What About the Furgary?

It's been almost three years since the City of Hudson seized the Furgary Boat Club, evicted its members, and put a fence around the area to prevent people from entering the compound. Although the issue is kept alive by posters on a local chat board and at least one commenter on Gossips, who manages to use a host of different topics as the platform for a diatribe about access to the river for fishermen and hunters, the topic of the Furgary doesn't come up very often in public meetings.

In October, a resolution to raze the Furgary shacks was introduced in the Common Council but never voted on. Instead it was decided that a "small working group," made up of the mayor, Common Council president Don Moore, and aldermen Nick Haddad (First Ward), Bart Delaney (Fifth Ward), Abdus Miah and Tiffany Garriga (Second Ward), would take the next sixty days to investigate "what might be done down there." Many more than sixty days have passed, and, until last night, there had been no public word on what the findings had been.

At the same Council meeting in October, Alderman Dave Marston (First Ward) announced that a representative from the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) was scheduled to visit the site on October 24. He moved that the resolution to raze the shacks be tabled "until a historic resources study could be done." Marston's motion passed.

A few weeks ago, at a Hudson FORWARD meeting, someone asked, "What ever happened with the Furgary?" Tiffany Martin Hamilton, an advocate for the legendary fishing settlement, answered by saying that the City wanted someone to select structures to be saved, but the historic significance of the place was not individual structures. Rather it was the location and the traditional use of the site.

Haddad, who was part of the working group tasked to figure out what to do with the Furgary, said there was no plan to preserve any of the shacks "because no one has selected the shacks to be saved." He asserted that Linda Mackey, the representative from the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) who had visited the site in October, had determined there was "nothing worth saving." Hamilton disagreed, claiming that, from her conversations with Mackey, "there were some possibilities" of significance, based on the "tradition of use of the area."

Since there was disagreement about SHPO's opinion of the site, Gossips undertook to find out exactly what Mackey had said. First, I asked Moore if I could see a copy of Mackey's report. He told me there was no written report. Next, I sent an email to Mackey, asking if she would clarify what her findings were. She referred me to the Deputy Public Relations Officer at OPRHP, who ultimately told me there were no findings because there had been no formal request for a determination. When I asked who could make such a formal request, he referred me to the section of the OPRHP website that deals with State and National Register designation. That pointed me to Bill Krattinger, the person in the National Register Unit at SHPO whose territory includes Columbia County. Was it necessary, I asked him, to apply for National Register designation in order to learn the findings of Mackey's visit? Krattinger promised he would look into the matter, and on Monday morning, I got a call from Kathy Howe, who coordinates the Survey Program at SHPO. She explained there were three things that would trigger a SHPO investigation and finding: (1) state or federal agency involvement in a project; (2) a request from the property owner for a determination of eligibility for designation; (3) a request from an interested third party for a determination of eligibility. Requests for determination must be made through the Cultural Resource Information System (CRIS), and neither the City of Hudson (the owner) nor any of the Furgarians (an interested third party) had made such a request.

Last night, at the informal Common Council meeting, the Furgary Boat Club came up for the first time in a long time. Council president Moore introduced the topic by explaining that "the mayor wants the Council to move ahead on a resolution about the Furgary." The resolution in question would allocate $5,000 to do an environmental assessment of the seventeen shacks to determine "what process is needed to remove them." The resolution, Moore explained, was still in draft form but would be ready for the regular Council meeting on May 19.

Always watchful of the municipal bottom line, city treasurer Heather Campbell asked if the City had the ability to identify the owners of the shacks and make them pay for the demolition. City attorney Carl Whitbeck noted that the City did not own the property when the shacks were built. Alderman John Friedman (Third Ward) suggested that, whether the State of New York or the City of Hudson owned the land when the shacks were built, the builders had "created a nuisance on public property." Whitbeck advised that it would be "way more expensive and very dysfunctional to try to hold shack owners responsible."

When the discussion turned to the historic significance of the shacks and the site, I offered the information I had learned that morning from Kathy Howe at SHPO. Moore said that he had never been told this by SHPO and was of the opinion that the State had no interest in the site. He then returned the discussion to the proposed resolution, telling the aldermen, "If we do not wish to demolish the shacks and want to put them to some other purpose, we should not pursue this."

In the discussion that followed, Moore said of the visit from SHPO, "We all thought they were basically wrecks"; North Bay advocate Timothy O'Connor asserted that he had a Sanborn map that showed the buildings existed in the 19th century; Alderman Nick Haddad (First Ward) spoke of his efforts to get the Furgarians to select the buildings they wanted to keep; Moore cautioned that it would be expensive to preserve one of the shacks and spoke of "parkland interests"; Alderman Tiffany Garriga (Second Ward) complained that no one representing the Furgary ever showed up for meetings of the working group tasked with deciding the fate of the site; Alderman Bart Delaney (Fifth Ward) declared that the working group had come to a conclusion: "Rip 'em down!"

Finally, Alderman Rick Rector (First Ward) suggested that if there was interest in keeping one of the shacks to be used as a kiosk or public facility or for kayak rental, the task of selecting the building and creating a budget for its restoration should be taken up by the Common Council Economic Development Committee. It was then agreed that the Council would go ahead with the environmental assessment of the shacks.
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