Hudson Urbanism

"To seek 'causes' of poverty... is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes."

2011-02-11T16:26:00.003-05:00

—Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

On kitchen renovations, messiness, and economic development

2011-02-10T01:11:00.017-05:00

About ten years ago, I received a call from a woman in the midst of a home renovation project. She and her husband were tearing down interior walls in their new house in Boston. "We're not sure how to lay things out or which walls are structural. Can you take a look?"

I knew it would be a mistake to get involved in designing a project already under construction. A successful home renovation typically requires a year of design effort before it is safe for anyone to go near a hammer. A lot of aimless "what if?" explorations have to be engaged without the pressure of making final decisions. There's a lot of practical stuff to figure out, too: budgets and building codes and building permits and which walls are holding up the roof. Homeowners who begin construction without first doing these things are digging a bigger hole than any expert will be able to dig them out of once construction has started. An architect foolish enough to step into this breach is likely making a grave professional error.

The late, great Jane Jacobs, who
understood the good kind of messiness

Naturally, I agreed to take a look. Perhaps I found it hard to decline because I knew the voice on the other end of the line. Elaine cut my hair every month, and I probably didn't know how to say no to someone who regularly stood over me with a sharp pair of scissors.

I arrived at the house to meet Elaine's dust-covered husband. Except for being a little less rectangular, Tim was indistinguishable from the rest of the dust-covered house interior. He had already removed every wall except those he suspected guilty of holding up the house. They needed to go, too, and the sooner the better.

"No walls, anywhere," Tim said. "We hate clutter. We want a big open interior with lots of light and no junk."

"Where are you going to put things?" I asked. "Where will you put the mail and your coat when you come in the door? Where will your closets be?"

"No closets," he insisted. "No storage. No junk. Just open space."

"I hate junk too," I said. "But even the neatest person has some junk. Everyone needs places to put coats and boots and ski poles and the litter box and the dishes that get used twice a year. You need to figure out where those things are going to go so you can have other spaces that aren't messy. Otherwise, every piece of junk you own will be on constant display. Everywhere you look you will see clutter. That pristine dining room table you're envisioning is going to be covered with magazines and mail. You are on a course to realizing the exact opposite of your goal."

If it's difficult to say no to a woman holding a pair of scissors, it's impossible to reason with a man holding a sledgehammer. Tim would hear none of it, and he was looking ever more longingly at the wall dividing the dining room from the kitchen. I realized that the more emphatically I argued, the less likely I was to convince him of his error, and the greater the chance of having the second floor crash down on my head. I wished Tim well and left, and shortly thereafter began looking for someone else to cut my hair.

I tell this story because of a larger lesson: A viable vision for any physical place, whether a kitchen, home, neighborhood, or city, has to incorporate and even celebrate the reality that life is inherently messy. Not all of life perhaps, but certainly some or even most parts of it. Life is full of change, invention, reinvention, false starts, unrealized what-ifs, dead ends, failures, losses, misunderstandings, and occasional successes, many of which do not last.

Here in Hudson, where so many are engaged in the arts, it is generally understood that creativity requires a willingness to indulge messiness. Even a modest blog post requires a writer to write down, sort through, and rework a lot of random thoughts, go-nowhere sentences, ugly irrelevancies, and rough drafts before there is any chance of a reasonably polished piece emerging. It is a foolish, self-destructive writer or artist who shuns the mess and attempts to deal only with fully formed ideas.

Likewise, the city planning process has to indulge a lot messiness before any clarity starts to emerge. But there is a crucial difference, and this does not seem to be well understood: the process of creating a city, unlike a literary or visual work, is never finished. The messiness of the creative process is always present in the urban realm, because the urban realm is a living artifact of life itself. People grow, change, get married, have kids, invent things, encounter rising and declining fortunes, and die. They move away and others arrive with different ideas. New products and technologies are invented to replace old ones. Government administrators and highway builders and others enact new visions before the old visions can be realized. Meanwhile, weather, fires, accidents, and other forces erode the built environment.

Interesting, truly alive cities and city districts are always messy in at least some regard. Something is always changing. No district is ever physically perfect or wholly restored or orderly twenty-four hours a day. It is a wise urban vision that allows, accommodates, and even celebrates messiness.

This frightens some Hudsonians. Some envision a future Hudson that is very clean and genteel, and they seem unwilling to make room for the messier aspects of a fully alive urban place. I touched on this point in a blog post a month ago, when I addressed what I and some other Hudsonians perceive to be an anti-industry sentiment among some members of our community. One or two commenters said my claim could not possibly be true; certainly all Hudsonians would be pleased to have industrial activity filling our empty industrial buildings. Surely, I was told, the widespread pleasure over the arrival of Etsy to the Cannonball Factory was evidence of this.

This is precisely where the problem lies: in the mistaken notion that a viable economic development model is mess-free, and that an economy can be built upon a clean-hands practice of having businesses that originated elsewhere fill Hudson's empty buildings. According to this model, Hudson does not need to make conceptual or physical space for the ad-hoc, root-level, messy creative processes that bring fledgling enterprises into the world in the first place. We don't have to allow homely little business endeavors to be tried out in the buildings on our back alleys. We don't have to consider a model of zoning that would allow a State Street resident of limited means to sell dresses or pedal calzones or run a repair service out of her house. No indeed, one city alderman recently explained to me. "We can't have that! Someone might complain!"

