PINE PLAINS — While some fall traditions have changed this year due to COVID-19, the Pine Plains Free Library and The Little Nine Partners Historical Society have devised a safe way to still host the annual Evergreen Cemetery Lantern Tours, sharing ghoulish history while making sure tourists social distance.
An unfailing source of autumn amusement for residents, visitors and history buffs alike, the tours are one of the library’s most popular fundraisers, a night that draws attention to the town of Pine Plains and casts the spotlight on the people who helped shape its history. Given the crowds that have come in the past, fans might wonder what organizers have in mind during a global pandemic. Though they had originally planned on doing a video broadcast only, Little Nine Partners Historical Society President Dyan Wapnick said they received such an overwhelming response from people who wanted to see a live tour that they decided to do both a live version and a video broadcast and work with social distancing guidelines.
“We believe this will be one of the few live tours in the area this year,” Wapnick said, “and we are taking every precaution necessary to make it both safe and enjoyable. I think it shows that people are looking for some normalcy in their lives, and this is something that the town looks forward to every fall. It’s a fun and educational way to support the library.”
As far as adapting the tours to fit COVID-19 guidelines, Wapnick said they had to scale back the number of people allowed on each tour to 25. Meanwhile, Beth McLiverty, president of the Pine Plains Free Library Board of Trustees, said they’ll have staff on hand to ensure social distancing and face masks are enforced.
“It’s a completely contact-free event and outdoors, so we feel we can safely do this,” McLiverty said.
All tickets must be purchased in advance, check-in will be contactless, simply involving checking guests off a list. There will be an optional one-page tour program that guests can choose to pick up or not. To make sure they never exceed a capacity of about 35 to 40 people at the check-in area (including staff), McLiverty said guests won’t be allowed to linger after the shows. Hand sanitizer will be made available, and the staff will sanitize its hands every 20 to 30 minutes.
“We would never want to compromise our community’s safety,” McLiverty said, “so even though we won’t raise as much money as in the past, we believe this is a good compromise to have a smaller event for people to enjoy while following safety protocols.”
This year’s tours will be held on Friday, Oct. 30, with a rain date of Sunday, Nov. 1. With each tour timed at 60 minutes, the tours will be held at 6 p.m., 6:30 p.m., 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Meeting at 19 Maple St. in Pine Plains, spectators will take the tour through the Evergreen Cemetery.
Tickets cost $15 for adults and $5 for students and seniors, and may be purchased either online at www.pineplains-ny.gov/evergreen-cemetery-lantern-tour-october-302020 or in-person at the Pine Plains Free Library, located at 7775 South Main St.
Should one prefer a virtual tour, McLiverty said it can be viewed on YouTube starting on Sunday, Nov. 1.
For more information, call the library at 518-398-1927 or go to www.pineplainslibrary.org.
Due to the incoming inclement weather, the Pine Plains Free Library and The Little Nine Partners Historical Society’s Evergreen Cemetery Lantern Tours planned for Friday, Oct. 30, will be moving to Sunday, Nov. 1. Please note that all tour times are already full.
Anyone who has already purchased a ticket but can no longer attend should let organizers know ASAP as they have a waiting list for the event.
The following excerpts from The Millerton News were compiled by Kathleen Spahn and Rhiannon Leo-Jameson of the North East-Millerton Library.
LAKEVILLE — Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cleaveland are the proud possessors of a letter from President Roosevelt extending his heartiest congratulations and best wishes to them upon their golden wedding anniversary which they observed Friday. Mr. and Mrs. Cleaveland celebrated the occasion at “The Pines,” the home of Mr. Cleaveland’s sisters, where they were visited by many relatives and friends and also received many other congratulatory notes.
A party of Millerton sportsmen returned Sunday night after a ten days’ hunting trip at Golden Beach and Racquette Lake, bringing home with them one spike horn buck, a four-point buck and a five-point buck. In the group were Ronald J. Silvernale, Yorke S. Blanchard, Henry Penchoen, of Brooklyn, Robert Fenn, Hulet Silvernail, Oliver W. Valentine and Raymond Van De Bogart.
George Wathley has reported the theft of twelve bushels of potatoes from a barn on his property, formerly known as the Stephen Mills farm. In revealing the theft, Mr. Wathley intimated that the identity of the person who stole the potatoes was known.
