Meetings and Events in the Week Ahead

The long Fourth of July weekend is over, and the schedule of meetings in the next three days of the week looks pretty intense.

• On Monday, July 8, the Common Council Economic Development Committee meets at 6 p.m., followed by the informal meeting of the Common Council at 7 p.m. Both meetings take place at City Hall. No agenda is yet available for either meeting.
• On Tuesday, July 9, at noon, the Hudson Literacy Fund and Friends of Hudson Youth will celebrate the official opening of Hudson Little Free Libraries with a ribbon cutting at Oakdale Park. Assemblymember Didi Barrett will be on hand for the ceremony.

The little libraries, which were built by the Technology Education class at Hudson High School from materials donated by Ed Herrington, Inc., and installed by the Department of Public Works, have been in place and in use for a couple of weeks at three locations throughout the city: 1 North Front Street, the First Presbyterian Church, and Oakdale Park. 

• Also on Tuesday, July 9, the DRI Committee will meet at 3 p.m. at City Hall. There was a site visit on June 25 for firms interested in submitting proposals in response to the City's RFQ for renovations to Promenade Hill. July 9 is the deadline for submitting proposals, so it is likely the proposals received will be reviewed at this meeting and decisions made about firms to be interviewed.
• The final meeting of interest on Tuesday, July 9, is a public hearing to be held by the Planning Board. The public hearing starts at 6 p.m. and will take place not at City Hall but in the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street. When the public hearing was scheduled a month ago, two projects were to be the subject of the hearing: the proposal to situate self-storage units in the vacant lot at the corner of Fairview Avenue and Oakwood Boulevard and, what's expected to be the big draw, the conditional use permit for Colarusso.

Regarding the latter, The Valley Alliance has resurrected itself for one more battle. Warning of a potential 400 percent increase in truck traffic, a double-wide paved highway through South Bay, and dangerous truck crossings over two major entrances to Hudson, they declare: "Hudson's Planning Board has the power to prevent these destructive impacts, which have held back the Waterfront for so long. . . . This is truly a watershed moment for Hudson."

• On Wednesday, July 10, Mayor Rick Rector holds a public hearing on Local Law No. 1 of 2019--an amendment to the zoning code that will eliminate offstreet parking requirements throughout the city. The public hearing takes place at 3:00 p.m. at City Hall. This amendment to the zoning code originated with a recommendation from the Planning Board, and so far the only person to speak out against it has been code enforcement officer Craig Haigh, who warned that it would create havoc in residential neighborhoods.
• At 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 10, two meetings are happening simultaneously: the Hudson Housing Authority Board of Commissioners meets in the Community Room at Bliss Towers, and the Common Council Housing and Transportation Committee meets at City Hall. At the Hudson Housing Authority meeting, there is always a chance to learn something about the plans for new construction. At the Housing and Transportation Committee meeting, it is expected that the impacts for Hudson of the Statewide Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 will be discussed. If things follow their usual course, one can probably start out at the HHA meeting, leave when the board goes into executive session, and get to City Hall to catch most of the Housing and Transportation meeting.

• At 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 10, the Livingston Planning Board continues its public hearing on the Global Partners proposal to build a market cafe with multiple gas and diesel islands on the northeast corner of the Bell's Pond intersection. The hearing takes place at Livingston Town Hall, 119 County Route 19 in Livingston. Click here for more information.  
• On Thursday, July 11, the board of Hudson Community Development and Planning Agency (HCDPA) meets at 2:00 p.m. at 1 North Front Street. The board will likely continue its discussion of efforts to divest itself of property--vacant lots of various sizes in the Second Ward.

Update: The HCDPA meeting has been canceled.

• On Friday, July 12, the Historic Preservation Commission meets at 10:00 a.m. at City Hall. 

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The Fate of a Remarkable Building

This building, with its curved wall, which stood at the junction of Columbia, State, and Green streets, has always fascinated me. 

According to an article that appeared in the Chatham Courier on February 20, 1964, celebrating 150 years of the Gifford-Wood Company, which was located in this building for almost a hundred of those years, the building was constructed in 1814 for the Columbia Furnace Company, which made agricultural implements as well as furnaces. Elihu Gifford, father of Hudson River School painter Sanford Gifford, purchased an interest in the company in 1823 and changed the name of the company to E. Gifford & Sons in 1856. 

