New York History

Fordham University Press has republished Robert O. Binnewies's comprehensive history of the many varied parks and natural areas that comprise the Palisades Interstate Parks near the New York–New Jersey border.

The Palisades Interstate Parks and its governing body, the Palisades Interstate Parks Commission (PIPC), are unique and creative land management entities that have had international influence on land conservation. In the early chapters, Binnewies tells the stories of the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Perkinses, and others with roles in preserving this land—a "who's who" of wealthy American families with conservationist legacies. Binnewies makes a strong case that the preservation of these natural areas, so close to New York City, influenced conservation strategies of the National Park Service.

Binnewies tasks himself with telling the whole story of these many parks: what [End Page 391] was there before they were parks, how they were made into parks, and how they were managed.

This is a lot to bite off in one book. Because of that, the narrative is sometimes disjointed, and some chapters can be difficult to follow. There are just so many actors and Binnewies packs in so much information that the chronology can be confusing. For instance, he jumps from nineteenth-century preservation efforts to seventeenth-century background on the Revolutionary War, and then back to the twentieth-century preservation of Nyack Beach (all in a chapter titled "Welch," a man he does not introduce until the second-to-last page of that chapter).

This account is ultimately an insiders' account, since Binnewies led PIPC for many years. Binnewies is not a historian, which is evident when he makes big claims (for example, that the Storm King controversy was the foundation for modern environmental movement, and that PIPC parks set the precedent for the National Park Service) but fails to cite any secondary sources to contextualize his points.

But because Binnewies was an insider and the people who fought to protect these lands were some of the richest in New York City and the world, his account shines when he talks about the insider deals from the era when he was personally present. The "Minnewaska" and "Sterling Forest" chapters are especially good. These chapters can stand alone as case studies for historians of land management or for environmentalists thinking through how best to creatively protect land through partnerships.

The new edition lacks some of the illustrations of the first, but it has some textual updates. The most significant addition is a new chapter, "Honor and Electronics," about the creation of the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in New Windsor, New York, and the fight against the LG towers in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

When he wraps up the conclusion of the LG controversy, Binnewies wants to spin it like a victory, as PIPC did, and which follows the storyline of so much of PIPC's legacy. But in reading the paragraph on page 347 that discusses the resulting low-lying building and how employees can enjoy nature from it, I could not help but feel like he was employing the same rhetoric as that used by the Sterling Forest Corporation and against which the PIPC fought a hard battle. How much more ecosystem was disrupted to make way for this long, flat building, and was it more than would have been damaged if the towers had been built instead? This conflict ultimately gets to the question of what matters more: viewshed protection or ecosystem protection? But Binnewies does not really grapple with that issue. Would ending with a critical look at the outcome be a more effective call to action than pretending a huge office park built in a forest was a win for conservation and the environment?

That said, PIPC is a unique, interstate, quasi-governmental entity that has had many successes. In an era of environmental catastrophe, we need...