In a report on the Dutchess County jail, the State Department of Correction last week warned that the grille-work or shut-off at the main entrance corridor of the jail be relocated in order to prevent possible escapes. Three prisoners already have broken out of the county’s so-called “escape-proof jail.” Although it approved the plans for the jail and later stamped its O.K. on the jail when completed, the Correction Department explained that it had “overlooked the possibility of escapes through the offices adjoining the entrance corridor.”
At the stroke of midnight Oct. 15 Alderson Magee of Sharon would have been ineligible to enter the Federal Migratory Bird Hunting stamp contest.
Magee, however, finished his design at 10 p.m. on the eve of the deadline date, hustled to a post office in Hartford, arriving 20 minutes before midnight, and got the necessary Oct. 15 postmark.
WEBUTUCK - A partisan crowd of about 75 people packed the Webutuck High School auditorium Monday to denounce a proposal to create a charter school in Amenia.
But members of the proposed Harlem Valley Charter School board (HVCS) were nowhere to be found opting instead to place pro-charter school flyers on the windshields of audience members during the hearing.
One audience member wanted to know how to ask questions of the HVCS board members.
“You can always put a note on their car,” cracked another audience member.
Back in my architectural student days I had two professors, both English and one a city planner, constantly talking about “roundabouts.”Roundabouts? I learned they were an English term for what we Americans called rotaries or traffic circles. In the U.S. hardly any had been built since before the War whereas in England they were rediscovered in the late 1950s and updated, improved variations were being designed and constructed by architects, landscape architects, city planners and traffic engineers throughout Great Britain. In addition to rebuilding war-torn urban areas, Britain had also embarked on a program of constructing a series of new towns, and designers tried to employ the most advanced techniques including roundabouts.
Within a few years other European countries started to follow suit;and several others began intensively rebuilding. France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlandsand several other countries began major road building campaigns, all of which featured new roundabouts.
A roundabout (or rotary or traffic circle) is a type of traffic intersection in which traffic travels in one direction around a central island;priority is given to the circulating flow. Signs usually direct traffic entering the circle to slow andto give way to traffic already on it.
Roundabouts have several advantages over ordinary intersections. They are much safer with many fewer places where crashes might occur. A study of five roundabouts by the Connecticut Department of Transportation foundan 81% reduction in severe crashes and a 44 % reduction in total crashes. Driving speeds are reduced and the basic geometry rules out the possibility of any head on or T-bone crashes. Vehicles (nearly always) enter and exit without completely stopping thus reducing noise, pollution, and fuel consumption. The cost of construction of a roundabout is balanced against that of installing and maintaining sophisticated traffic lights, signs and signals.
Roundabouts do have a few disadvantages. Large, high traffic installations may need a lot of space to function ideally and to look right in their place in the landscape. Some of the largest, multi-lane roundabouts may be confusing for some drivers leading to hesitation or incorrect lane use; however, thisconfusion is over after one or two encounters for most drivers.
Older traffic circles such as Columbus Circle in Manhattan (1904) are not considered by modern traffic designers as roundabouts (they’re just thought of as traffic circles) .
An older, small traffic circle with which readers are familiar is the one at the intersection of Routes 4 and 63 in Goshen.A precursor to the large modern roundabout, although much smaller, it functions much like its contemporary cousins moving traffic smoothly and efficiently. But plans are underway to convert the Goshen traffic circle into a much larger, carefully planted roundabout with a pedestrian crosswalk.
After years of community conflict, the intersection of Routes 7 and 41 at the south end of Great Barrington was finally converted into a roundabout. Construction faced political delay for years; only after it was built and local citizens got used to it did it become accepted, even popular.
Most estimates for the number ofroundabouts in the U.S. today indicate there are more than 13,000.In Connecticut there are only about 30, but many more are in the works.Carmel, Indiana a city of roughly 100,000 people, has an astonishing record number of roundabouts, more than 150! Apparently, the city’s mayor and many of its citizens fell in love with roundabouts and kept converting more and more intersections.
Roundabouts have become popular all over the world, especially in Europe (which tends to be more congested than North America). France has the largest number: more than 43,000.And in poorer developing countries with fewer motor vehicles but exploding populations the roundabout boom is only just beginning.
More and more, architects, landscape architects and other artists are getting into the act, right from the beginning to turn these constructions into actual art works, something usually overlooked in the past. The center islands were often the obvious place to start with huge sculptures. But more attention is now being paid to all of the surrounding landscape. This could be a route to a really improved segment of our public space.
Architect and landscape designer Mac Gordon lives in Lakeville.
