Breakfasts charge your battery for whatever awaits you daily; at home, work or play!  It can be something as grand as an Easter brunch, taking mom out on her special day or just a leisurely cup of java with the boys. The variety of offerings in our area is enormous, ranging from McDonald’s and Denny’s to the Silo and the Sagamore.

Let’s begin by setting some standards.  We usually don’t want to wait to be seated.  Coffee or juice offered right away, and refills a must!  The table should be clean, ambiance relatively quiet and a great variety of choices.

Locals will steer you to the best places; don’t be turned off by the appearance. Sometimes the ‘greasy spoons’ deliver the best ingredients and values.  Remember sitting at a counter, the owner has his back to you on the grill, his wife is pouring coffee in those big mugs and if you miss a day they want to know where you were?  Bill Gate’s diner in Bolton, Potter’s in Warrensburg, Slim’s and Zeke’s in Lake George and the Palace in Glens Falls were those kinds of places. All great and all missed.

Today each town or village has remnants of those places like Bill’s in Warrensburg, Prospect Mt. Diner in Lake George, Poopie Di Manno’s in Glens Falls and Latham’s in Hudson Falls.  Good, long standing local establishments that you can always count on.

First, let’s throw out all the chains of the world; the places that put your breakfast in a bun, or wrap it in aluminum foil and the home fries resemble a fried hockey puck.  On the road I’ll give Denny’s and Friendly’s a shot. I truly miss Howard Johnson’s although the one in Lake Placid is still standing and great.  Stewart’s coffee is excellent and Nice ‘n Easy’s breakfast pizza is a real treat.

Some accommodations should give you free breakfast, lunch and dinner too!  Ordinarily, the tureens are filled with low-grade bacon, dime-sized pancakes, scrambled eggs that taste like rubber and a toaster that takes way too long. Some places though, like the Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton Inn’s and Marriott Courtyard’s truly do breakfast justice.

For those special occasion breakfast days where they change the name to ‘brunch,’ like Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day or New Year’s Day, it’s hard to beat our local hotels.  The Queensbury, Holiday Inn, Fort William Henry and Sagamore really deliver.   A little further south The Gideon Putnam does it almost weekly. They have the room, staff and facilities to spread it out, provide live music and give you an enormous amount of choices. You’ll pay for it, but you’ll go home stuffed and happy! Right here in our own backyard, the East Cove’s Sunday brunch has been a long standing tradition and an excellent value.

Café Vero in Lake George Village is a great stop.  Sitting by the fireplace is a real treat and they have an excellent selection of pastries and omelets. Art Leonard’s Prospect Mountain Diner is a popular breakfast choice 24/7.  Their eggs Benedict are the “Filet Mignon” of the morning crowd. Sutton’s in Queensbury and Gamble’s Bakery are also great places that serve fresh, wholesome food and excellent service.  The Tamarack Inn on Canada Street in Lake George is a cozy, family run establishment that features stuffed French toast and a variety of pancakes during the season.

The owners of the Silo in Queensbury have just expanded their cozy, Adirondack themed dining area to accommodate the daily locals. Their breakfasts are fresh and offer everything from pancakes and waffles to eggs and homefries. One of the area’s best!

Lastly, a real enigma in our area for breakfast is the Lone Bull on Lakeshore Drive, Lake George.  Don’t let the aroma of the horse stables across the street turn you off.  Try to get there around 9am to beat the long lines that usually wind into the parking lot.   Inside, a veteran wait staff serves huge portions of everything imaginable.  You get a pot of coffee on your table, the eggs are extra large, the English muffins are sandwich size and platters are heaped to the rim. The homefries fresh, Canadian bacon sliced thick and corned beef hash is made daily.  A lot of food, but you can skip lunch!

So, roll out of bed, smell the coffee, call a friend and treat yourself to the most important meal of the day. In our area we are fortunate, as we have many options to satisfy!

According to state Environmental Commissioner Joe Martens, the exception was made for fishermen.

“It’s a tradition for fishermen to get on the lake before the sun comes up,” he said. “We want to maintain that tradition.”

But if the privilege is abused, or if it appears that a path has been left open for new invasives to enter Lake George, the policy will be revisited, Martens said.

