The major purpose of last night's special Planning Board meeting was to review the design of the proposed buildings. In March, Quncie Williams, the architect from Alexander Gorlin Architects who said he was the architect for the project, made a presentation to the Planning Board and got a tad huffy when Planning Board member Peter Spear pressed him about the relationship of the renderings to what would be the final product. Last night, Alex Gorlin himself was there to make the presentation. Interestingly, he identified himself as the design architect and did not mention Williams.
Gorlin began by saying his firm has worked with Mountco, HHA's development partner, for the past fifteen years, "doing a number of award-winning projects." He proceeded to show pictures of some of those projects: Neremiah Spring Creek in East New York;
The Brook in the Bronx;
Boston Road in the Bronx;
and El Borinquen Residence in the Bronx.
He maintained that all of these buildings were "designed not to look affordable but to look market rate."
In demonstrating his credentials for the project, Gorlin also mentioned his book, Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing, which is actually a collection of essays by other people that he co-edited with architectural historian Victoria Newhouse.
He then launched into a history of the site, which he described as being in its earliest time "near whale fishing docks." The visuals started with an 1838 map of Hudson and ended with this is still from the 1959 film Odds Against Tomorrow.
He explained they were "trying to bring back the bustling urbanism of Hudson." (An aside: Gossips was just on Warren Street and can attest that Hudson does not need any help to bring back its bustling urbanism. That might have been true thirty years ago, but it certainly isn't now.)
Gorlin pointed out, as he has done before, that the open space that is part of the redevelopment plan is the same size as the Public Square, a.k.a. Seventh Street Park. He asserted that the open space could be "designed wonderfully to be one of the great parks of the city."
When Planning Board member Veronica Conca asked if there would be more open space than there currently is around Bliss Towers, Gorlin didn't actually answer the question. Instead he said, "It won't feel like leftover space." Interestingly, two weeks ago, when the Planning Board was reviewing plans for the proposed "Waterfront Village," on the other end of Second Street, members of the Planning Board worried that the open space included in that project would be "exclusive." No one expressed similar concerns about the open space proposed for this project.
Gorlin's presentation provided lots of new renderings. These two which show essentially models of what the site will look like when Phase 1 is completed and what it will look like when Bliss Towers and Columbia Apartments have been demolished and Phase 2 is completed.
There are also these renderings, which show the project from various vantage points on the site. The inset in the bottom right indicates the vantage point for each one. A couple of them assume that Phase 2 is already completed.
Gorlin said he had "looked to the texture of the city on Warren Street to pull that into what we're doing and especially the scale and the use of brick and bay windows." He noted, "We're doing four-story buildings in keeping with the general height of the city itself." Despite the talk about texture and scale and buildings that "align harmoniously into the community," not one of the renderings presented by Gorlin shows the project in actual context. What will people walking on Warren Street see when look to the north at Second Street? What will drivers see when they turn north onto Second from Warren Street? What will people leaving the dog park see after they've pulled up the steep hill and are approaching State Street? And maybe the biggest question: Why did Gorlin say they were building four-story buildings when the renderings clearly show five stories?
Gorlin called Bliss Towers "a good example of bad urbanism." One wonders what fifty years from now people will call what is currently being proposed.
More to come.
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Anyone who would equate a 1950s photo of a quaint rural city with vintage cars to the disturbed, urban blockhouses being proposed is clearly either insane, or drooling with the thought of attaching themselves to the public teat. This is way beyond bad urbanism, it requires a new descriptive, let's call it "profane disturbanism."
ReplyDeleteThe last thing we need in Hudson is those cute colored blocks. Oy...
ReplyDeleteArchitects understandably want to push the envelope a bit. Affordable housing is easy to get wrong, because the most design -forward projects are not always going to be deliver what the residents of affordable housing need most: safety, tranquility, and a sense of belonging. Having said that, I do not agree that Hudson has already gone as far as it needs to go with urbanism. Anyone who has ever been to a large, truly cosmopolitan city can see Hudson for what it is, a high bourgeois example of historic preservationism meets second home prestige lifestyle.
ReplyDeleteI am not quite sure why the implication is being made that it's verboten to see the finished project from e.g. Warren St. Surely it's not that offensive, is it?
ReplyDeleteYou missed the point, Max. I'm not suggesting that it would be verboten to see the project from Warren Street. Frankly, there is no way you wouldn't be able to see it. I was harkening back to something Jeffrey Dodson, HHA executive director, said (and I reported) back in March. (See this post: https://gossipsofrivertown.blogspot.com/2026/03/hha-and-planning-board.html.) At a Planning Board meeting, Dodson recalled his first walk down Warren Street, thinking this was a beautiful, historic place, "Only to take a right on Second Street and go, 'My god, what is that?'" He was reacting to Bliss Towers, which he described as "hideous." Given this recollection, as I have said before, it is not unreasonable to think Gorlin might have provided a rendering that shows the proposed development, in its actual context, from that perspective.
DeleteDodson's remark is actually not that far off that.
DeleteI myself had a somewhat similar reaction when I saw Bliss Towers for the first time.
That said, Bliss Towers is also nine stories tall whereas the new buildings have five (four in the opinion of one).
Gorlin by the way may not be entirely off the mark when he claims that previous projects they did largely look market-rate. I have seen first hand at least the one in East New York and on first glance they resemble contemporary town houses you may find in many middle big cities in the US, especially in the sun belt.
There was still however a bit of an uncanny valley effect and that wasn't due to the buildings but rather the street decorations. It felt like there were fewer trees and less greenery there than you would find elsewhere around this type of construction.
This is something that I think the city can actually and should fix if it comes to that.