An Opportunity Not to Be Missed

Some people revel in the chance simply to visit the Dr. Oliver Bronson House and view the architectural treasure on the grounds of the Hudson Correctional Facility. Others wonder how many times they will be called upon to celebrate the fact the beloved ruin now has windows and the roof doesn't leak. For the former and the latter, this coming Saturday will be an experience to remember.

On Saturday, November 14, the house will be available for visitation from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. The event, which is free and open to all, is an opportunity to see the stabilization and restoration work that has been going on this summer and to learn what the archaeological investigation has revealed about the original configuration of the grounds immediately around the house.

The restoration has progressed to the point where it is time to think about paint colors. An extensive paint analysis was just completed, which reveals the colors the house was painted at different periods in its history. Peter Watson, author of the Dr. Oliver Bronson House Daybook blog and an authority on the work of A. J. Davis, will be on hand on Saturday to discuss the findings. Copies of the extensive and intriguing paint analysis report, Selective Exterior Finish Color Investigation, will be at the house for review.

The archaeological investigation has in the past week uncovered vital clues to the original design of the grounds around the entrance to the cellar kitchen on the south facade. Matt Kirk from the archaeological firm Hartgen Associates will be at the Bronson House on Saturday to talk about what the archaeological investigations have so far discovered. On Saturday, for the first time in most people's experience, it will be possible to walk all the way around the house.

The current project at the Bronson House, which will be completed in June 2016, is funded by a $400,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Fund. Historic Hudson's match for this grant is $100,000. A month ago, $75,000 still had to be raised for the match. Today, only $33,000 remains to be raised. You can help support this exciting project to restore Hudson's only National Historic Landmark. Click here to make a donation.

Support for the restoration of the Dr. Oliver Bronson House has come from New York State's Environmental Protection Fund, the Hudson River Bank & Trust Foundation, the John E. Streb Fund for New York of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Gerry Charitable Trust, the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation, the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, and the Ettinger Foundation.

The Dr. Oliver Bronson House is located on the grounds of the Hudson Correctional Facility. Enter the grounds through the entrance on Worth Avenue and follow the signs to the house.
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The City Budget for 2016

Sounding as if he were still campaigning and speaking in a voice that seemed unnecessarily loud, Mayor William Hallenbeck presented the proposed budget for 2016--the work of the BEA (Board of Estimate and Apportionment, made up of the mayor, the city treasurer, and the Common Council president)--to the Common Council this evening, in a session that was supposed to take ten minutes but lasted twice as long. Here are the highlights. There will be a 1 percent increase in City property taxes (the state imposes a 2 percent cap on property tax increases). Two capital reserve funds will be established with money allocated from the fund balance: $600,000 for replacing the Ferry Street bridge, and $150,000 for a new tower truck for the fire department to be purchased in 2020, leaving $2.2 million in the fund balance.

The proposed 2016 budget can be viewed here. There will be a public hearing on the budget on Tuesday, November 17, at 6:30 p.m., immediately preceding the regular monthly meeting of the Common Council.
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Excuses, Excuses . . .

Please bear with me. I'm at the Board of Elections, helping with the hand count of the ballots from last Tuesday's election. There should be a new Gossips post, however, by late afternoon or early evening.

Election Gamesmanship

It's a time-honored Hudson tradition to try to get your name on the ballot as many times as possible. This year, as has regularly happened in the past, some of the Democratic candidates reappeared on the Working Families line, and most of the Republican candidates appeared again on the Conservative and Independence lines.

The most memorable example of party line acquisitiveness happened back in 2003, when one of Rick Scalera's minions commandeered Linda Mussmann's independent Bottom Line Party line, forcing her to create another independent party, the Fair Deal Party, to run against him that year.

Back in the day of lever voting machines, having the same person appear several times in the same column didn't matter much. The machine didn't let the voter flip more than one lever in a column, forcing voters to decide, before opening the curtain, on which party line they wanted to vote for a given candidate. With our current system of voting, voters can, and often do, fill in the circle beside the name of the candidate of their choice every time that name appears on the ballot. It's only when the ballot is fed into the machine that an error message warns that multiple votes have been cast for the same candidate. The voter then has the choice of casting the ballot as is and having the vote go to the candidate on the first line on which his or her name appears, or having the machine spit the ballot back out, returning it to the election inspectors to have them mark it "SPOILED," and getting a new ballot to mark correctly.