In 1905, the company, then owned by Malcolm and Arthur Gifford, the grandsons of Elihu, and known as Gifford Brothers, merged with William T. Wood & Company of Arlington, Massachusetts, to form the Gifford-Wood Company. Six years later, Gifford-Wood moved to a new building on the south side of town, in an area then known as Second Hill, and the remarkable semi-circular building was put to different uses. Soon after Gifford-Wood moved out, the ground floor became the showroom for William Petry's automobile business. 

I learned not long ago that the last occupant of the building was Pitcher Accessories, which sold automotive supplies. These photographs, by Howard Gibson, discovered in the Photo by Gibson collection, reveal that it was the location of Pitcher Accessories at least as early as the 1940s. The building appears in the background of each of these pictures of a firefighters' parade that took place in Hudson in 1945.

Regrettably, the building, then 155 years old, was destroyed in a spectacular fire on November 20, 1969. The next day, this account of the conflagration appeared in the Albany Times-Union.

 

Today, of course, the Speedway gas station occupies the site where this extraordinary building once stood.
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The Dawn of Express Delivery

Last month, The Motley Fool published an update on Amazon's plan, announced five years ago, to use unmanned aircraft to deliver packages: "Amazon Drone Deliveries Are Almost Here." Yesterday, Gossips stumbled upon this article in the Columbia Republican for July 8, 1919, reporting on what was a hundred years ago cutting edge technology in package delivery.

The article in the Columbia Republican was not accompanied by a picture of the hydroplane that landed on the river, but this photograph may provide some idea of what a hydroplane in 1919 looked like.

Miss Bertha Vandenburgh, the recipient of the parcel from Macy's delivered by hydroplane, lived in this house on upper Warren Street.



One can only wonder what the parcel from Macy's contained.

Update: Walter Chatham shared this photograph, which accompanied an article entitled "Special Delivery, 1919" in Mobile Bay Magazine, and suggested that this was more likely the type of hydroplane used to make deliveries along the Hudson River. 

Photo courtesy Hammel's. The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama. Colorization by Dynamichrome Limited

The plane in the picture was used by Hammel's department store in Mobile, Alabama, to make special deliveries to customers along the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay.

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Good News for Carnivores

For those wanting to buy meat from animals raised in a safe and healthy environment, to support the farmers and butchers who make it possible, and to do that at any time of the day or night, the opportunity draws closer.

Gossips has previously reported about The Applestone Meat Company and its plan to open a facility on Green Street in Hudson. On Wednesday, the sign for the business was installed. Can the vending machines and the organic and grass-fed beef, pork, lamb, sausage, and poultry be far behind?
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Independence Day in Hudson, 1919

If we'd lived in Hudson a hundred years ago, here's what we could have done to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The "big Willard and Dempsey fight," which took place on that day in Toledo, Ohio, turned out to be the most brutal fight in boxing history. It is described on the website of the National Portrait Galley in the following way:

On July 4, 1919, challenger Jack Dempsey (1895-1983) met reigning champ Jess Willard (1881-1968) in an eagerly awaited bout for the heavyweight championship of the world. Having demolished a series of opponents to earn a shot at the crown, Dempsey was a decided underdog in the matchup with Willard, who was five inches taller and fifty-eight pounds heavier than this opponent was and considered unbeatable. Yet when the two boxers met, the contest was brief and brutal. In the opening round, Dempsey unleashed a torrent of punishing blows that felled Willard seven times. By the end of round three, Willard was finished, and Dempsey was the new champion.

We have the advantage over our predecessors here in Hudson. Instead of getting the fight by rounds by means of "a special wire," we can watch the fight from start to finish on YouTube.

In an article that appeared on Boxing.com in 2012 called "The Horror: Jess Willard's Toledo Injuries," Mike Casey elaborates on the damage done to Willard that day:

The famous beating that Manassa Jack administered to Willard in the searing heat of Toledo, Ohio, in the summer of 1919, remains the worst carnage that boxing has witnessed in the modern age. All sorts of colorful analogies were drawn as writers clattered away at their typewriters. Jess looked like the victim of a train wreck. Jess looked as if he had been hit by a speeding automobile. Jess looked as if a tall building had fallen on him.

For once, the bloody descriptions of a bloody fight didn't go far enough. The injuries that Willard sustained were horrific and more comparable to those suffered by shell blast victims in the recent Great War. One of his cheekbones had caved in. His jaw was broken, as was his nose. Many of his teeth had been knocked out. His ribs were busted, his eyes were swollen shut and he had lost his hearing in one ear. His face and body bore multiple contusions, cuts and abrasions. His lips were badly cracked.

Casey also quotes Jack Dempsey as saying, "I felt sick. I hadn't realized that my inner fury could do so much damage."