According to the draft of a Prevention Plan released to the public in April, boaters would be allowed to use the launches long after or long before an inspector or steward is on duty.  The state would agree to install a surveillance system and subject a boater to fines if the cameras identified his boat as one that has not been inspected.

Walt Lender, the executive director of the Lake George Association, says he has some qualms  about 24 hour access, stating, “We are concerned that the potential of less restrictive after-hours regulations will leave the lake somewhat vulnerable,” but he added,  “at least the lake would be protected most of the time.  We find that there are not all that many boats entering in the early morning hours or late at night.  For those who are launching at those times, the responsibility will be on their shoulders to make sure their boats are not moving invasives.  They are still accountable to the law.”

Walt Lender

Martens and Bob Stegemann, DEC’s Region 5 director, denied the exception for fishermen was made to protect federal subsidies to DEC’s Bureau of Fisheries or to ensure the future of Lake George’s  fish stocking programs.

“I’ve heard those speculations; they’re not true,” said Stegemann.

It has been rumored that both programs would suffer if fishermen were denied twenty four hour access to Lake George.

According to Emily DeSantis, a spokesperson for DEC, the department does participate in a federal program through which it is reimbursed for expenses associated with boating, habitat management and education.

“A minimum of 15 percent of those funds must be used to support the boating access program,” said DeSantis.

The funds also help pay for the operatiion of DEC’s fish hatcheries, DeSantis said.

DeSantis also said that it was a policy of DEC to stock only waters accessible to fishermen.

“If a water body does not offer reasonable public access, it is not eligible for stocking,”  DeSantis said. “Public access to a given water body is not always a constant, and a substantive change in public access opportunity could trigger a review of the stocking policy.”

The provision permitting 24 hour access from state  launches appears in Section 5, page 11 of the draft plan.

The provision was not in a draft of the plan circulated in November, so many have assumed that the provision was inserted at the request of the DEC, perhaps in return for the department’s support for mandatory inspections.

Walt Lender, for example, said  “We are realistic and believe that the compromise is worth the risk.”

Martens denied the DEC had insisted upon including the provision within the revised draft plan. He did, however, acknowledge that the plan released in April was developed “in tandem with the DEC.”

Lake George Supervisor Dennis Dickinson said the provision is “ridiculous.”

“People have to understand you can no longer have unbridled access to the lake;  for some reason, fishermen believe they should never be inconvenienced. We’ve done too much work here to have something so silly included in the final plan. We’re going to say, ‘no way,’” Dickinson said.

Bolton Supervisor Ron Conover said he, too, opposed allowing the state boat launches to remain open 24 hours a day.

“By keeping the state boat launches open, the inspection program won’t offer the same level of protection as it would otherwise. You’re opening a door to invasives, and that’s problematic. Anything that weakens protection is not something I can support,” said Conover.

Our ignorance is largely the fault of the artist herself, who once told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins, “Lake George is not really painting country.”

It should be noted that she told the same writer,  “We’d push the past out of our way entirely if we only could.”

“Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” an exhibition that will travel from The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and then to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, demonstrates that Lake George, far from being a footnote to O’Keeffe’s career, was its crucible.

According to Erin Coe, who curated the exhibition, O’Keeffe completed more than 200 paintings at the lake between 1918 and 1934, the most prolific years of her career. Acknowledged or not, Lake George was indeed “painting country.”

For instance, those images of flowers that made her a celebrity (at least among undergraduates) in the 1970s, and which people attribute to the bohemian doyenne of the southwest, were painted on Lake George.

Here, she pushed representation toward the edges of abstraction, where something essential about the natural world is to be found on the canvas, albeit distilled, or abstracted, from the particulars of the landscape. It was an approach to nature that she would take with her when she turned to the desert landscapes of the southwest.

Although O’Keefe spent a summer on Lake George in 1908 at an artists’ colony founded by Yaddo benefactors Spencer and Katrina Trask, it was not until 1918 that she became an annual summer resident.

"Lake George" Georgia O'Keeffe,1922.