There are presumed advantages to cross endorsements, as they are called. If a candidate loses a major party primary, having a second party endorsement ensures the candidate's name will still appear on the ballot in the general election. That advantage is iffy though. It's impossible to recall any candidate in the past twenty-two years in Hudson ever winning on a second party line after losing a major party primary.

Once in a while, having your name appear multiple times on the ballot does pay off, as it did this year in the Fourth Ward. Running for Fourth Ward alderman, Lauren Scalera, daughter of Rick Scalera, past master of getting his name on the ballot as many times as possible (his name appeared three times on the Fifth Ward ballot this year, even though he was running unopposed for Fifth Ward supervisor), managed to get her name on the ballot three times: on the Democratic, Republican, and Independence party lines. (She'd tried for four times, but her Conservative Party petition was thrown out because it gave as her address her father's address in the Fifth Ward instead of an address in the Fourth Ward, the ward she wanted to represent.)

Scalera, in her very first run for political office, got 108 votes on Election Day, besting incumbent Fourth Ward alderman Alexis Keith by 13 votes. Quite an achievement for a newcomer to politics, but one has to wonder if the format of the ballot, which is dictated by a host of apolitical considerations, influenced the outcome. In Column 9, the names of three candidates appeared: Alexis B. Keith (Democratic), Derrick Smart (Republican), and Rich "Trixie" Volo (Working Families). In Column 10, only one name appeared, three times: Lauren Scalera. Although there is a single heading over the two columns with the direction "Vote for Two," one wonders how many voters, accustomed to voting for one candidate in each column, thought they had to choose one in Column 9 and one in Column 10 and voted for Scalera because she was the only candidate in Column 10. We'll never know.
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Dereliction of Environmental Duty in New York

The following is an editorial by Gidon Eshel, environmental consultant and Research Professor of Environmental Physics at Bard College. 

As the Skelos-Silver spectacles unfold in Manhattan, Albany culture of pervasive, mostly legal corruption will be on prominent display. Given the rarity with which sanitizing light shines on this culture, an exhaustive examination seems appropriate. And few aspects of this culture deserve a closer examination than the crucial yet rarely discussed handling of the money-energy-environment confluence by the Cuomo administration.

Because of its aging, decrepit infrastructure, New York is by far the most prominent state currently in immediate need of rethinking its power delivery system. The century old model—relatively few power plants supplying virtually all customers via a highly centralized network we call “the grid”—is outdated. Modern alternatives that seamlessly integrate recent advances in hardware, network analysis, engineering, material science, and cyber security with novel business models that best accompany the new infrastructure are well overdue. States dominating the race to shape the necessary once-a-century conceptual leap will lead the future industry, and enjoy its windfalls. States opting instead to expand existing realities, in space or time, deprive their citizens of rare economic, environmental and power democratization opportunities.

The New York Public Service Commission (PSC), the Governor appointed body overseeing utilities, has indeed proposed several transmission projects. Key among those is an addition of about one gigawatt to existing north-south transmission along the Hudson Valley. Unfortunately, the proposal is deeply flawed. With no element that wasn’t commonplace in 1950, it systematically ignores any recent addition to the modern utility toolbox, thus expanding outdated realities in both space and time. While adding under 5 percent of typical downstate peak loads, the project also raises serious regional security and environmental concerns.

Most puzzling, the project is neither needed nor stands to deliver societal benefits. The PSC has offered two rationales for the project, neither even remotely persuasive.

First, the PSC invoked enhancing downstate reliance on upstate wind energy. Yet while upstate wind resources are pedestrian at best, they are superb off Long Island. If you are serious about wind, you go offshore (as Massachusetts is doing), and simultaneously minimize transmission losses because eastern populations are overwhelmingly coastal.

Second, the PSC cited congestion mitigation, the need to subsidize increased power costs during peak demand. This is illogical. Most times the grid capacity is only 50 to 60 percent tapped, with enormous capital idling nearly all the time only to accommodate a few hours a year of peak load. Congestion costs are therefore a simple market control limiting the inefficient use of a scarce resource, power during peak demand. They require no “mitigation.”

