Hudson-Champlain Anniversary Has Set New York State Scrambling

ALBANY — When Virginia commemorated the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, the state spent about $15 million and had the queen of England and President Bush show up.When New York state marks a pair of its own 400th anniversaries next year, it will have $4 million to spend, with possibly a member of the Dutch royal family on hand along with a player — most likely French or Canadian — to be named later.The Empire State’s plans for the yearlong commemoration of the 1609 explorations by Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain have hit their share of snags, false starts, and delays. The situation not only causes concern among organizers of local anniversary events, it potentially could diminish the public’s awareness of Hudson and Champlain’s accomplishments, which at least one New York historian believes deserve as much billing as Jamestown’s founding, if not more.“Jamestown disappeared. New York City went to be the greatest city in the world,” a professor of history at Columbia University, Kenneth Jackson, said.“New York history tends to gets a little bit overshadowed by Massachusetts and Virginia, so we need to tell our story,” Mr. Jackson said recently.A state commission created six years ago is trying to do just that. But the commission only recently got down to serious work — then had its $7 million budget cut nearly in half by Governor Paterson.The $3 million set aside for marketing the commemoration was eliminated, leaving local groups without official state-produced brochures to inform New Yorkers about the anniversaries’ significance.“We have nothing,” Celine Paquette, a leader of the group that’s organizing Champlain events in a three-county region in northeast New York, said. “If you walked into my office today, I couldn’t give you anything.”The Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial Commission was created by the Legislature in 2002 to help create, organize, and market events commemorating the anniversaries of the Hudson and Champlain explorations of the waterways that would bear their names, with Robert Fulton’s historic steamboat trip on the Hudson River in 1807 thrown in.But little got accomplished in planning for the quadricentennial, and the commission literally missed the boat on marking the bicentennial of Fulton’s roundtrip voyage in a steamboat from New York City to Albany, a feat that forever changed transportation in America.New York State didn’t really set things in motion until this past winter, when Governor Spitzer announced his appointments to the “quad commission.” But a few weeks later, Mr. Paterson and the Legislature reduced the commission’s spending to $4 million because of the state budget crunch.As a result, the commission’s two paid directors have scaled back previous plans. Instead, they’re urging local communities in the Hudson-Champlain corridor to piggyback their already-scheduled 2009 anniversary events with the state’s official commemoration. The idea, the director of the commission, Robert Bullock, said, is less celebration of three separate voyages and more recognition of what they helped create: The Empire State.”It’s not just a celebration of the past but also a celebration of what the future holds for New York state,” he said.

Hudson-Champlain Anniversary Has Set New York State Scrambling

Hudson-Champlain Anniversary Has Set New York State Scrambling

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