A few years earlier, she had fallen in love with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and impresario whose family started coming to Lake George in the 1870s. The family compound would become the couple’s sole, permanent home until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

They timed their stays to coincide with the departure of Stieglitz’s relatives, whose table talk O’Keeffe found irritating, but for the six to eight weeks the property was theirs, Lake George was the motionless fulcrum of their hectic lives, a place to garden and hike, to row out to islands or to the village, and even to play miniature golf.  But above all else, it was a place for both to work in companionable silence.

Stimulated by one another, they attacked the same subjects – the clouds, the trees, the architecture of the family’s house, barns and outbuildings.

“Georgia O’Keeffe reveled in Lake George; in her letters she constantly remarks how perfect it is,” says Erin Coe. “Over and over again, I hear people say, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe hated Lake George.’ It simply wasn’t true.”

Coe even takes issue with accounts about O’Keeffe’s feelings toward Stieglitz’s relatives.

At least a few of them, Coe says, appealed to O’Keeffe, especially if they appeared infrequently and spoke even less. Foremost among those relatives was Stieglitz’s nephew Donald Davidson, who re-established the property’s orchards, vegetable and flower gardens and whose horticultural expertise informed O’Keeffe’s aesthetic approach to the jack-in-the-pulpits, petunias and poppies she painted.

To be sure, the relationship between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, which had been formalized with a wedding in 1924, had its challenges. Twenty-three years older than O’Keeffe, Stieglitz began an affair with an even younger woman named Dorothy Norman in the early 1930s.

By then, O’Keeffe had begun making annual trips to the southwest, a place where she could escape Stieglitz and the powerful, obtrusive influence he exercised over her art and life.

“I have not wanted to be anything but kind to you – but there is nothing to be kind if I cannot be me,” she wrote to Stieglitz in 1929.

A ‘’me” of course is a very ductile thing indeed, and the “me” O’Keeffe fashioned over the last decades of her life was one that purported to owe nothing to Stieglitz and Lake George.

Stieglitz himself had more or less single-handedly created a public image or “newspaper personality” for O’Keeffe, first with an exhibition of his nude photographs of her in 1920 and then, in 1924, with a show of flower paintings which he interpreted and then publicized as representations of the female eros.  Among the many things O’Keeffe carried with her from Lake George to New Mexico were the techniques that she had learned from a master of public relations.

"Lake George Barns" Georgia O'Keeffe, 1926.

While much of the wooded shores of the 32-mile-long lake remain untouched, there is little in the village of Lake George today that O’Keeffe and Stieglitz would recognize. The family mansion became a motel. The farmhouse and barns were burned in the 1950s and the property subdivided. Stieglitz’s ashes are buried, depending upon whom you talk to, beneath a parking lot or a pump house that pushes lake water to a treatment plant.

And, with the exception of a historical marker erected last summer near the site of the farm, until recently there was little to inform visitors that two of the most famous artists of the 20^th century once lived and worked here.

As of this summer, though, Lake George’s local history museum is displaying artifacts associated with the artists’ life on Lake George, the centerpiece of which is a diorama created by Clarke Dunham depicting life in Lake George in the 1920s and 30s, when Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were among the lake’s most prominent residents.

According to Lisa Adamson, the museum’s curator,  “Our directors have always wanted to affirm the relationship between Lake George and O’Keeffe and Stieglitz with a display, and the opening this summer of The Hyde Collection’s “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” presented us with a new opportunity to call attention to that relationship. After speaking with Erin Coe, we recognized that as a local historical museum, we should focus on something other than the work of the artists. We chose to focus on their connection to the community. The lake and the Village inspired them, and they left us with a legacy.”

The Hyde has also mounted an exhibition to complement “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” called, “A Family Album: Alfred Stieglitz and Lake George.”

According to Alice Grether, The Hyde’s director of communications,  “A Family Album” takes an intimate look at the family compound, which was the couple’s home until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

And later this summer, the Adirondack Theatre Festival will mount two productions based on the life of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.

Filming O’Keeffe, a play by Eric Lane will open July 12. And on August 9 and 10, Carolyn McCormick and Byron Jennings will read from the artists’ correspondence with one another in a new show called Faraway Nearest One.

