Our stories this week looked at preservation and its flip side, neglect and destruction
I’ve always had a soft spot for a thesaurus.
I was introduced to the reference, which lists synonyms and antonyms of words, in college, which in my case meant a book, not a web search. A buddy of mine would go through final drafts of his papers and substitute as many words as possible with more ‘razzle-dazzle’ choices mined from his thesaurus.
I’m sure all his word-polishing gave his professor a headache.
As I was selecting stories to highlight in this week’s newsletter, I noticed that several choices were about preservation, while others were about its antonym, or word opposite in meaning, which include neglect and destruction.
Robert Brum contributed one story about efforts to preserve the history of the Borscht Belt, and a second on a daughter’s preservation of a memoir, "Confessions of a Hayseed DA," penned by her father, Rockland District Attorney Robert Meehan, 18 years after his death.
If you live in Yonkers, or ride the Hudson Line on Metro North, you pass the Yonkers Glenwood power plant, a graffiti-covered, long-vacant monument to neglect overlooking the Hudson River. The story by David McKay Wilson and Diana Dombrowski, looked at a developer’s longtime and so far fruitless effort to transform the plant — built in 1907 to provide electricity to New York Central Railroad and Grand Central Terminal — into a center for climate change solutions.
The Belmont Stakes is Saturday, and many would argue the Triple Crown is a destructive force for racehorses, an issue we’ve covered in the past. This year, we timed racing season to our look at the damage that can be caused by mobile sports gambling. From January to March, sportsbooks saw $4.8 billion in online wagers in New York alone. The staggering figure was joined by a sharp increase in calls to gambling helplines.
Reporter Kelly Powers reported that well over half a million New Yorkers battle gambling addiction, raising the issue of the role played by the ubiquitous advertisements and marketing for online sports-gambling sites. As part of her package of stories, Powers wrote about sports radio host Craig Carton’s recovery from addictive gambling, which led him to borrow more than $30 million to fuel his habit.
Powers addressed the question of whether regulations could be on the horizon in New York, a story we will stay with. She and the experts she interviewed conclude that while much discussed, the question is not so easily answered. Read her story for a complete analysis of the safeguards under consideration.
“Safeguard,” incidentally, is another synonym for “preservation.”
Thank you for reading, and thank you again for your support as subscribers.
All my best,
Mary Dolan
Executive Editor
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: A look at preservation efforts and forces of neglect worth monitoring