In pursuing nearly pure fossil based, decidedly 20th century unneeded project, New York is sadly turning its back on past accomplishments and foregoing leadership in the New Grid race, futilely clinging instead to the old model's last gasp. Absent course correction, New York’s energy efficiency will continue to slip, its choicest agricultural lands will be critically compromised, and state ratepayers will be saddled with upfront costs in the billions, and with hundreds of millions of additional annual operational costs. With energy research shunning the state, and meager energy modernization budgets shrinking (under 1.5 percent of the state budget and falling), New York's industry and budget crunched research universities will be reduced to idly watching their counterparts in states with more enlightened environmental leadership.

Whether standard Albany cronyism or simple incompetence, this is terrible for New York’s future. Yet notwithstanding fictional websites or languishing campaign promises, and despite New York’s national prominence—second to California alone in number of scientific papers, National Science Foundation grants, or patents granted, and the third highest GDP contributor—New York is already environmentally limping.

Wind plus solar account for 3.6 percent of total generation in New York to California’s 15 percent, and the percentage of New York households with Smart Meters, which allow customers to sell renewable power they generate to their utility, improving return on clean energy investment, is less than a third of California’s. Bleaker still is the share of “green” jobs in private sector employment. With neighboring Vermont and Pennsylvania leading nationally with 3 to 4 percent, New York‘s 1.7 percent is 39th, comfortably below Texas’ 2.1 percent. While in green jobs share in total employment New York fares better, its 3 percent is handily bested by Vermont’s 4.4 percent or even Idaho’s 3.7 percent.

These failings are not an accident, but a collaborative executive-legislative environmental surrender. The employment benefits of energy efficiency and environmental legislation add economic dimensions to this refusal to lead.

Given these failures, and with Albany subject to rare scrutiny, key questions beg for answers.

Why is New York so firmly behind a project that lacks any cogent rationale, that is devoid of any technical merit or novelty, that is environmentally ruinous, and that offers nothing more than an ephemeral life support for a dying model? If a two billion dollar deal is about to be sealed on our behalf, a deal that harms ratepayers in New York but handsomely benefits a few utilities that would rather extort than renew, why are the considerations that led to the deal shrouded in such secrecy? What mechanisms, if any, are there to ensure that designs and bids are selected based on merit alone? And more broadly, with its almost unparalleled human and fiscal capital, and with the enormous industrial business opportunities national environmental leadership confers, why is New York under Cuomo insisting on steadily degrading environmental performance while actively avoiding the national environmental leadership with which the state human capital is so eminently consistent?

With Albany culture firmly on the defense, the coming months may offer some answers.

Click here to make your comment to the Public Service Commission.

Election Watch

The hand count of the ballots--all the ballots in Columbia County--begins today, and Gossips will be there . . . counting.

The Incredible Beauty We Enjoy in Hudson

According to the old idiom, the early bird catches the worm, but on the southern edge of Hudson, the early riser may be treated to this.

John Cody captured this extraordinary landscape painted by the light from the rising sun.
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In Memoriam: Albright Harrell

Washington Square Park, in front of the courthouse, was where I first met Albright and encountered him most often through the years. He was enormously fond of my dog William, and I suspect he thought of me mostly as the woman who walked William. 

Lynn Davis and Rudy Wurlitzer knew Albright far better than I. Lynn provided this photograph of Albright, and Rudy the remembrance that follows.

On November 2nd, Hudson lost a beloved figure when Albright Harrell passed away. Having lived in Hudson for over thirty years, Albright was known throughout the eccentric fabric of Hudson street life for his sartorial splendor from top to bottom, in polished shoes and immaculate, well tended wardrobe, as well as for his love of jazz, soul music, gardening, along with a nourishing meal with old friends. He will be deeply missed by all that knew and loved him.

How Did This Happen?

Yesterday, 286 people voted for Victor Mendolia in the race for Common Council president, in spite of the fact that Mendolia had withdrawn from the race more than two months ago. There have been demands to know why his name still appeared on the ballot and whose fault it was. The explanation is that New York State Election Law establishes a deadline for candidates to withdraw in order to have their names removed from the ballot, and that deadline had already passed when Mendolia announced, on August 21, that he was dropping out of the race.

