From 10/27/06 NY Times by Lisa W. Foderaro

TUPPER LAKE, N.Y. — Those who love the Adirondacks most are worried they are being loved too much.

Personal watercraft, all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles shatter the stillness, from one season to the next. Nearly twice as many building permits were issued last year as in 1998, while home prices in some areas have doubled in less than three years. Two major development proposals that would resurrect defunct ski areas, one here and another in North Creek, could create a total of more than 1,000 units of housing and several hotels in what Peter Bauer, a leading environmentalist, described as “an unprecedented building boom.”

The Adirondack Park, an unusual mix of state-owned forest preserve and private land that is roughly the size of Vermont, has fallen in and out of favor for decades. Once a playground for the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Whitneys, who erected fabulous great camps at the turn of the last century, the park has been alternately viewed as a stunning refuge from overhyped second-home resorts and a remote backwater with black flies and bad food.

It has been more than a century since New York State created Adirondack Park, an expanse of rugged mountains and lakes that was, from the beginning, recognized for its magnificent scenery. The philosopher William James wrote to his brother, Henry, the novelist, that the “sylvan beauty” was “probably unlike aught that Europe has to show.”

Today, the park is clearly back in vogue, as shown by a spate of home building and boutiques peddling twig furnishings. While local officials embrace the boom for its anticipated tax windfall, environmental groups and others are anxious that New York’s great wilderness is becoming overdeveloped.

“In other parts of the country where they have 1,000-unit subdivisions, this may not seem like a big deal,” said Mr. Bauer, executive director of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, an environmental group. “But that’s not what the park is all about. It’s about big, continuous, forested, wild, open spaces.”

Michael D. Foxman, the lead developer of one of the two developments causing concern, the Adirondack Club and Resort here, said he was trying to ensure that it fits in. Almost 2,000 acres of the 6,300-acre site would be left untouched, he promised, and the ski lodge, town houses and other buildings would all be in the popular rustic lodge style.

“We’re trying to do everything on a human scale,” Mr. Foxman said. “All of our structures will be classic Adirondack architecture with twig work and half logs and whole logs. We’re trying to recreate the great-camp feeling in the Adirondacks.”

Critics argue that the land-use plan put in place by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in the early 1970s is ill-equipped to preserve the wilderness. After studying the zoning densities permitted under the plan, the Residents’ Committee found that it would allow 325,000 new structures to be added now to the park’s current 88,000 buildings, most of which are single-family homes.

The Tupper Lake proposal is the largest ever to be considered by the Adirondack Park Agency, a kind of park zoning board. Under the plan, developers would erect hundreds of houses and carve out two dozen estates, averaging 90 acres each, on former timberlands, a departure from past development, which was mostly along lakeshores and roadsides.

Apart from the designs of developers, individual home buyers are changing the face of the park on their own.

Local officials and business owners noticed a surge of interest after the terror attacks of Sept. 11. “It was instantaneous,” said Jeanne Ashworth, supervisor of the town of Wilmington, 35 miles from here. “Within six months, we saw people moving here, looking for a safer place.”

Last year, Wilmington, population 1,131, saw the construction of 24 new homes; Ms. Ashworth believes it was the most in a single year since the town was established in 1911, and up from about four or five a year before 2001. In the nearby town of Jay, population 2,300, officials said most of the newcomers were young families and retirees living there year-round, not second-home owners.

“We probably had 40 to 50 brand-new houses built last year,” said the town supervisor, Randall T. Douglas. “In 2000, we might have had 10 new houses a year.”

Environmental groups are most upset about the Tupper Lake resort, which they say could establish a harmful precedent, encouraging others to build in the privately owned backcountry. Those forested lands, mostly owned by timber companies, make up a quarter of the park. They give the Adirondacks their look and feel as much as the 2.7 million acres of state-owned forest preserve.

