Last Night with the Planning Board: Part 3

The title should more accurately be "Thursday Night with the Planning Board: Part 3," but, since it's the final part in a series. . . . 

Early on in the Planning Board meeting on Thursday, Ron Bogle, who chairs the Planning Board, made the following statement. (It should be noted that Peter Spear was absent from the meeting on Thursday, because he had to be out of town for business.)

I want to comment, mostly for the record and on behalf of Peter Spear who had expressed some concerns that I'm sympathetic with. And that is, as we approach this project, the comprehensive plan addressed, the one issue it addressed was that we should seek to correct the harm that was done during the Urban Renewal period in our communities.

The particular statement being referenced here is found on page 51 of the comprehensive plan known as Hudson 2035:

This comprehensive plan acknowledges the city’s complexities, including the history of displacement in Hudson, from indigenous Mahican people to residents that lost their homes and communities during Urban Renewal to those that could no longer afford rent while the 2035 Comprehensive Plan was being developed. By recognizing historical injustices, the 2035 Comprehensive Plan commits to promoting equitable development that repairs harms and prevents future displacement. 

Let's review the harms that were done to Hudson during Urban Renewal. The photograph below shows an aerial view of Hudson from the 1930s, decades before the devastation of the early 1970s.

The photograph shows that once upon a time the lower end of the city was pretty much the same on both sides of Warren Street. The grid pattern of the streets was regular. Houses and buildings north of Warren Street stood on 26-foot-wide lots with a relationship to the street that is still found on the blocks south of Warren Street. 

An area of more than fifty acres was leveled and re-created during Urban Renewal. The extent of the project is described in a booklet published in August 1970 by the Hudson Urban Renewal Agency, chaired by the late Arthur Koweek. The last two sentences are particularly interesting. 

Approximately 286 dwelling units, housed in 176 buildings, most of them in extremely substandard condition, were found in the area. Approximately 850 persons resided in them in conditions that were deplorable. Overcrowding was a problem in many buildings, and dwelling units sometimes housed two or three families. Many units were vermin infested, had inadequate heating facilities, chipping paint, leaking roofs, poor lighting, and cracked foundations. Fires had always been a problem in the area, and the rotted hulks of many burned out buildings were to be found.

Physically the area contains more than fifty acres and is bound on the North by New Street, on the South by Cherry Alley, on the West by the Hudson River and on the East by Second Street. The area was a tax problem to the City, taking more than its proportionate share of City services, such as fire, police and health protection. There was also a problem with the abandonment of buildings as well as there being a number of structures owned by the City because of tax defaults.

Note that the original parameters of the Urban Renewal Area included both sides of the first two blocks of Warren Street.

The Hudson Urban Renewal Agency painted a pretty bleak picture of that which it destroyed. That's understandable. It had to justify the extreme actions it was taking. But an item that appeared in the Register-Star on April 30, 1974, gives different sense of the neighborhood and the houses that were bulldozed. The last house to be demolished was this one, which stood at 12 Chapel Street and was the home of an 83-year-old woman named Mrs. First. According to the information provided in the Register-Star, she had lived in the house for fifty years and had raised her six children there.

The reason the demolition of this particular house got attention in the Register-Star was not only the irony that the "First house" was the "last house" to be demolished but also that Mrs. First's son, Walter First, was the president of Keil Contracting Corp., which was under contract with the Hudson Urban Renewal Agency to demolish "all the street's buildings, removing sidewalks, pavements, and curbing and regrading the site in preparation for future development."

There is even more irony, which couldn't be appreciated in 1974. Walter's son, Jeffrey First (shown seated at the far left in the picture above, on the stoop of his grandmother's house) served for many years, up until 2016, as executive director of the Hudson Housing Authority and property manager for Bliss Towers and Columbia Apartments.

What happened during Urban Renewal had an enormous, community-altering impact not only on the neighborhoods of the Second Ward but also on the city as a whole. Hudson still deals with the consequences of the decisions made by the Hudson Urban Renewal Agency, decisions that concentrated low-income housing in one area of the city and rendered the revitalization that has taken place on the south side of Warren Street and elsewhere impossible by destroying much of the historic architecture that has been the engine of Hudson's revitalization. Granted it is not insignificant, but the current plan does nothing more than provide new housing for the current residents of Bliss Towers. In that respect, it perpetuates the harm done by Urban Renewal by perpetuating the concentration of low-income housing in the same area of the city. 

At Thursday's meeting, Planning Board member Sara Black said she was interested in "having more of a public discussion about what it means to repair the harms of Urban Renewal." She went on to say:

I've heard a lot about this in terms of restoring the built urban form. I think stably rehousing all the residents of Bliss Towers is the most significant way to repair the harms of Urban Renewal, as frameworks that are outlined in the comprehensive plan are largely not architectural.

Those hoping for a discussion of the proposed design for the project, one that assesses the success with which the designs manifest the claims the architects have made about replicating texture and scale and creating buildings that "align harmoniously into the community," will be disappointed. That apparently is not going to happen. At one point in the meeting, Bogle stated, "I don't think we should opine on the design because that's outside the scope." Responding to a question from the Planning Board's consulting engineer, Bogle said:

I think all we can say about the aesthetics is that the applicant has been responsive to the board, thoroughly. They provided a fulsome and transparent overview of the overall plans for the project. I just don't feel like we need to be making architectural judgments about the design, and I believe they've responded in many ways to the comprehensive plan and they have responded in many ways to the character and nature, both scale and density, of architecture in the city.

The document Bogle is referencing, "Questions for the HHA Architect," with the responses from Alexander Gorlin, can be found here. 

At the meeting on Thursday, the Planning Board made a negative declaration in the SEQR (State Environmental Quality Review) process, which came as no surprise although Register-Star and the Times Union both made it their headline. The Planning Board also set a date for a public hearing on the project: Tuesday, July 21, at 6:00 p.m. at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street.

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