The Methodist church in downtown Gloversville was built in 1869 and is an architectural attraction for the city, even as it's boarded up right up to the steeple.

I’m lost. My car’s GPS system said to turn left and within a minute I’m wandering through a neighborhood on one end or the other of Johnstown. Yay, modern conveniences.

I stumble across the downtown business district and I decide to park the car someplace very visible. I’m fresh out of breadcrumbs and I want to make sure I find my way back. Then I wander down a street like many in small cities across upstate New York: buildings dating largely from the mid- to later 19th century. The streetscape seems well kept, with clean windows and largely filled commercial spaces, although I notice a number of empty upper floors.

A couple of days later, I get similarly lost in downtown Gloversville. Yeah, I’m really good with this spatial awareness thing. I similarly notice a city trying to preserve its historic nature, although the buildings appear generally newer in Gloversville — architecture of the first few decades of the 20th century dots the street.

Both cities are using and highlighting their historic character, although perhaps in different ways. Among communities that skipped much of the “development” of urban renewal in the 1960s and ‘70s, this is a common effort.

In Johnstown, I stumbled across Sir William Johnson’s grave, and a couple of buildings he had built, including his own home. Information plaques gave me his story until his death two years before the American Revolution. I haven’t seen buildings that old since I was an 11-year-old touring Boston on a five-day school field trip in 1976, a month before the Bicentennial. Very cool.

Adjacent to that, I found information about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and I was a bit surprised, because when I think of the women’s suffrage movement, I think Seneca Falls (very pretty), Rochester and even little Homer in Cortland County, where nothing more than a historic marker calls attention to the birthplace of Amelia Jenks Bloomer, of undergarment fame and one of America’s first prominent women journalists. Also cool.

Three miles away, Gloversville is using its Brownfield Opportunity Area to scope out and perhaps rehabilitate historic commercial and industrial properties. One of the biggest hurdles in redeveloping downtown brownfields is determining whether they’re actually contaminated. Once you know, a developer can plan accordingly, and return an underused building in a choice downtown spot to a community asset.

Both of these efforts can make downtowns a destination — a place to be. That can draw residents, retail and leisure businesses to cater to them, and commercial enterprises to tap the retail and leisure. It can lead to growth.

But both also bring cautionary tales. The historic marker in my hometown in New Hampshire to H.H. Holmes, America’s first recorded serial killer, is in the middle of a rural neighborhood that has remained largely unchanged since the middle of the 19th Century. The growth came elsewhere. If nobody pays attention to the history, is it really that much of a draw?

And if a city’s plethora of old industrial buildings little the landscape, unused, for decades, how long should a community hope and plan for their restoration before accepting they’ve simply become eyesores?

Neither question has a clear answer — yours will be different than the person standing next to you, and as a journalist, I’m not entitled to one.

But Gloversville lost the option to decide in April when a fire destroyed the former Fownes Brothers Glove Co. factory on South Main Street. Mayor Vincent DeSantis said the property probably wasn’t contaminated and could serve any number of future uses, even if the roof had caved in.

Time will do that to a community, without maintenance and vision. The challenge to all communities — Johnstown, Gloversville or anywhere else — is how communities agree on that vision, and what efforts they’ll make to maintain it.

Dino is back.

Eight months after the doctor looked at him and informed him that the tests showed cancer and he really should consider his options, the Fulton County supervisor, Dino Orfan (R-Gloversville), has completed his treatment and wants to get back to doing the job, full speed.

“I may not get around as much,” Orfan said Friday. “Dino is still at it, but he’s dealing with this.”

The diagnosis Feb. 3 (He very clearly remembers the day) wasn’t entirely a........

© The Leader Herald