Lake George’s mayor and the chamber of commerce hope that “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George” will bring renewed attention and more tourists to the resort community. A commercial calculation like that is something both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe would have understood, and perhaps even appreciated.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Quest magazine and is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Sponsored by the Lake George Historical Association, the exhibition features a diorama created by Clarke Dunham depicting life in Lake George in the 1920s and 30s, when Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe were among the lake’s most prominent residents.

“With the diorama, we wanted to present Lake George from the Hill, the farm where Stieglitz and O’Keeffe lived and worked, to the miniature golf course owned by the grandfather of Alex Parrott, the president of the Lake George Historical Association,” said Lisa Adamson, the museum’s curator.  “Stieglitz sometimes played that course daily.”

According to Adamson,  “Our directors have always wanted to affirm the relationship between Lake George and O’Keeffe and Stieglitz with a display, and the opening this summer of The Hyde Collection’s “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” presented us with a new opportunity to call attention to that relationship. After speaking with Erin Coe, the curator of the exhibition at The Hyde, we recognized that as a local historical museum, we should focus on something other than the lives and work of the artists. We chose to focus on their connection to the community. The lake and the Village inspired them, and they left us with a legacy.”

A $5,000 grant from the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership helped make it possible to commission the diorama, which was installed shortly before the museum opened on May 18.

Dunham described the diorama as “an exploded color post card” of how Lake George Village would appear as viewed from the lake.

“As the eye moves upstage, toward the rear, images are flattened. But downstage, everything is three dimensional,” he said at the exhibition’s opening.

“This is a conjectural restoration of how Lake George Village appeared during the era of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. We received new information as recently as yesterday,” Dunham said.

“Can we be wrong? Yes! But not often. Everything portrayed is factual, but not everything is contemporaneous. The trolley ceased operating in 1927, even though we wanted to portray the Village between 1925 and 1935. The tracks of the incline railway to the summit of Prospect Mountain were removed during World War I, but the path remained clearly visible, and the railway is an important part of the Village’s history.  We weren’t certain whether the Horicon docked at the Village pier with her bow pointed up the lake or in the opposite direction. We made informed artistic choices. We’ve not only done the best we could, we’ve done better than that,” Dunham added.

Museum curator Lisa Adamson with Barbara and Clarke Dunham

According to Lisa Adamson, local residents helped fund the diorama by sponsoring individual pieces, among them, the Lake George High School Alumni Association, Pam Morin and Kathy Flacke Muncil.

Dunham, a well-known model builder, former Broadway set designer and fabricator of museum exhibits, donated a portion of his time to the project in order to reduce costs, said Alex Parrott.

The diorama and the Stieglitz-O’Keeffe exhibit, which includes reproductions of Stieglitz’s photos and O’Keeffe’s paintings, will remain on view as a permanent installation within the museum, said Adamson.

Events related to  “Spirit of Presence and Place: Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, the Lake George Years,” include a presentation by Marisa Muratori on the artistic heritage of Lake George on June 13 and 6:30 pm and the publication of a book by Teri Gay that includes 40 images by O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, 19th century artists and Seneca Ray Stoddard.

“Like the exhibition, Teri Gay’s lecture, “Spirit of Presence and Place,” is an overview of our area and how the geography of place impacted the artists, and how their” presence” impacted our history,” said Adamson.

Copies may be reserved in advance of publication from the Lake George Historical Association at a discounted price by visiting the museum or calling 668-5044.

The decade of the 1960s in America was a rebellious era and Lake George was certainly not an exception. At the start of that decade in 1960, a song, “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” sung by Brian Hyland, became a huge hit. The bubblegum pop tune was about a shy young woman embarrassed to appear on the beach because of her “itsy bitsy” bikini, that two-piece bathing suit that soon became the norm for female beach attire.

However, by the mid-1960s, Lake George had a more extreme story, a daring woman who went to a Bolton Landing beach wearing only a topless bathing suit.

The beginning of that story actually began 50 years ago in 1963, the year the “monokini” was introduced to American fashion. Rather than a two-piece bikini bathing suit, it was a one-piece topless apparel for females appropriately named–monokini. The shocking garment was essentially a bathing suit bottom with a long thin neck strap that revealed the woman’s bare top.

Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian-born, avant-garde fashion designer, shocked the world with the monokini. Gernreich said his one-piece topless bathing suit was an expression of freedom for women. After all, it was the audacious sixties! When released, the monokini was controversial amongst mainstream America, but was a bit more accepted in some fashion quarters of the world. Ironically, today the monokini describes a popular one-piece bathing suit with straps from bottom-to-top that links a bikini into a one-piece, non-topless suit.

A year after the monokini first appeared, Gernreich’s design hit a Lake George beach. On July 14, 1964 the Amsterdam (NY) Evening Recorder published an Associated Press article entitled “Woman in New Swimsuit Nabbed.” The story began like this: “An alert Bolton Landing policeman was credited with the first sighting on Lake George of a topless bathing suit.” The account, however, did not state whether the brunette woman was clothed in a monokini or simply a bikini bottom.

According to the Associated Press, on July 13, a Bolton Landing policeman ordered a 22-year-old Manhattan woman out of the water as she waded from the beach into Lake George in a red one-piece topless bathing suit. The Manhattanite was whisked from the lake and a blanket was provided to cover her up. The constable then drove the bather to her motel to get more clothing.

The wire service news story reported the young woman said she just wanted “to be fashionable.” Thus, half-a-century ago during the tumultuous 1960s, a small piece of fashion history was made at the “Queen of American Lakes.”

The award is given by Phalanx, the student leadership honor society at RPI, and was established by David M. Darrin, a trustee and a member of the class of 1940, to recognize a faculty member who has made an unusual contribution in the counseling of undergraduate students.

“Student advising and counseling have always been at the core of my educational philosophy,” said Boylen. “With each student experience, I feel my life has become enhanced and, conversely, I feel my interactions with students impart a positive attitude of their experience as a college student. My career at RPI has been enriched beyond measure with the experiences I have had with my students.”

Boylen said he was especially pleased to receive the award because of its association with David M. Darrin, the Hague summer resident who was an early supporter of the work of the Fresh Water Institute.

“As an RPI trustee, David’s interest in undergraduate and graduate education was already evident on campus with the construction and opening of the Darrin Communication Center in 1972,” said Boylen. “But his firsthand experiences with RPI students and faculty at Lake George in the early years of the Fresh Water Institute played a significant role in David’s motivation to recognize faculty advising and counseling by creating the Darrin Counseling Award.”

Boylen said he first became acquainted with Darrin while doing research on Lake George.

“Within a year of my arrival at RPI, I initiated my research program at Lake George with RPI’s Water Research Center. The first research site was at Smith Bay, on the northeast side of the lake, south of Gull Bay. Directly across from the laboratory was Hague. David and Peggy had a summer home there and in the summers, David would boat across the lake to ‘see what was going on,’ to use his phrase. He enjoyed engaging faculty and students in conversation about the lake’s ecology and their own research.”

David M. Darrin died in 1981. But his support for the Fresh Water Institute, which was continued by his wife Peggy, led RPI to name the new laboratory and renovated campus in Bolton Landing the David and Margaret Darrin Fresh Water Institute.

Boylen received a BA in Microbiology from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been at RPI since 1972 and was director of the Fresh Water Institute from 1983 to 1993 and has been its Associate Director since 1993. Boylen is internationally known for his research on Lake George and other water bodies of the Adirondacks.

To say nothing else, their roots are intertwined with those of Silver Bay, the northern Lake George landmark, as well as with those of the YMCA.

John Barber is the grandson of two YMCA leaders, the son of one and the nephew of another.

“Coming back to Silver Bay every summer was like coming home,” says Barber. And with good reason. Both sets of Barber’s grandparents rented cottages at Silver Bay in 1921. The following year, his father got a job in the store and helped unload guests’ trunks from the steamboats. Barber’s parents beganvacationing here as a couple in 1931. His sister met her husband here in 1950, when both were Emps. Barber himself worked as an Emp in 1952. To say nothing of uncles, aunts, cousins, children, and, of course, life-long friends…

Nevertheless, the Barbers have decided to sell the home they built near Silver Bay in 1995, after John retired from the Buffalo law firm where he had worked since graduating from the University of Michican in the early 1960s.

