A Year Ago

As regular readers know, Gossips loves commemorating an anniversary, but we missed one this year. Last Thursday, March 19, marked the one-year anniversary of the day the meticulous "deconstruction" of the historic Hudson Orphan Asylum, which had been acquired by Galvan Initiatives Foundation in 2006, was abandoned in favor of just brutally knocking it down.

On March 7, the day the "deconstuction" began, Dan Kent of the Galvan Foundation  released a statement which read in part:

We are saddened to announce the need to deconstruct our building at 620 State Street in Hudson because of public safety concerns. . . .

We are committed to constructing a new building paying homage to the old building in the same location, using bricks and materials recovered from the original. This project honors the legacy of this important historic orphanage building while ensuring public safety.

A year later, the site has seen no development, and Galvan has announced its intention to use the bricks from the demolished orphanage building to make repairs to Hudson Upper Depot across the street, which is being readied for reuse as a brewery.

Because the demolition of the building was considered necessary for public safety, the Historic Preservation Commission was circumvented. The demolition was done without a certificate of appropriateness from the HPC despite the building's historic significance and its location within a locally designated historic district. Still it seems Section 169-8 of the code, which addresses demolition in historic districts, should apply here. The final sentence in that section reads: "In no case shall the time between demolition and commencement of new construction or lot improvement exceed six months."
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