Now Available on the City Website
The 1996 Hudson Vision Plan is the stuff of legend. Funded by a grant from New York State's Urban Development Corporation secured by the Hudson Opera House back when it was a nascent not-for-profit that owned a historic building but had yet to occupy it any way and informed by more than a year of monthly community meetings, the document focused on Warren Street, Fourth Street (from the courthouse to what was then the library), and the waterfront to formulate a "vision that would take the city into the next century."
Before the grassroots community process was complete, the document was hijacked by City Hall, and for this reason, it is probably not the document it might have been. Still it has been influential and a force for good, even though it was never officially adopted by the City. The illustration above, which is from the 1996 Hudson Vision Plan, appears in the Department of State's LWRP guidebook, Making the Most of Your Waterfront: Enhancing Waterfronts to Revitalize Communities. The Vision Plan was referenced extensively in the April 2005 decision handed down by then NYS Secretary of State Randy Daniels that brought an end to the plan for a giant coal-fired cement plant to be built in Greenport, with access to the Hudson waterfront through South Bay.
For all its importance and influence, very few people have ever read the Vision Plan, mostly because very few copies existed. But now it can be read by everyone. Thanks to Sheena Salvino, HDC executive director, who had the document scanned, Mayor Tiffany Martin Hamilton, and City Clerk Tracy Delaney, the 1996 Hudson Vision Plan is now on the City of Hudson website, with its own tab on the homepage: Vision Plan - 1996.
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In 95 I was living over the Jersey Bakery and had just started rehab on cabin number 11 down at N Dock, so curious I attended...
ReplyDeleteCraig Thorn III and Power Boat/HDC Puba Bruce Finn spoke. Mr Thorn's words were golden; use the Opera House as an "anchor" for commerce in a dying block. The man had vision.
Mr Finn spoke of exchanging one piece of the people's shore for another north of the state launch. NDTBA incorporated as a Rod & Gun that month in an attempt to secure our "inalienable" right to gather at the river.
Sheena Salvino, HDC executive director, and trusted City officials, why was NDTBA removed from the people's shore four years ago, dismembered and Power Boat retains both properties?
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ReplyDeleteThe 1996 Vision Plan is more like a plan for a plan. Its second half (parts 4 and 5) comprise The Master Plan and The Action Plan, which make suggestions on how to move forward.
But I'm not knocking the Vision Plan. If the waterfront effort of 2006-07 had heeded its suggestions, everyone would have been saved a lot of trouble and disappointment.
In fact, the Vision Plan and the State's LWRP Guidebook both recommend the appointment of focus groups and committees to look at specific waterfront issues. Looking back, it's clear that the City's failure (or refusal?) to do this 10 years ago was a huge error.
What Hudson's waterfront leaders did instead was to appoint experts who'd finish the job for us. That's how we got Cheryl Roberts (whose great idea was that?!), and also the despicable BFJ Planners (again, whose idea?).
These experts would half-heartedly conduct interviews with "stakeholders" (I never want to hear that word again), after which they'd return to their terrestrial offices and work exclusively on the pet ideas of the few people who were running the show. Typical Hudson, then and now (and some of the same people involved!).
The Vision Plan devotes only a small section to the waterfront, and not much to go on which wasn't superseded by the subsequent LWRP effort a decade and more later.
The Vision Plan's pipe dream sketches of waterfront shops and marinas seems dated now, and a tad vulgar too. (There are eras of waterfront planning when, willy-nilly, everyone on the Eastern seaboard designs the same look at the same time.)
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ReplyDeleteNaturally it was the HDC pushing to make this ancient document available, for whom generalities concerning any level of planning act like catnip, as long as everything the public sees remains vague. (Can anyone explain to me why the HDC is still in business? What crucial service can the non-public HDC do for us which our public IDA cannot do?)
Back to the Vision Plan, I'm afraid that in this case I must agree with the principal author of the failed waterfront program, Cheryl Roberts. I remember her explaining that the LWRP went well beyond the Vision Plan by realizing protections for North and South Bays, and by establishing a land swap with the previous owner of South Bay, and not just dialogue with them, or whatever the idea was.
That the landowners couldn't be trusted was something the public could have told the experts (and did), but that's not how we do things here. We don't even exercise those protections for the environment we managed to establish as Local Law. We suppose all you have to do is write the law, like waving a wand, and it takes care of itself.
You know, we're pretty clueless as to what we already have, and we're dusting off the Vision Plan again? Goodness gracious, are we really that lost?
Time for a brand new vision ?!
ReplyDeleteDefinitely!, but where the waterfront is concerned, ask yourself why we're already saddled with some of the same old players.
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