you see online, but Orlondo’s campaign and persona have moved me considerably. He pairs a human conviction in progressive beliefs with technocratic interest at a time when it’s easier to vigorously pursue one instead of the other. He’s orchestrated material wins for Schenectady despite never holding elected office, including the redevelopment of blighted Downtown properties for local artists during COVID. He’s written over 90 songs and 400 poems, and since launching his Mayoral Campaign, he’s advocated tirelessly to end homelessness in Schenectady.This is a politics I can and will support: a politics of personal accountability and clarity that meets a moment of monstrous, growing inequality head-on with an unrestrained view of the possible. A politics that battles our postmodern nightmare of alienation with a deep conviction in the irreplicable specialness of a specific place at a specific time. A politics that sees hope in those places that were abandoned by capital but not by people. A politics of old white men standing in solidarity with young, Black political hopefuls. A politics of progressive vegan cafés as sites of resistance and portmanteau burritos.There is no doubt who Orlondo, aka 97OTIS, seeks to serve. Posing in front of a map of New York State on his Spotify profile, he says on “If it ever drops,” “Like to watch these roots grow, like Schenectady, my home // Once again, after all these raps I wrote, you can’t wonder who I am.”Other photos from TroySources referenced here and for further readingTroy, Schenectady, and the Mohawk Nationhttps://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4488&context=gc_etdshttps://www.azuremagazine.com/article/fredric-jameson-and-the-meaning-of-architecture/https://www.wampumchronicles.com/darkestday.htmlhttps://placesjournal.org/article/the-indianized-landscape-of-massachusetts/?cn-reloaded=1https://www.pbs.org/video/forgotten-war-the-struggle-for-north-america-iB8033/https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/1035/nation-steel?srsltid=AfmBOoqITGleGuuRi62k5l-wkS__7pY5i7dRvyjRCrHOpcnnxdkh9aZ_https://saratogaliving.com/general-electric-company-changed-schenectady-everything-forever/https://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/j6075/edit/Mitchell.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/16/nyregion/a-mohawk-trail-to-the-skyline-indian-ironworkers-return-lured-by-building-boom.htmlhttps://www.academia.edu/28225142/1901_Kahnawake_census_Chateauguay_district_Sault_St_Louishttps://brooklynrail.org/2018/09/field-notes/LITTLE-CAUGHNAWAGA/Detroithttps://www.metrotimes.com/news/on-dan-gilberts-ever-growing-rap-sheet-and-corporate-welfare-5257860/https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/921582/pdfhttps://www.metrotimes.com/music-2/contents-dislodged-during-shipment-2283654/?oid=3221084https://deadspin.com/cleveland-cavaliers-owner-dan-gilberts-nba-championship-1782375100/https://motorcitymuckraker.com/2016/04/08/judge-dan-gilbert-companies-violated-federal-labor-laws-with-threatening-rules/