The Adirondack Park has lots of friends in high places, and Arthur V. Savage (1926-2012) seemed to know all of them. Well-connected men accomplished great things in mid-20th century America, in part, because their privilege was rarely questioned. But Arthur was a rare creature. He was a man of great influence who was not stuffy. In fact, he was fun to have around.
Arthur curated jokes. When I interviewed him in 2008, he began by impersonating his grandfather telling two of his favorites. They were early 20th-century chestnuts about a rural Irish couple and a toothless man; they were not very funny, and also slightly offensive. But the clip is extraordinary because Arthur’s grandfather was Augustus Noble Hand (1869-1954), a pillar of American jurisprudence.
Augustus Hand served with his cousin, Learned Hand (1872-1961), on the Federal District Court and Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City. Augustus wrote or concurred in the decisions that legalized condoms, allowed James Joyce’s Ulysses to be published in the United States, codified the rules for conscientious objection to military service, reorganized the film industry, and much more. But Arthur wanted me to know that this eminent jurist was also Gus, a country lawyer from the small Champlain Valley village of Elizabethtown. Gus cultivated that image and passed it on to Arthur, his beloved and only male descendant. Arthur re-told Gus’ jokes to make that point. Listen to the clip here:
Arthur spent a great deal of time volunteering to protect the wide-open character of the Adirondack Park. He was a founding trustee of The Adirondack Museum (now The Adirondack Experience) in 1952 and served on its board until 2001, and he was also a leader in the Association to Protect the Adirondacks (now Protect The Adirondacks! — president in 1978), the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (co-founder in 1973), The Adirondack Council (“legal co-founder” in 1975), and the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (trustee from 1978 to 1997). He was best known for serving on the board of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) from 1979 to 1997.
He looked back on his APA service with mixed emotions. He was proud that so much of the wild and rural land that he loved had been saved, but he regretted that the early APA forced rules on his neighbors that were too strict. “There were times when it bothered me,” Savage said. “The [APA] staff would object to a particular building being painted yellow instead of green. There’s no room for the Agency to get involved in matters of taste.”
Arthur was a New York City guy, but his family had deep roots in the North Country and a long tradition of producing lawyers. His great-great grandfather, Augustus Cincinnatus Hand (1803-1878), moved to the Champlain Valley hamlet of Elizabethtown in 1831 and was elected to the New York State Senate and US House of Representatives. His great-grandfather, also a lawyer, was asked to stand guard over abolitionist John Brown’s body in Lake Placid the night before Brown was buried.
Arthur and his mother took the train to Elizabethtown every summer as soon as school let out. “What we mostly did there was play tennis,” he said. “We hiked, camped, and swam. I was never much for hunting or fishing. In the very early days, back when people were content to rock on the porch for two weeks, we stayed in Elizabethtown. Later on, we went over to the Ausable Club in Keene Valley to find things there that were not in Elizabethtown. We passed five generations through that Elizabethtown house.” The Hand family donated its 1849 home to the town in 1979, and today it is a museum and music venue.
After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy (1944) and serving in the US Navy during the postwar occupation of Japan, Arthur attended Princeton University (graduating in 1948) and Harvard Law School (1952). A position in the American aristocracy in those days demanded that one also support charity, and many Ivy Leaguers checked that box simply by writing checks. But Arthur jumped in with both feet.
The Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks (1968-70) was a turning point for the Park for two reasons. Its recommendations were dramatic and detailed, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller harnessed strong voter support to turn the most important ones into law. Arthur was not a member of that Commission, but his political career began there when its Chairman, Harold Hochschild, who was a close family friend, asked Arthur to draft legislation that would make it more difficult to change the Park’s geographic boundaries (the so-called “blue line”). That law passed in 1972.
In response to another Commission recommendation, Arthur helped organize the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in 1973. Its first chairman was his step brother-in-law, Wayne Byrne, who owned a hardware store in Plattsburgh. Arthur’s friend and collaborator, Paul Schaefer, chose Byrne because it would be easier for a permanent resident of the North Country to attend all the organizational meetings, and also, Savage said, because Byrne would do what they wanted him to do.
Arthur also made sure that even though the group was a mere chapter of TNC, it would not have to send 50 percent of the funds it raised to the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters. Wealthy Adirondackers were a catch for the Washington DC-based group, which was much smaller in the 1970s, so the North Country was granted an unusual degree of independence.
Arthur was not named to the board of the APA until 1979, but the board’s first chairman, Richard Lawrence, was married to his wife’s cousin. Another original APA commissioner, Peter Paine Jr., was a childhood acquaintance. Arthur remembers that when Paine Jr. was a teenager, Paine Sr. asked Arthur to take the boy on an outing. He was concerned that his son was spending too much time reading instead of playing outside.
Arthur watched with growing dismay as local opposition to the APA mounted after the law was passed. Richard Lawrence “could be very intolerant,” Arthur said. “Distant is a a good word.”
Although Arthur supported the APA’s restrictions on the development of private land, he felt that a more informal attitude of listening, learning, and staying flexible would have improved the agency’s reputation with local residents. Lawrence disagreed. “We had to move quickly, and so we stepped on some toes,” he once said.
A turning point for the APA came in 1975, when the owners of two large housing developments brought separate lawsuits charging that the APA’s rules were so strict that they amounted to an unconstitutional “taking” of private property. A ruling favorable to the developers would have destroyed the APA.
In a law review article co-authored while the suit was moving through the court system, Arthur cited several decisions from the early 1970s and argued that a “quiet revolution” in the understanding of private property rights had taken place. The decisions showed that courts were now upholding zoning laws that aimed to protect aesthetic and environmental quality, he wrote. It followed that in areas where legislatures have recognized that these qualities are especially important, such as the Adirondack Park, reasonable restrictions on the rights of private property owners could now be considered legitimate. The APA law is reasonable, he wrote, because it regulates development instead of expressly forbidding it.
