Ear to the Ground
Ten years ago, in March 2006, Richard Cohen presented a plan to the Historic Preservation Commission to convert the building on the northeast corner of Warren and Fourth streets and the adjacent three town houses along North Fourth Street into a hotel.
No one seems to know for sure if the design for the hotel ever received a certificate of appropriateness from the HPC (it is Gossips' memory that it didn't), but in grim pursuit of his plan for a hotel, Cohen demolished first a building at 406 Warren Street, believed to date from the late 18th century, and then an early 19th-century Greek Revival town house on North Fourth Street.
In the past ten years, while plans for other hotels in Hudson--The Barlow and Rivertown Lodge--were conceptualized and realized, the hotel project at Warren and Fourth remained a worrisome eyesore that seemed to be more about the destruction of historic architecture than its restoration and reuse.
Now the word is that Cohen has given up on the hotel project and intends to lease out the building at 402-404 Warren Street as office and commercial space. In recent days, the cornice of the building has been getting a coat of trendy dark gray paint . . .
and there are "For Rent" signs in the windows of the two ground floor spaces, where the brick was recently painted white.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CAROLE OSTERINK
if one called city glass and installed glass storefronts, the building would look great and the stores would have good display windows.
ReplyDeleteits a shopping street --
The destruction of the buildings over the years was heartbreaking.
ReplyDeletethat poor tortured building
ReplyDeleteUtterly destroying the east sidewalk making passage unmanageable for strollers bound for the elementary school was the event that affected my business considerably. Gossips failed to note the lovely new structure replacing the Greek Revival townhouse on 4th.
ReplyDelete