Thursday, July 11, 2024

Seven Years Later

It was August 1, 2017, when Governor Andrew Cuomo came to town to announce that Hudson was the Capital Region winner in Round Two of the Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI). Seven years later, at the informal Common Council meeting on Monday, Rob Perry, superintendent of public works, reported that implementation of the project called Hudson Connects, the largest of the City's four DRI projects, was set to begin next week, July 15. 

Work will commence at Second and Allen streets, with the Second Street stairs that descend from Allen Street to Cross Street. Below is the last rendering of what is planned for the stairs. This was created three years ago by Arterial, the group that did the planning and design for the complete streets connectivity program. Exactly what the current plan for the stairs involves is not known.
  

The schedule for work on the entire project, which apparently is now being called "Hudson Streetscapes," can be found here. The final plans for the project, which require a fair amount of interpretation and do not include renderings, can be found here

A press release issued by the mayor's office this morning contains this information about the project that is about to commence:
Work under the Hudson Connects portion of the overall DRI, the Hudson Streetscapes project, is beginning on July 15, 2024, and will be ongoing throughout October. This work will remedy many of the problem areas from Front Street to Second Street, including, but not limited to, making our streets ADA compliant by creating new curb ramps at corners, fixing existing non-compliant curb ramps, creating new crosswalks, and addressing the Cross Street staircase. Additionally, and simultaneously, the Public Works Board will be commencing work as part of their Sidewalk Improvement District, which will entail fixing many of our city’s sidewalks and tackling curb ramps and crosswalks not covered under the scope of the DRI. The City of Hudson’s Department of Public Works (DPW) will also be working diligently in assisting both projects. 

Only time will reveal exactly what has survived from Arterial's original proposals for enhancing our streets. We can only hope that the proposed street furniture didn't make the cut.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CAROLE OSTERINK

1 comment:

  1. If you squint hard enough, it seems there's going to be at least a couple of type-2 benches where Warren St converges into Front St. These look acceptable in the technical drawings.

    At this point we should be happy that the proposed benches do not appear to be studded with poisonous spikes.

    ReplyDelete