The HPC on 11 Warren Street

The final item of business on the agenda for last Friday's meeting of the Historic Preservation Commission was a discussion of 11 Warren Street. The topic was introduced by HPC chair Phil Forman, who spoke of the comments on "social media" about the three concepts for facade improvement presented at the public input session on June 9.

 

Forman cited as the best suggestion for dealing with the building the one offered by Walter Chatham in a comment made on the Gossips post "Perpetuating the Sins of the Past":

There is little hope of improving this sad building with "lipstick." It would be better to take the facade improvement money and apply it to the landscaping budget. A screen of arbor vitae or similar trees and vine-covered trellises would help a great deal. Ivy on the alley and Second Street walls would also help.

Interestingly, along those same lines, Matt McGhee commented at the HPC meeting that the building as it is now is preferrable to the proposed "improvements" because "it doesn't jump out at you the way the proposed revisions do."

Inspired by Chatham's comment, Forman consulted with landscape architect Britt Zuckerman, who created this rendering to show what a green wall of arbor vitae screening the building from the street might look like. 

The rendering above was presented at the HPC meeting. A second illustration, showing how a green wall might be made up of different species of trees and shrubs, was unintentionally left out of the HPC discussion. Gossips was able to obtain a copy of that image to share here.

Forman called 11 Warren Street "a structure that does not fit and can never fit" into the context of the historic block on which it is located. He lamented the fact that the County's acquisition of the building meant the city would have to put up with the out-of-character building for a least another thirty years. "We've lost an entire block in the historic district," Forman told his colleagues. He referred to the first block of Warren Street as a "gateway block" and called the building a "stoppage point." He attested, based on his own observation, that people walking up Warren Street from Front Street continue walking past the building, because they can see the buildings and shops beyond, but people walking down Warren Street toward the river stop when they get the 11 Warren, because they think the good stuff has come to an end. He maintained the building was "creating damage to the businesses on Warren Street," as well as those on South Front Street.

Forman told his colleagues, "We don't have clear authority to request they apply for a certificate of appropriateness," and suggested the HPC make a recommendation to the County. Forman's assumption that the HPC does not have "clear authority" may not be entirely true. Ray Jurkowski, Commissioner of Public Works for Columbia County, who is shepherding this project, has maintained the County is exempt from from Hudson's preservation ordinance, however, there is reason to believe this is not the case. 

In 2011, when the issue was the alterations to the Columbia County courthouse, Cheryl Roberts, who was then the city attorney, stated (and Gossips reported) that the City "has jurisdiction [over county projects] until the City says that it doesn't." At the time, Gossips also reported: "[David] Robinson [then Columbia County Commissioner of Public Works] had originally indicated that he would seek a Monroe decision from the Common Council to exempt the project from review and approval by the Hudson Planning Commission and the Hudson Historic Preservation Commission. . . ." In the end, Robinson chose to submit the courthouse project for site plan approval from the Planning Board (then still known as the Planning Commission) and a certificate of appropriateness from the HPC. 

The mention of a "Monroe decision" in the post from 2011 has relevance to the current situation. When the question of the county being exempt from city regulations arose, Victoria Polidoro, legal counsel to the HPC, spoke of the Monroe balancing test and questioned whether or not the County had applied the test to this project. Googling "Monroe balancing test" yields this AI Overview:

The Monroe balancing test is a multi-factor legal framework used in New York State to determine if a government or public agency is immune from local zoning ordinances when building a public facility. Established by the Court of Appeals in the seminal 1988 case Matter of County of Monroe v. City of Rochester, the test weighs public need against local community impact.

Instead of granting blanket immunity, municipalities and courts must weigh the following nine factors:

1. Nature and scope of the public entity or instrumentality seeking immunity.
2. Legislative intent to subject the encroaching entity to local zoning.
3. Kind of function or land use involved (e.g., essential public service versus commercial enterprise).
4. Public interest to be served by the project.
5. Effect of local regulation on the enterprise (whether it will severely impede the project).
6. Impact on legitimate local interests (e.g., traffic, agriculture, aesthetics).
7. Alternative locations for the facility in less restrictive or non-local zones.
8. Alternative methods of providing the needed improvement.
9. Intergovernmental participation (the extent to which the host community was consulted and considered during planning)

If the balancing test weighs in favor of the public entity, they are granted immunity and are not required to adhere to the host community's zoning restrictions.

It seems pretty clear that the Monroe balancing test would not weigh in favor of the County on this project, but how will this all play out? There was talk of approaching the mayor to get "the City" to tell the County the project must go before the HPC. Code Enforcement Officer Nick Fox suggested that when they apply for a building permit, which presumably the County is not exempt from having to do, he could send them to the HPC. The meeting ended without the HPC agreeing on a clear path forward, but Forman's last words on the subject were: "We can't just be passive about an entire block of Warren Street."

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