A hundred years later, Gossips wishes for Hudson a quiet and civilized Fourth of July, with neither violence nor fury.
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Hudson in Vanity Fair France

This morning, photographs that appear in the July issue of French Vanity Fair were posted on the Hudson Area Community Board on Facebook. They were shot in the vicinity of Bliss Towers.

One photograph in particular was of interest, because it called to mind a post that appeared on the Hudson Area Community Board in early May. In that post, a resident of the 100 block of Warren Street complained that a "band of people" doing a photo shoot in Prison Alley, were, without her permission, using her car, parked behind her house, as a prop, having their models "sprawl all over it." The appearance of the picture revealed the purpose of the shoot.
   

  
The photo that resulted from the shoot appears above. The damage to the car that resulted from the shoot reportedly cost more than $3,000 to repair. 
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Prohibition and Hudson

Back in January, Gossips published its first post about Prohibition and Hudson. It was published three days after the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification, on January 16, 1919, of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquors. In that post, I promised "to comb the available newspapers regularly, from now until the anniversary of the day Prohibition actually began on January 17, 1920, searching for news or comment about Prohibition." In the past months, my search hasn't yielded much of interest, but today, in the Columbia Republican for July 1, 1919, I discovered two items.

A little background is required. After the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson instituted a temporary wartime prohibition in order to save grain for producing food. That temporary prohibition was to end when the war was over, and the prohibition imposed by the 18th Amendment wasn't to take effect until January 1920, but on June 30, 1919, a bill was introduced in Congress to "stop the gap" between wartime prohibition and constitutional prohibition. An article on the front page of the Columbia Republican for July 1, 1919, with the dateline June 30, reported the bill "would make prohibition continuous beginning to-morrow"--tomorrow being July 1. The two items of interest appeared on page ten of the same paper. 

The first reports an action that seems surprising given the impending crisis for the brewing industry.

"Checona" was a soft drink "with a twang and body all its own." The promotional piece below extols Checona in this way: "This 20th-century non-intoxicating beverage never had to pass through an experimental period, the foundation of its success was laid by the founder of the Evans' Brewery in 1786. In all characteristics it is as closely allied to the original Evans' product as conditions permit--and has won its way upon its merit and family resemblance and reputation."

A column over from the report on the strike at C. H. Evans & Sons Brewery, there was a report on the reaction of saloonkeepers in Hudson to developments in Washington.

We know from the scandal that happened in Hudson in March 1922 that many saloonkeepers in Hudson did not stop selling liquor, beer, and wine, "continue to do business along restaurant lines," or "sell soft drinks, cigars, sandwiches, etc.," but on this day a hundred years ago, that's what they told the newspaper.
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Meeting Shift

It seems the Common Council Housing and Transportation Committee meeting, originally scheduled for tomorrow--Wednesday, July 3--at 6:45 p.m. has been rescheduled for Wednesday, July 10, at 6:00 p.m.--exactly the same time that the Hudson Housing Authority Board of Commissioners holds its regular monthly meeting. Those are two meetings that really shouldn't happen concurrently, but so it goes.
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Progress Report: Galvan Housing Initiative

The Strategic Housing Action Plan, which was completed last year, indicates that the Galvan Foundation was creating 29 units of low- to moderate-income housing in 10 buildings located throughout the city.

An article that appeared in HudsonValley360 on March 20, 2018, reported that the units were expected to be completed "by the end of the year"--the year being 2018: "Galvan Foundation announces affordable housing initiative." Now that we are halfway into 2019, it seems a good time to check on the progress of this initiative.

29-31 Fairview Avenue

The sign announcing apartments for rent has disappeared, and yesterday the painting of the porch railings was finally completed. It appears that at least one of the units is now occupied. 
Update: Dan Kent, Director of Initiatives for the Galvan Foundation, has informed Gossips that all four apartments in this building are occupied.

260 Warren Street

Notices in the windows on the ground floor announce the imminent opening of Lawrence Park Wine Bar, and a certificate of appropriateness was granted by the Historic Preservation Commission for a hanging sign for the wine bar on Friday. There is no indication, however, that any of the three apartments in the building is ready for occupancy. 
Update: According to Kent, Galvan will be starting to accept lease applications for the three apartments in this building in the next few days.

22-24 Warren Street

A year ago, the Historic Preservation Commission granted a certificate of appropriateness for the facade alterations proposed for this building, but so far no work has begun. 
Update: Kent reports that construction on this building will begin in the fall--more than a year after the project was granted a certificate of appropriateness.