There are rumors that phone calls were made on the eve of the election urging people to vote for Mendolia. If that actually happened, it's very disturbing. It suggests that a deliberate attempt was made to sabotage Tom DePietro's chances by encouraging people who might have been inclined to vote for him to throw away their votes by voting for someone who was out of the race and who had given his support to DePietro.

There are many troubling things about this outcome, not the least of which is, as Seth Rogovoy has pointed out, that significantly more voters did not vote for Claudia DeStefano than did. The combined votes of Mendolia and DePietro total 771 to DeStefano's 574 votes. More disturbing than the possibility of having a Common Council president that about 60 percent of the voters did not opt for is the fact that 286 voters were so uninformed as to vote for someone who wasn't actually running.

But this may be nothing new in Hudson. Someone told me a story yesterday that I have yet to confirm, but, with that caveat, it's worth sharing anyway. Back a half-century or so, a mayoral candidate died before an election. There wasn't time to recruit a new candidate or to remove his name from the ballot, and remarkably, he won. In that case, there was probably a special election to select a new mayor. In this case, unless there are enough votes for DePietro among the 220 absentee ballots to close the 89-vote gap (and there very well may be), Hudson will have to live with the consequences: a Council president that 60 percent of the voters didn't vote for and who is of a different party from both the majority of the Council and the mayor.
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About Tonight's Outcomes

Seth Rogovoy reports on today's election: "Hamilton Likely Winner as Hudson Mayor Hallenbeck Sharply Rebuked at Polls."

Photo Seth Rogovoy

Election Results

The preliminary election results--before the hand count verification and counting absentee and affidavit ballots--is reported on the Hudson City Democrats website. Go there for the details, but here are the highlights:

Hamilton           740

Hallenbeck       704

Remember to Vote Today

Courtesy Hudson FORWARD

See you at the polls!

Waterfront Watch

Last month, A. Colarusso & Son submitted an application to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to stabilize the shoreline and replace the bulkhead at what is sometimes known as the "deep water dock." Timothy O'Connor, of the South Bay Task Force, predicts that what is proposed would "permanently and profoundly alter a shore of the Hudson River in the City's South Bay." Today, on imby.com, he provides evidence that the land beneath the bulkhead Colarusso proposes to replace does not belong to them but instead belongs to the State of New York. He also makes an appeal to everyone to request an extension to the public comment period for the project, which is now scheduled to end on Friday, November 5: "Submit a public comment: The Colarusso bulkhead is State-owned."    

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Navigating Tomorrow's Election

Tomorrow is Election Day. The polls are open from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. The polling sites in Hudson are as follows:

First, Second, & Third Wards 

St. Mary's Academy, Allen and Third Streets

Fourth Ward

County Office Building, 401 State Street

Fifth Ward

Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street

If you are uncertain in which ward you are registered and where you should vote, click here to find out.

In the past, finding the polling site where you are supposed to vote has often been the biggest challenge. This year, finding the candidates you want to vote for may be a greater challenge. In the race for Common Council President, a candidate who has withdrawn from the race appears twice on the ballot. To find the Democrat-endorsed candidate Tom DePietro, you have to go past the two appearances of Victor Mendolia's name (he withdrew from the race back in August) all the way down to Row I. 

The ballot for Fourth Ward voters presents another challenge. There are four candidates for the two alderman positions, and those candidates appear in two columns on the ballot. The problem is that people accustomed to voting for one candidate in each column might think that the same rule applies here as well. It does not. 

  

You can vote for two candidates in the first column. You can vote for one candidate in the first column and one candidate in the second column. The only thing you cannot do is vote for two candidates in the second column because there is only one candidate in that column.

An election can be won or lost by a single vote. See you at the polls!

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Eleventh Hour Prep for the Mayoral Election

Two days from now, if you haven't already voted, you'd better rush to the polls. You'll only have a few hours left.

Meanwhile, in the eve of the day before Election Day, if you missed last Wednesday's debate, or if you just want to remind yourself of what the candidates had to say about particular issues, the video of the debate can now be viewed online at tiffanyformayor.com.