“Forest slopes would be clear-cut to make room for new roads, driveways, parking areas, houses, lawns and accessory buildings,” John F. Sheehan, a spokesman for the Adirondack Council, an environmental group, said in an Op-Ed piece earlier this year in The Albany Times Union. “The resulting fragmentation would devastate native plants and wildlife that depend on undisturbed habitat.”

Mr. Foxman, the developer, said his company, Preserve Associates, planned to construct the great-camp residences on five-acre sections within the sprawling properties, which would limit fragmentation of the forest.

The plan’s 461 town houses, 238 single-family houses and 40-room inn are within the permitted density limits for the site, which was once owned by a manufacturer of wooden bowls. Because of the project’s scale and complexity, the project is subject to approval by the Adirondack Park Agency.

Such enormous parcels are available for development because of the global competition facing big paper companies. Some have sold off forests that they had harvested for a century or more, while others sought to reduce their taxes by giving up development rights. The trend has created a rare opportunity for conservation, and Gov. George E. Pataki took it, protecting 575,000 acres since taking office in 1995, but other tracts have gone to developers.

Many residents support the building proposals as a way to ease the tax burden in an area that has pockets of poverty and high unemployment. Tupper Lake, for example, was once a thriving mill town, but a series of fires in the first half of the last century wrecked the streetscape. In recent years, residents — and the business district — have suffered from the loss of the Big Tupper Ski Area, as well as a department store and supermarket.

“I want it — definitely,” said Lynn Bishop, who lives here and owns Al’s Taxi with her husband. “It will bring more jobs and commerce to Tupper Lake.”

In North Creek, a hamlet in the town of Johnsburg 50 miles from here, the town supervisor, William H. Thomas, backs a developer’s plan to build 160 units of housing, 294 rooms in five hotels, 102,000 square feet of retail space and a golf course next to a town-operated ski bowl that closed in the 1970s. State and local officials have agreed to reopen the ski area eventually, making it part of nearby Gore Mountain, the state-run ski center.

“We could do nothing and try not to enthuse visitors to move in, and in a few years the taxes would be so high that nobody could afford to live here,” Mr. Thomas said. “I would rather go down fighting than do nothing.”

Mr. Thomas acknowledged that renewed interest in the Adirondacks had driven up real estate prices, making home ownership elusive for young year-round residents. A house next door to his recently sold for $162,500; three years ago, it went for $75,000. Twenty low-income housing units are now rising in town, reflecting the robust market.

Concern about overdevelopment of the Adirondacks is nothing new.

It was worry about clear-cutting the mountainsides that led to the park’s creation in 1892, along with the forest preserve. But the private lands remained largely unregulated.

Then, in the 1960s, after construction of the Northway, an extension of Interstate 87 that runs clear through the park to the Canadian border, new fears emerged over the fate of private timberlands and the potential for second-home development.

In 1971, under Governor Rockefeller, the Adirondack Park Agency was created to control future development. It undertook an elaborate — and fiercely contested — classification of all the private lands in the park, based on existing development, proximity to forest preserve and natural features like slopes, soil types and wetlands.

The six classifications, from the least restrictive (hamlet) to the most restrictive (resource management), laid out the permitted densities on every private parcel. The large swaths of backcountry — timberlands classified as resource management — require a generous 42.7 acres per structure.

In a study of recent housing development, the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks found that from 1990 to 2004, about 13,500 new houses and buildings went up in the park. Of those, about 4,700 required permits from the Adirondack Park Agency. The pace has picked up, from a low of 724 permits issued in 1998 to about 1,200 permits last year.

“Our goal is to strike for balance,” said Keith P. McKeever, an agency spokesman, describing a constant tug of war between development and preservation. “We have to protect the natural resources of the park, but the act clearly states that we have to balance that with the needs of local government and the thousands of people who live here year-round.”

A poet from Johnsburg, Jeanne Robert Foster, echoes the fears of many who live here and love it: “And the way things are going there won’t be woods very long, or wilderness; it’ll be imitation ranches, and ski runs, and places called by names that the folks who lived there years and years ago never heard of.”

Ms. Foster was born in 1879.