356 Union Street

Although a certificate of appropriateness was never granted for the proposed restoration of this building, work has been going on there for close a year. But the project, which is to provide seven two-bedroom apartments, remains unfinished.
Update: Kent predicts that the work on this building will be completed by this fall. 

340 State Street

This building appears to be occupied, although no exterior work has been done on the house since it was acquired by the Galvan entity Hudson Collective Realty LLC in 2017.

105 Union Street

Although this house has been occupied at times since it was acquired by Galvan Initiatives Foundation in 2013, it is not clear if it is occupied now. Since Galvan acquired it, no exterior renovation has been done on the house. 
Update: Kent maintains that this house is occupied, but a Gossips source reports that the tenants moved out a month ago, unhappy about repairs needed to the house that were not made.

357 Union Street

This house was acquired by Galvan Initiatives Foundation in 2015. It is not clear if the house is currently occupied or not, but so far no exterior renovation has been proposed. 
Update: Kent reports that this house is occupied.

229 Union Street

This house was acquired by Hudson Collective Realty LLC is 2015. No exterior renovation has been done on the house, and it is not clear if it is currently occupied. 
Update: Kent reports that the two apartments in this house are occupied.

69 North Seventh Street

Work is currently underway on this house. 
Update: Kent reports that the work on this house is nearly completed and lease applications will soon be accepted.

335-337 Allen Street

The restoration of this house was completed about a year ago, without a certificate of appropriateness from the Historic Preservation Commission. The four apartments in the building--one studio, two one-bedroom, and one two-bedroom--have been occupied since then.
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On the Road Again

Next week, on July 9, the Planning Board is holding a public hearing on a conditional use permit for Colarusso's operations through South Bay and at the dock. What's under scrutiny is the activity that goes on at the dock and a proposed new haul road that goes from the dock to quarry in Greenport. Greenport approved its part of the haul road--from just east of Route 9G to the quarry--almost two years ago, but lawsuits suspended the review by the Hudson Planning Board. Now, after several months of asking questions and deliberating over the answers, the Planning Board has decided they know what they need to know and it's time to move ahead. But is it?

The repairs to the dock, undertaken in December 2016 without the required review by the Planning Board, ended the grandfathered nonconforming use status of the dock operations and triggered the need to seek a conditional use permit from the Planning Board. Much of the discussion of the project by the Planning Board has focused on the dock, dealing with such issues of hours of operation, number of trucks, screening stockpiled material, and traffic at the Broad Street railroad crossing. There hasn't been as much talk about the haul road itself, but perhaps there should have been. The South Bay Coalition is now questioning if the new route of the haul road through South Bay doesn't require a variance because it deviates from the Core Riverfront District and encroaches into the Recreation Conservation (R-C) District.

On the map above, created by the South Bay Coalition, the green line shows the Core Riverfront (C-R) District as it extends through South Bay from the dock area to Route 9G. This is the corridor that the Zoning Board of Appeals decided was correct when asked to determine the exact boundaries of the C-R District. The pink shows where the proposed haul road deviates from the C-R District and encroaches into the Recreation Conservation (R-C) District. It would appear that, before there can be a public hearing by the Planning Board, the project needs a use variance from the ZBA, because such industrial hauling is not a permitted use in the R-C District.

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Events and Meetings in the Week Ahead

There's not much happening in the days leading up to the Fourth of July, but there are a few things that merit mention. 

• Tonight, Monday, July 1, the OutHudson Pride Parade Awards Gala takes place at Helsinki Hudson. The coveted Roy G. Biv Awards, created by local artists, will be bestowed upon the winning entries in this year's pride parade. The festivities begin at 7:00 p.m. 

• Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 2, the Tourism Board meets at 5:00 p.m. at 1 North Front Street. Having heard presentations by all four respondents to its RFP, the board will probably continue to discuss the existential crisis caused by the Common Council's determination to defund the Tourism Board, which was created by the previous Council when it enacted the lodging tax, and control all the revenue derived from the lodging tax.
• The regular meeting of the Conservation Advisory Council, scheduled for 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 2, has been canceled. This is the second meeting in a row that has been canceled since the CAC completed its Open Space and Natural Resources Inventory and Jonathan Lerner stepped down as chair.
• On Wednesday, July 3, the Common Council Youth, Education, Seniors, and Recreation Committee meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall. At 6:45 p.m. that same day, the Housing and Transportation Committee meets, also at City Hall. No agenda is available for either meeting.

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