Circumstance

The Adirondacks are a special region in New York and certainly unique in being so relatively well preserved in comparison with the rest of the United States.  It's quite interesting to think on how this really became the case.  I'm sure we'd like to think that from the outset we sought to protect the Adirondacks.  However, the way I see it, it was mostly through a series of failures and accidents that the Adirondacks became this unique place.

This is pretty much explicitly stated in Schneider when talking about the railroad system. There was a grand vision of 185 miles of railroad around Saratoga and Ogdensburg.  From lack of investments, the railroad tycoon was only able to build roughly a third of the proposed structure, thus failing  and making the system obsolete and could not connect the region as much.  Similar circumstances of harshness include acidic soil and cold winters.


Failure may be a little to harsh a word to acceptably cover this topic.  Failure implies not meeting a series of goals that one sets.  If we use a conventional definition of "not being fully developed and exploited by humans", then yes, then settlement of the Adirondacks was quite poor throughout much of Adirondack history.  It was widely characteristic of bust and boom, and many places lacked proper infrastructure to support a conventionally good quality of life at the time.  However, the implications of having some sort of settling success would have meant kind of depressing things for how the region would be shaped.  The New York Times had predicted that should the railroad have completed, the Adirondacks would just be another suburb of New York.  Knowing how most of us here treat hearing someone is from "a suburb right outside of Boston", another large suburb of New York would be rather uninteresting to talk about or visit as opposed to the region we enjoyed running around two weekends ago.  So if we change failure to being a generic region than doesn't take advantage of the great biodiversity of the United States, then the Adirondacks is certainly a success.