New Faces on Warren Street

On Friday morning, the Historic Preservation Commission approved facade revisions for two Warren Street buildings: one the little infill structure at 419½ Warren Street; the other a former residential building at 739 Warren Street.

The little infill building, which in the 19th century had a storefront, will have a storefront once again.

The HPC requested that the width of the third story windows be the same as the width of the second story windows and that they have only two lights, with a vertical division, instead of six. The applicant agreed to those changes.

The house at 739 Warren Street, the ground floor of which has had a commercial use for at least two decades, is going to acquire an actual storefront.

The aluminum siding on the facade will be replaced with wood clapboard. The second floor windows will be restored to their original size. The portico over the entrance leading both to the commercial space on the ground floor and the rental apartments above, will be removed, and that doorway will access only the apartments. A new storefront, projecting a foot our from the building, with two shop windows and a center door, will be introduced into the facade.

The proposed changes to the building were approved, but HPC member Tony Thompson abstained from voting. When asked to explain why, Thompson said he "cannot figure out what to do about the expansion of commercial activity into a residential neighborhood." While it's a legitimate concern, this area of Warren Street, although originally residential, hasn't been residential for decades.

The building shown in the photograph below stood opposite Eighth Street. It was replaced decades ago with the building, probably originally a car dealership, that now houses the offices of the Social Security Administration.

The remarkable house in this photograph (below), where Anna Bradbury lived as a boarder from 1904 to 1909, stood a few doors down at 729 Warren Street.

It was lost in the 1930s to make way for the Warren Theater, which thirty years later morphed into the motel that is now the Warren Inn.

There are a few buildings on Warren Street that started out as houses and are now commercial spaces. In this 19th-century photograph of the 400 block of Warren Street (below), 421 Warren Street appears to be a residence. Today, it is the location of Olde Hudson. Its conversion to a storefront undoubtedly happened decades ago.

The mid-19th century photograph of the 500 block of Warren Street (below) shows  both 513 and 511 Warren Street as residences. Today, with storefronts that have probably been there for close to a century, the buildings are the location of Eustace & Zamus and A Collector's Eye. (The building in the picture with the arched facade is the original Hoysradt Hose & Chemical Co. firehouse, which ironically was destroyed by fire and replaced by the current firehouse in 1925.) 

COPYRIGHT 2014 CAROLE OSTERINK 
Historic photographs courtesy Historic Hudson, Byrne Fone, and Lisa Durfee