Inside the Northern Empire

Back in the day when it was easy to find a cheap apartment in Hudson, many of those apartments were located in buildings owned and managed by Phil Gellert, who called his real estate holdings in Columbia County "Northern Empire." Over the years, Gossips has done a few posts about Gellert's properties in Hudson. "Gellert Gallery" inventoried the twenty buildings he owned in Hudson in 2010. In 2016, in 2018, and again in 2023, Gossips revisited some of the Gellert properties that then had new owners.  

In 2023, it was announced that The Spark of Hudson had purchased what was described in the press as "the last of the properties" that made up Gellert's Northern Empire in Hudson. One of those properties was this one: 7-9 South Seventh Street.

Not long after its acquisition by The Spark of Hudson was announced, the building was back on the market. It was recently purchased by Billy Shannon, who was once a reporter for the Register-Star, for a time wrote a blog called Hudson River Zeitgeist, and now publishes what he calls Middle Sphere on Substack. Because the building used to be owned by Gellert, Shannon sought Gellert out to speak with him. Yesterday, Shannon published their conversation, which can be found here. It makes fascinating reading.

At one point in the conversation, Gellert makes reference to a building he owned on Allen Street, where there was a fire in May 2020.

Photo: Julie Metz

In his conversation with Shannon, Gellert says of the building:

We had a fire about maybe six years ago on Allen Street, and the building was completely renovated. It was a nice building. As I said, I had over 30 buildings in Hudson. This one was probably as nice as any building around.

Gellert's statement makes it sound like he was responsible for the renovation of the building. That is not true. He sold the fire-damaged building, and it was the new owners who salvaged it and restored it. The following pictures show the building when Gellert owned it, the building today, and the building in 2022 when its restoration was getting underway.

Back in 2011, Gellert ran afoul of the Historic Preservation Commission when he removed (and discarded) doors and sidelights from the entrances. Although the doors were probably not original to the house, which dates to 1835, they were at least a hundred years old, and sidelights may well have been original detail. The doors were replaced with mismatched metal doors, and the area around the doors filled in to make the smaller doors fit. This, of course, was done without a certificate of appropriateness from the HPC.

The HPC required him to replicate the doors and the sidelights as they had been.

Again, Shannon's "A conservation with Phil Gellert" makes interesting reading.

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