Of the Library and the Armory, Part II

At the September meeting of the Hudson Area Library Board of Trustees, board president Theresa Parsons and vice president Mark Orton described a dream come true for the perennially cash-strapped library. The library board, staff, and patrons could conceptualize the perfect library space, Eric Galloway and the Galvan Foundation would create it for them within the Armory building, and the library could live there happily for the next thirty years, paying only a dollar a month in rent.  

But now that the library board has sold the only home the library has ever known to Galloway, and entrusted one of Hudson's most architecturally significant buildings to someone who has so far not shown himself to be a very worthy steward of architectural antiquity, it seems that the details of the offer of space in the Armory may not be as generous as Parsons and Orton thought.  

Gossips has heard that Galloway is offering the library 8,000 to 10,000 square feet in the Armory for a mere dollar a month, but the library must retrofit and furnish the space at its own expense. That could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the ongoing expenses that the library board was hoping to escape by abandoning its historic building don't seem to be going away either. Gossips has also heard that in addition to the dollar a month rent, the library will have to pay insurance, utilities, and maintenance for their space, as well as share in the cost of any improvements to the common spaces of the property.

Could this be true? Could the library's future not be as rosy and secure as we thought? Say it ain't so.   

Photograph of the Armory by Scott Baldinger, from his blog, Word on the Street.