Historic Takings in Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area

The author examines the many takings of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area to consider the contested legal and personal meanings and valuations of property, place, and memory. The book suggests personal and systemic approaches to reframe place and reconcile public development with personal and community loss.

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The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (DEWA) is among the busiest National Park Service (NPS) units with millions of annual visitors. In this book, David Fazzino uses oral history and archival work to consider the ramifications of government land takings, done half a century ago to uproot families and communities across 70,000 acres in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Fazzino situates these land takings in historical context to explain the ways places have been taken, both physically and ideologically, in the name of progress, development, wilderness, and recreation. The author contrasts legal valuations, measured along utilitarian and material lines, with lived valuations which account for place as experiential, intimate, personal, and relational. Fazzino also considers the ruins of what was and the remains of past lives in the valley to suggest inclusive possibilities of future management regimes in DEWA and federal public lands more broadly.