There was a camera malfunction at the end of the debate, so the closing statements of both candidates have been omitted. As a consequence, you will not be able to hear incumbent Mayor William Hallenbeck declaring, before the 2016 budget has been presented to the Common Council or approved by the legislative body, that he kept the tax increase for 2016 at 1 percent (the state imposed cap is 2 percent), or challenger Tiffany Martin Hamilton promising, "What you will not get from me is intellectual or ethical bankruptcy."
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Election Day 1915

A hundred years ago, Election Day was on Tuesday, November 2. On the ballot that year was a referendum to amend the New York State Constitution to allow women to vote. On the eve of the election in 1915, this item appeared in the Hudson Evening Register.

WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE.

Why They Will Vote for Suffrage.

Prominent New York men have issued the following statement:

"On Tuesday, November 2nd, the legally qualified voters of New York will decide whether or not the constitution of the State is to be so changed as to allow women to vote on the same terms as men.

"The questions are essentially those which have arisen whenever suffrage has been granted to any group of people. The world has tried various forms of exclusive government for a long time, and is trying some of them still, but the march is rapid toward universal freedom, and toward the participation in government of all intelligent adults. In the United States that belief in liberty has always been strong, and it is stronger to-day than ever before.

"The emancipation of women is feared by some because they think it threatens the home and those virtues which center around it. When woman asks the vote, she merely asks to keep up with her own work after it has left the house and gone into the community. She gladly admits that her place is in the home, and adds that the home is everywhere.

"In twelve American states women have been voting for periods ranging from one [Montana and Nevada] to forty-six years [Wyoming]. Everywhere the gain has been appreciable. The opinion of enlightened businessmen, statesmen, editors and careful women is overwhelming. And in foreign countries, in many of which the experiment has been fully tried, there is the same preponderance of opinion. No homes are broken up, no reckless legislation is passed, no women desert cradles in order to become politicians. But on the other hand there is a general toning up and liberalizing of life, an improvement in women themselves, and a distinct gain in legislation along such lines as especially affect children, women in industry, morals and municipal efficiency.

"We, the signers of this statement, declaring our intention to vote for the amendment, belong to various political parties, but we are united in our desire to have our state true to the fundamental principle of democracy. We believe that a people is greater when it follows gladly and bravely its underlying convictions than when its political life is inertia and causeless timidity. We believe it is bad for democracy to put a check on the aspirations of a large portion of its citizens. We believe that women should vote, and that the community will derive an appreciable advantage when they do vote."

The statement was signed by Jacob Gould Schurman, the president of Cornell University; Adolph Lewisohn, an investment banker, mining magnate, and philanthropist; Herbert Parsons, a former Republican congressman from New York; Charles L. Guy, a lawyer and justice of the New York Supreme Court; William A. Prendergast, comptroller of the City of New York; John Mitchell; Egburt E. Woodbury, New York attorney general; John K. Sague, delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1916; Robert Adamson, New York City fire commissioner; Samuel Untermyer, lawyer, civic leader, and millionaire who established Untermyer Park in Yonkers; Frederick M. Davenport, Progressive candidate for governor in 1914; Dudley Field Malone, collector of the Port of New York; Norman Hapgood, writer, journalist, editor, and critic; William G. Willcox, president of the New York City Board of Education; Samuel McCune Lindsay, president of the Academy of Political Science at Columbia University; James Lees Laidlaw, president of the Men's League; Ogden M. Reid, owner of the New York Herald Tribune; Frederic C. Howe, commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York; George A. McAneny, newspaperman and president of the New York City Board of Aldermen; Charles A. Beard, historian and chair of politics and government at Columbia University.

The amendment failed in 1915, but it succeeded two years later, in 1917, making New York one of the fifteen states that already had full suffrage when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1920.
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On the First Day of the Return of Standard Time

Stash your zombie gear and grab your tweeds (and your bicycles). The fourth annual Tweed Ride, organized by Lisa Durfee, proprietress of Five & Diamond, is happening today.