Across most of the space scientific community, the realization has solidified that there is life out there, meaning other than just on Earth. Sounds obvious but until the past 10 years there has been no hint of proof, just hypothesis.
All the Moon dust and rocks the Apollo program brought back showed no traces of life. Since then, probes, especially to the southern polar regions of the Moon, have shown the presence of water but no bio signatures.But last summer, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover drilled into the mudstone and there was a dramatic upturn in probability we’re about to receive actual proof of life existing on another planet. “This finding… is the closest we’ve actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars,” said Nicky Fox, NASA Associate Administrator. He went on “…everything we know about life on Earth, this is the kind of signature we would see that was made by something biological. In this case, it’s kind of the equivalent of seeing leftovers from a meal, and maybe that meal had been excreted by a microbe. That’s what we’re seeing in this sample.”
Are they going to bring back a sample for ground-based testing? The project director for the Perseverance project, Katie Stack Morgan explained, “we’re pretty close to the limits of what the rover can do on the surface… That was by design, since the payload of the Mars Perseverance rover was selected with a sample return in mind.” Then we’ll know, is the goal here, to bring back samples.
But this Administration has just proposed cutting the Mars rover programs by more than 50%, taking a sample return mission off the table for now. It’s an expensive mission, to return samples to Earth. Yes, there’s the technology which we have not proved yet: a robot to land on mars, collect the samples, blast back into Mars orbit, transfer to a waiting spaceship to return in maybe a year to Earth. Or perhaps wait for some humans to land on Mars?
It is worth remembering at this point a medical necessity of the Apollo landings’ programs: Biohazard prevention. Every capsule, piece of clothing, instrument, and the astronauts themselves, on return to Earth from their Moon missions stayed in quarantine for 30 days. During that time, every medical, sterile, procedure was followed while dust, clothing, blood samples, and all bodily fluids were tested every day. The worry then was that a single unknown bacteria or virus – and therefore pathogens for which life on Earth have no resistance – could terminate all or a great deal of life on our planet. And that risk still exists today for all space exploration.
One way missions, like the Mars Perseverance, pose no threat as a portable lab on a distant planet. It is only bringing something alien back here that could pose a threat. This is not a USA-only issue, it is a global, all humanity, issue. And until all of humanity can be 100% sure that all that the international space programs are prepared, budgeted, andscientifically sure, no one, nothing, should be returned to Earth. There is a safe way forward, but no single country’s space program nor any commercial entities should not be allowed to recklessly proceed with ambitious goals devoid of security for this potential risk to everything for everyone.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
Enjoying the vast array of works on display were Jen Coon and her daughter Maddie Zelevansky, 6, who shared that she is a student in the First Grade.
MILLBROOK — Art lovers flocked to the Millbrook Library on Saturday, Nov. 8, to celebrate the opening of “Salon Hang,” an eagerly anticipated exhibition showcasing works by both budding and established local artists. The fact that proceeds benefit the library was a welcome bonus.
Festive orange banners rippled from roof to ground along the library façade, signaling that something special was happening inside.
The show marks the library’s first effort to bring together artists of all ages in a single exhibition — a concept organizers hope to repeat, if not next year amid an already full calendar of events, then certainly the year after.
“How do we raise funds inclusive of the entire community,” was the question that gave rise to the event, library board member June Glasson said.
Local artists and art lovers turned out in force for the Friday, Nov. 7, opening of “Salon Hang,” a community-wide art show and fundraiser for the Millbrook Library. Resident Toni Weeks brought little Ren Herberich-Weeks, 9 months, to the event that included a number of works by her wife, Emily Herberich, local professional artist.Photo by Leila Hawken
Engaging the entire community, Salon Hang attracted artists of all ages and levels of experience, as 104 artists came forward to show 120 pieces in all. A few professional artists have more than one work in the show.
Board member Leigh Jackiewicz was pleased to see all ages represented, from youngsters to professionals. Sales were brisk at the opening. Prices range between $5 and upwards of $6,000, a variety of percentages to be donated to support the library.
“This is a way to get professional and amateur artists to participate even more than usual in our library,” Jackiewicz added.
“Anything I can do to help the library … my kids are always here participating in craft clubs,” said crochet artist Erin Walsh who was showing an intricate wall hanging. “They do a great job,” she added in praise of the library’s staff and programs.
The Salon Hang exhibit and sale will continue until Monday, Nov. 24.