After the courts rejected the developers’ claims, organized local opposition to the APA began to subside. It also helped when Richard Lawrence resigned as chairman and was replaced by Robert Flacke, a school guidance counselor and small business owner from Lake George. Flacke would later become Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and play an outsized role in the evolution of the Park.
Around the time of Ton-De-Lay and Wambat decisions, Arthur was invited by Arthur Crocker, director of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks (AfPA), to meet with the leaders of six other environmental organizations at the palatial offices of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in midtown Manhattan.
“Half a dozen people were at that meeting, including a man named Bill Hurd, who came out of nowhere,” Savage said. “He was anxious to start an environmental watchdog agency. He wanted it to watch what the APA was doing, criticize it when it was not doing enough, and support it when it needed support.
“Harold Jerry, the director of the Temporary Study Commission, was at that meeting. John Adams of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) was there, too. Adams said, ‘You’ve got hundreds of people who will support the Adirondacks with money. You’re not going to get a penny from the NRDC, but we will be one of your supporting organizations.’” The NRDC joined the Sierra Club, the AfPA, the Adirondack chamter of The Nature Conservancy, and three other organizations to form The Adirondack Council, and Arthur did the legal work to set it all up. Today the Council has about 20,000 members and is the park’s most powerful advocate for wilderness.
Sometimes it only takes two people to make a deal. In 1977, Arthur attended a conference at Lake Mohonk with DEC Commissioner Peter Berle. “We went off to one of the lovely tea houses they have,” he said. Savage wanted to make Berle a two-part offer on behalf of The Adirondack Mountain Reserve, a private organization that owns thousands of acres in the High Peaks region, and he knew Berle was interested. The Reserve’s property includes the exclusive Ausable Club, where Arthur had been going since his youth. In the 1970s the Club was running low on cash and looking to sell some of its land. The sale was the first part. The second part was the important one.
Conservation easements were not well known in 1977, but there had been a few deals where owners of scenic property had sold or donated their development rights to neighbors. Back in 1970, the Temporary Study Commission had recommended that the state start purchasing “scenic easements” as a way of protecting open space in the Adirondacks without buying more land. The state had not done it yet.
Arthur told the Commissioner that the Reserve was interested in selling some of its land to the state, and that it would also be willing to sell an easement that would allow recreational access to even more land. “Berle said to me, ‘if we can get started on this, I’ll go to Governor Carey and say, Governor, to make your name famous for all history, you had better look at this Adirondack territory.’”
The Reserve sold 9,311 acres to the State in 1980. They also allowed the state to hold a conversation and recreational easement that opened up an additional 7,000 acres to the public. The easement deal was a critical early use of a legal technique that has become an internationally important land conservation tool. Today, the DEC manages nearly 902,000 acres of land protected by a permanent conservation easement. Almost all of these lands allow some form of public access, and 785,000 of the acres are in the Adirondack Park. Elsewhere in New York State, more than 80 not-for-profit land trusts are actively negotiating conservation easements. And 61 million acres across the United States are protected in this way. That is about as much acreage as the states of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey combined.
Arthur’s stories describe an era when environmental protection happened in the Adirondacks largely through the efforts of a small, elite group. But in 1979, when the Governor appointed Arthur to the board of the Adirondack Park Agency, the men’s club was losing control of the movement. Not-for-profit groups with thousands of members were lobbying to strengthen land protection. On the other side were developers and property rights advocates, who were also organized and well-funded. The APA became the referee, an essential but thankless task.
This change was highlighted in 1990, when Governor Mario Cuomo’s Commission on the Adirondacks in the 21st Century produced another report. The Commission’s director, George Davis, had designed the original zoning plan that regulated private land inside the park back in 1973. Peter Berle was its chairman. Harold Jerry, Richard Lawrence, and other leaders from the early 1970s were among the commissioners. Once again, the recommendations were dramatic and detailed, with the goal of protecting the wild Adirondacks for future generations. But times had changed.
When the report was released, the backlash was so intense that Governor Cuomo and other elected officials ran for cover. “I remember thinking it was a good idea to have the commission doing what it was charged to do,” Arthur said. “We ought to look at things and see what should be done in the long run. But the report was so far ahead of anything that people could swallow. It was going to go nowhere.”
In 1990, powerful men still met privately to draft policy proposals, just as they do today. But the story of the 21st century commission showed that when powerful people meet privately, the smart ones navigate by comparing their ideals against their assessment of what the public is willing to accept.
I met Arthur on a sunny spring morning at his house in Pelham, a tidy village of doctors, lawyers, and bankers who take a half-hour train ride to their jobs in Manhattan. He told me stories about the family heirlooms that surrounded us, like the carved wooden sideboard that was Learned Hand’s wedding gift to Gus, or the dress sword that was given to his maternal great-great grandfather when he took command of the First Asiatic Fleet. Arthur and his wife, Harriet Boyd Hawes Savage (“Hat”), were getting ready to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, and the house was crowded with pictures of their four children and nine grandchildren.
My conversation with Arthur was part of an oral history project that recorded the recollections of 100 North Country people who were involved in the environmental movement and its opposition in the last half of the 20th Century. The project resulted in two books: A Wild Idea (2021) and the forthcoming Adirondack Green (2027). The conversation was transcribed, hand-corrected by Arthur, and edited for readability. Non-commercial users can download a copy of the corrected 48-page transcript here. For other uses, including access to the audio file, please contact XXX.
