Saturday, January 23, 2010

A Railroad Museum?

The progressive degradation of the South Bay began with the railroad transecting the mouth of the bay in the mid-nineteenth century. For more than half Hudson's history, the railroad has been a part of the waterfront, and in his comments at the LWRP public hearing, Patrick Doyle suggested a way that this part of Hudson's heritage might be commemorated.

There is a railroad trestle across one of the embayments at the waterfront--the only surviving bit of a spur that once went down closer to the river, possibly to the old gasification works. Doyle's suggestion is to restore the trestle, which is in remarkably good condition, move an antique railroad car onto the trestle, relocate the antique railroad crane that now sits across the street from the train station to the site, and create an outdoor railroad museum. Rather a nice idea.

At one time, there was talk about turning the current site of the crane into a sculpture park. A few years ago, Tom Swope nominated the crane for local historic designation, but that effort was sidetracked by city attorney Cheryl Roberts, who maintained that an object could not be designated separate from the land on which it stands, and the idea of designating the site or any part of it seemed to present insurmountable problems. Doyle's idea would be a good way to consolidate and protect these two vestiges of the past on our waterfront.

2 comments:

  1. Carole -- I've posted a link to your blog and some historical footnotes of some relation to the current LWRP process at:

    http://www.hudson.typepad.com/sam/

    The item also includes a link to the full text of the Alice Neal book which evidently serves as the eponym of your blog...

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  2. Sam, I did acknowledge the source of the title of my blog in the sidenote, "About Me," but I didn't include the link to the book itself because reading Alice Neal is pretty hard going, so I figured I'd do the heavy lifting and just publish the better bits.

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