“About five years ago, we recognized that at some point, we would need more care than we could provide for ourselves. We started to look at our options, in particular at adult living facilities that would meet our needs, and we found one: Wake Robin in Shelburne, Vermont. We were really taken with the facility, the management and the residents – they’re all active. This, we felt, is where we fit,” says John Barber.

Still, it’s not easy for the Barbers to leave a home which they helped design and which fulfilled some of their deepest wishes.

“We saw this piece of property more than twenty years ago,” says Ann. “I always wanted to own a little piece of the woods.”

In addition to their own acres, the Barbers have access to the Adirondack Forest Preserve lands that abut their own.

“Twenty feet from our door, we’re on trails that could take you into wilderness,” said Ann.

The grounds surrounding the house are open, allowing sunlight into fields and gardens.

The house itself includes features that situate it in the Adirondacks: wood beams, a fireplace, a loft overlooking a great room and, of course, a screened porch with views of the mountains on Lake George’s east shore.

When the Barbers retired to Hague in 1995, they found a stable, year-round community composed of people who, like them, had deep attachments to Lake George, many to Silver Bay itself.

And their lives since then have been as busy, if not busier, than when they lived in Buffalo and were raising three daughters.

John carried on the family tradition of serving YMCA and Silver Bay.

In 2010, he was awarded Silver Bay’s Luther D. Wishard Distinguished Service Award for his years of leadership and dedication.

What Barber found rewarding, he said, “was just to be in a position to provide leadership in such a special place. It’s won the loyalty of so many wonderful people, people who don’t choose to stand out, who are very quiet, but who have tremendous talents.”

And by the time he and Ann had moved to Silver Bay, Silver Bay’s executive director, Mark Johnson, had recruited him to become a trustee of The Fund for Lake George.

Barber served on The Fund’s board until 2010, and through many of those years he led it as a chairman and vice chairman.

Among his lasting achievements was the creation of the Lake George Waterkeeper program, which was not necessarily a popular idea at first, even among some advocates of lake protection.

And, of course, they found themselves engaged by the community of Hague itself, donating time and energy to the Hague Fire Department, the Rotary and, not least of all, the famous Poopies’ group.

Named for the Glens Falls diner, Poopies’ people travel throughout the north country, attending concerts and events, visiting museums and historic sites. Started spontaneously, it’s still going strong today.

The Barbers will never really leave Lake George, though, because they’ve given so much of themselves to the place, which will continue to be enriched by their presence.

And in the years to come, it will no doubt remain on their minds as they look across Lake Champlain toward the Adirondacks. After all, as even a Vermonter once admitted, one of the best things the Green Mountain State has to offer is its views of our peaks.

The Barbers’ home is located at 7887 Lake Shore Drive, Silver Bay, NY. For information, contact Jennifer Johnson at Keller Williams Realty of Saratoga Springs. 518-588-1392

“These exhibitions will be a special opportunity for visitors to view rarely seen treasures, including paintings, photographs and sketchbooks, from notable Adirondack-inspired artists, past and present,” said the museum’s Jessica Rubin.

According to Rubin, “’Great Wilderness, Great Expectations’ celebrates our relationship with nature and wilderness by featuring more than 120 paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs-some never or only rarely exhibited before. Depicting the Adirondack landscape over a span of two centuries, these masterworks from the museum’s permanent collection-together with quotes from Adirondackers past and present-explore the many ways the region has been portrayed by artists, photographers, and writers from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Their images and words have shaped the changing ways in which people expected to interact with nature when coming to the Adirondacks to find meaning in the wilderness, far from the workaday world.”

‘Great Wilderness’ was organized by the museum’s Chief Curator, Laura Rice, with assistance from Executive Director Emerita Caroline Welsh. Among the artists represented are: Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, William Trost Richards, Seneca Ray Stoddard, Edward Bierstadt, Harold Weston, Eliot Porter, and Nathan Farb.

The exhibit includes rarely or never before seen artists’ sketchbooks and examples of Adirondack photographs, among them, large format 19th century albumen prints by Seneca Ray Stoddard. New acquisitions, including a painting by William Trost Richards, will hang in the galleries for the first time.

