Talk:Hudson Highlands Multiple Resource Area

Question the coherence of this article on an MRA, and wikipedia-notability

Hey, i came across this. In recent discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places#Article name and missing bridge questions, I was involved in discussion of names and/or wikipedia notability of MRA / MPS / etc. topics. Not sure if this one is wikipedia-notable, perhaps it seems like just an area survey, a specific study, not more meritorious than any other source with info about any NRHPs. Can the notability of this set be asserted? doncram (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm assuming the easy collection of all members in one place alone is relevant (otherwise one might wonde rthe usefulness of mentioning a MPOS in the infobox if giving a list of that MPS members is considered unencyclopedic...). Further details regarding how all these fit together is certainly available in the documentation I linked to the bottom, though I've created the page mostly as a timewaster, and I'm not familiar enough with New York state to do much more. I've left a note to Daniel Case (talk · contribs), since almost all these are his articles and he's fairly familiar with the area. Circeus (talk) 06:23, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

It's certainly a valid source document to be used in each of the NRHP sites that it covers. Glancing at the PDF, available as you link from the NYS site, and also from the U.S. National Register site at http://www.nr.nps.gov/multiples/64000559.pdf, it seems to be a broad survey of any apparently NRHP-eligible sites in a given area, using any NRHP-eligibility criteria that appear relevant for each candidate, like other area surveys at county level that have been discussed. So it appears not to be a coherent set to me, unlike, say, the MPS about 5 Cuyuna Iron Range Municipally-Owned Elevated Metal Water Tanks in Minnesota. doncram (talk) 06:50, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Having been asked to respond, I will. I do think some sort of notability can be asserted, in light of this MPS's history. It was initiated not by the state but by the environmental group Scenic Hudson during the later years of the controversy over Con Ed's plans to build a power plant by flooding most of Black Rock Forest and carving a huge block out of the base of Storm King Mountain. A state court had made the precedent-setting ruling that the area's aesthetics could be considered in evaluating the impact of a project, and, I think, Scenic Hudson wanted some way of backing up its claim that the area had considerable historic value. They hired a consultant, surveyed the area and came up with this list of almost 60 or so properties that hadn't been listed yet, and got SHPO to formally submit it to the NPS. Given the controversy over the power plant and Scenic Hudson's lead role in the opposition to it and (I think) limited understanding at the time of what an NRHP listing means, there seems to have been some opposition. As I said to Circeus, three of the properties included were listed at the state level but never the National, and St. Philip's Church in the Highlands only dropped its opposition 13 years later (A lot of this is in the "other" documents listings at the NYSOPRHP site).

That said, I would probably consider this notable without that history, as the Hudson Highlands are important in national history as well, and this MRA as a whole shows it.

And to repeat what I said earlier at WT:NRHP, I think we should only have separate MPS articles where the MPS crosses county lines (and has enough listings to justify an article: one of New York's "Movie Palaces of the Tri-Cities" has about one or two listings from Albany, Schenectady and Troy, not really enough for a separate article). MPSes that are listed in one county alone are better off discussed within the listings article for those counties (like, for instance, the Shawangunk Valley or Cornwall MRAs near where I live, where I've written about a number of the entries). Daniel Case (talk) 16:37, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Hey, i am at fault here, for setting up a list of all the MPS's for New York state with red-links at List of RHPs in NY, where I think Circeus might have been browsing and chose to turn one of the redlinks blue. I just moved those out to its Talk page. But I think the document seems to be useful as a reference in an article about the topic "Hudson Highlands" and/or in an article about Scenic Hudson. The MPS is a document and/or a dated, one time study, and on its own it does not deserve an article. That would be like creating an article about any local history book which covers historic sites. So, I think this list-article needs to be reconsidered, and morphed into being, nominally, about some topic rather than about the MPS itself. doncram (talk) 17:42, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

No, no. I've been looking at Daniel's creations for a while and thinking that a central collection of the relevant properties of thir MPS would be useful. I just decided to on a whim to do it (though I did indeed follow the red link from that list, it wasn't to "turn a red link blue"). The MRA gives a lot of background information that links togetehr the relevant properties, just like a Historic District links together properties with a coherent history (In fact, a MPS is in my mind a hsitoric district where the contributing properties simply happen to not form a single coherent land area). Circeus (talk) 19:14, 13 February 2009 (UTC)