In 1961, the federal government gave American cities a mandate—and a blank check—to fix themselves. What followed, in places like Rondout in Kingston, was less renewal than removal: a sweeping clearance of working-class neighborhoods in the name of progress, executed with the blunt instrument of eminent domain. Blocks vanished. Families scattered. The waterfront went quiet.
A decade ago, filmmakers Stephen Blauweiss and Lynn Woods, working from a haunting archive of photographs by Gene Dauner, turned that history into Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal—a documentary that trades boosterish myths of modernization for something closer to testimony. The film stitches together Dauner’s images—taken as the neighborhood was being dismantled—with oral histories from residents who lived through the upheaval, reconstructing not just what was lost, but how it felt to watch it go.
On May 2 at 7:30pm, the film returns to the very ground it documents with a 10th anniversary screening at Tempo Performing Arts Center, the new venue at 29 Wurts Street in the Rondout district. Blauweiss, Woods, and Dauner will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A—an opportunity to revisit the project not as a closed chapter, but as an open question.
What makes Lost Rondout endure is its refusal to treat urban renewal as an abstraction. In policy language, the program promised efficiency, sanitation, a rational city remade. On the ground, it meant the demolition of more than 400 buildings and the displacement of thousands, many of whom were relocated into public housing that traded one set of problems for another. The gap between promise and outcome—between the tidy diagrams of planners and the unruly lives they displaced—runs like a fault line through the film.
And yet, the irony is visible just outside the theater doors. The Rondout of 2026 is a place of restaurants, galleries, and riverfront views—a neighborhood remade again, this time by market forces rather than federal fiat. The questions raised by Lost Rondout—who benefits from redevelopment, who bears its costs, and what happens to the people who are asked to move along—have not gone away. They’ve simply changed form.
Seen in this context, the anniversary screening lands as something more than commemoration. It’s a kind of civic mirror. The film insists on specificity—faces, storefronts, voices—against the flattening logic that once declared a neighborhood expendable. Watching it now, in a space just steps from where that erasure took place, the past doesn’t feel distant. It feels instructive.
Lost Roundout screens on Saturday, May 2 at 7:30pm at Tempo in Kingston.