"Schroon Lake" by Thomas Cole

More than any other Adirondack photographer, Seneca Ray Stoddard (1843-1917) shaped and perpetuated a popular image of the Adirondack Mountains as wilderness. But he also captured the social side of tourism, photographing stagecoaches loaded with people and baggage, gatherings of the American Canoe Association and outdoor picnics, Even armchair travelers could follow along the tour by way of the hundreds of stereo-views Stoddard printed of popular tourist sites and hotels.

In addition to photographs, ‘Traveling with Stoddard’ Includes maps, sales albums, paintings, sketches, and excerpts from his guidebooks and magazine articles.

New events this season include an Aqua Fest on July 20, which will celebrate the region’s waterways and provide programs for all ages. Aqua Fest will be held in conjunction with Governor Cuomo’s July 21 Adirondack Challenge. A variety of workshops, with topics ranging from stained glass to basket making to song writing, are also scheduled throughout the season. For more information, call 352-7311.

According to Dr. John Kelly, the Assembly Point resident who happens to lead IBM’s research teams and who addressed the Warren County Economic Development Corporation’s annual luncheon in Queensbury on May 17, it would mean not only smarter environmental management but economic development.

“We have the opportunity to do something big; we could build a model for balancing economic growth and environmental protection,” said Kelly, who, among other things, helped found the NanoTech complex in Albany.

In Galway Bay, IBM’s collaboration with the Marine Institute has led to the creation of new businesses by Irish technology companies and has strengthened local industries such as fishing and tourism.

Throughout the Hudson Valley, from IBM’s Research Center in Yorktown Heights to Albany and Saratoga County, technology has created “fantastic jobs and fantastic growth,” Kelly said, adding that the Adirondack Park could be the next place to benefit.

At the very least, Kelly suggested, a research project here would create jobs for scientists and technicians, who in turn would attract others to the Adirondacks.

“Techies want to live and work together, and the Adirondack environment provides them with many of the things they want,” he said.

“Talk about location, location, location: Warren County is a very special place.  Situated at the northern end of Tech Valley and the southern end of the Adirondacks, we are near the technology, the talent pool and the computation capability that is second to none,” said Kelly.

“What can we do here, with this special location and in this special place?” he asked.

The world is now in an era of “big data,” Kelly said. 90% of the world’s data has been created only in the last two years, generated by everything from smart phones to sensors.

“By 2015, the number of bytes of information being generated will be equal to the numbers of the stars in the universe,” he said. “Human beings cannot deal with this data deluge.”

Harvesting and utilizing data with the next generation of computers, known as cognitive systems, presents new opportunities for collaborative efforts among universities, businesses and government.

Should such a collaboration take place near Lake George, one by-product, if not its purpose, would be “the better understanding of the Adirondacks, and its preservation,” said Kelly.

Linking environmental protection with economic development, and leveraging one with the other,  has long been of interest to Kelly, who serves as a trustee of The Fund for Lake George.

“There’s this tension that exists between environmental protection and economic development, but I believe the two can co-exist very successfully. But it will take a lot of academic study and great people thinking about it and participating in the discussion,” Kelly said earlier this year at the dedication of Union College’s Adirondack Research Center.

The center, located in the former home of conservationist Paul Schaefer and housing the Adirondack Research Library, has been named the Kelly Adirondack Center in honor of Kelly and his wife Helen-Jo.

Kelly “is a local boy,” said Mark Behan, the president of Behan Communications, who introduced Kelly at the luncheon.

He grew up in the capital district, where his father worked at General Electric’s research lab in Niskayuna. He was educated at Union College and RPI, where he received a Master’s degree in Physics and a PhD in Materials Engineering.  He is a trustee of both Union and RPI.

Kelly joined IBM in 1980 and in the years since then he has helped lead the company’s semiconductor, microelectronics and storage businesses. He is now Senior Vice President & Director of Research for IBM, from which he oversees a team of more than 3,000 scientists and technologists at 10 laboratories in 10 countries.

“I do get to travel the world, but nothing beats being here in Warren County,” said Kelly.