The ride begins at 3 p.m. at the western end of Warren Street, beside the Chamber of Commerce building at 1 North Front Street, and proceeds for three miles through the streets of Hudson. A rain date has been set for November 8, but it's not likely it will be needed. The weather forecast on WAMC just predicted that any chance of rain would end at 2 p.m., at which time the sun would come out and the temperature would rise to 60 degrees.
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Tonight's the Night We Fall Back

Tomorrow, the sun will rise at 6:27 a.m., and it will set at 4:48 p.m.

Photo: Mount Merino Manor

Remember to set your clocks back one hour, and prepare for many hours of darkness ahead until things start turning around at the Winter Solstice on December 22.
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Gone . . . But Not Forever

Last April and May, Gossips reported on the departure of the replica Half Moon from the New World and its arrival in the Netherlands, where it is now at the Westfries Museum in Hoorn.

Photo courtesy New Netherland Museum

Recently, David Voorhees, who edits de Halve Maen, the Journal of the Holland Society of New York, brought an article that appeared in the summer issue of the journal to Gossips' attention. It was written by Andrew Hendricks, who helped fund, build, and design the replica Half Moon and is the chairman of the New Netherland Museum. In this article, Hendricks talks about the history of the replica Half Moon and the reasons for its being in the Netherlands today.

Photo courtesy The Holland Society

The replica Half Moon that we know and love is actually the second replica of the ship that brought Henry Hudson to the New World to discover the river that bears his name. The first replica Half Moon was built more than a hundred years ago in the Royal Dockyard in Amsterdam to celebrate, in 1909, the 300th anniversary of the discovery of the Hudson River. It was the centerpiece of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration that marked the Tricentennial. Sadly, twenty-five years later, this gift from the Netherlands, presented as a symbol of the "lively relations, which unite the Netherlands and the United States" and an "indication of the friendly feeling of the kinship and unity of interests which have ever held and still hold the Netherlands and the United States of America in one mutual bond," was left to deteriorate in Cohoes, where it became a shelter for vagrants. (It was the Great Depression after all.) On July 22, 1934, the first replica Half Moon was destroyed by fire.

The plan to build a second replica Half Moon was conceived in 1985, and the ship was launched in Albany on June 10, 1989. As the first replica Half Moon had been a century earlier, the new replica was the centerpiece of the Quadricentennial in 2009, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Hudson River. Our observance of the Quadricentennial here in Hudson, Henry & Hudson: The Namesake Celebration, was built about a three-day visit to our waterfront by the Half Moon.

Arlene Boehm

Back in 2009, there was talk of Hudson becoming the home port for the Half Moon. Mayor Richard Scalera in his remarks at the dedication of Henry Hudson Riverfront Park, which opened the Namesake Celebration, articulated the vision:

. . . imagine that instead of being here for only a few days, the Half Moon had good reason to spend more time here--coming and going, as if from a home port. Imagine one of the three slips on the Henry Hudson Park grounds being re-engineered to comfortably accommodate historic vessels like the Half Moon. Imagine the old brick warehouse building there just across Water Street, as the Henry Hudson Maritime Museum, a perfect land-based complement to the floating museum that is the Half Moon. And finally, imagine what something like this could mean for Hudson and its waterfront: a powerful new magnet for tourism, education, recreation, investment, commerce, and quality of life. 

When the Half Moon left for the Netherlands last spring, it seemed that all such hope was dashed, but Hendricks makes it clear in the article that the Half Moon will not be in the Netherlands forever. "The Half Moon will be on loan to the Westfries Museum in Hoorn for up to five years." That means that Hudson has up to five years to get its plans for the waterfront together if it wants to be in a position to welcome the Half Moon home.
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On the Waterfront

On October 20, Gossips shared the news that A. Colarusso & Son, the new owners of what has in the past often been called the "deep water dock," had filed an application with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to "stabilize approximately 170 feet of eroded Hudson River shoreline with large rock rip-rap" and to "replace approximately 75 feet of deteriorated concrete bulkhead within a lateral side berth with new steel bulkhead that will be placed in the same location as the existing structure."

There are questions of ownership surrounding the dock that go back to the 19th century, and the South Bay Task Force has requested an extension of the public comment period, which is currently scheduled to end on Friday, November 5, in order to explore them. Timothy O'Connor explains the situation on imby.com: "Hudson's Waterfront in Colarusso's Care: Extend the Public Comment Period."
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