Hudsonians—even those who disagree about almost everything else—seem to almost universally agree that it would be best for Hudson if the majority of our businesses were created, owned, and run by Hudsonians. So why do we have in place a development model whose essential structure is built upon the attracting of businesses? Why does this model essentially insist that the people who are already already here create little to nothing? Why do we define economic growth as something that arrives from beyond?

Let me be clear: I am not saying Etsy shouldn't be here. That is not my point or my belief. What I am saying is that the model that brought Etsy here is not a sustainable one. It is not in any way a creative model, even though some allow the fact that Etsy deals in artistic goods to cloud the underlying fact that the economic development model behind its arrival is non-creative. Frankly, I wonder how it can be considered a development model at all, when it amounts to nothing more than cherrypicking the fruits of a development process that took place somewhere else.

The great, unrecognized poison of American economic development today is the ubiquitous notion that localities need to "attract businesses." At some level, the notion is absurd. As E. F. Schumacher once noted, "We did not start development by obtaining foreign exchange from Mars or from the moon. Mankind is a closed society." [Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered] Yet the belief that economic growth necessarily comes from without drives the mission statement of the nonprofit Hudson Development Corporation: "[We] promote and assist current businesses and provide opportunities and assistance to attract new businesses." Ditto for the Columbia-Hudson Partnership: "We act as a facilitator... for businesses seeking to expand their current operations in the county, or locate new facilities here." Neither mission statement acknowledges the genesis of new businesses; they allow only for the growth and attraction of existing businesses. To wander a bit farther afield for a moment, New York City's Director of Planning, in the first paragraph of her website statement, writes, "I welcome the opportunity to plan and develop places in which people will love to live and work—the vibrant places that will attract and hold creative talent." How poisoned our development well must be when the planner for a city of more than 8 million people thinks it essential to attract anyone at all.

Like every city, Hudson has talents and ideas and manpower within its borders, but we are forbidding them to flourish. "Cities," the late Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, "have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Why are we unwilling to build from within, allowing everybody to create? Why are we not willing to develop our own resources? Why aren't we encouraging the messy stab at new businesses instead of outlawing them? To seek economic development by attracting fully formed businesses is to sell your own people short. It is to tell them—even if you say otherwise—that you don't want them to be productive, involved members of the local culture. It is to tell them you don't want the mess that comes from seeing them live creatively. It is, in essence, to order the twenty-somethings out of your community until their ideas are fully formed. Then, and only then, are they welcome to come back.

To close with a somewhat finer point: not all messiness is of equal value. Not all messiness is constructive. The point is not that messiness is inherently good, but that messiness in life and in cities cannot be escaped. One can choose either the good messiness that is part and parcel to the creative process, or the bad messiness that comes from prohibiting creative endeavor. In other words, we can have either a messy Columbia Street or State Street that results from its residents becoming creative, self-directed entrepreneurs, or we can have the kind of messiness that blights a neighborhood and destroys its buildings when its residents aren't able to generate wealth for themselves. Wouldn't you rather have the good kind of mess than the bad kind we now have?

300 block of Columbia buildout

2011-02-06T14:42:00.003-05:00

Keeping the county in the city: a closer look at Site #5

Here's a somewhat closer look at a potential buildout for county offices in the 300 block of Columbia Street (Site #5 on my recent post.). This is a particularly prominent and complex site with significant design challenges. It consists of two parcels bisected by Columbia street. The southern parcel lies adjacent to the PARC Foundation pedestrian way and is quite visible from Warren Street. Any building constructed here would have to bear significant civic weight, as it would lie on axis with City Hall Place and the Opera House.

The northern parcel also abuts the "PARCway," although it appears that the park has not been fully developed at this location. The parcel is somewhat less prominent than its southern companion, but also presents significant design challenges. The grade on the back/alley side is two stories higher than Columbia street, which would make it difficult to get adequate daylight into a building interior. This, combined with the possibility of using the sloping grade to conceal part of the building mass, suggests it might be more suited to a parking garage. However, this would still introduce a scale problem vis-à-vis the handful of wood frame houses nearby.

This exercise, however, is charged with the simpler task of determining if the site offers adequate space for a new Columbia County headquarters. Given that it is located adjacent to an existing 30,000 s.f. county building, it has a bit of a head start on the 100,000 s.f. target. However, with a garage on the northern parcel and a 3-story office building to the south, the scheme falls about 25,000 s.f. short. A 4-story building might produce enough space but almost certainly would be too massive. An alternative would be to build an additional office building on the northern parcel (assuming the daylighting problem could be solved), and to site a garage somewhere nearby.

I wouldn't rule this site out for county offices, but given its complexity, it can be properly analyzed only in context with other nearby sites and other city development needs. Its civic visibility and size might make it more suited to a police station or courthouse than to county administration. Too, there has been talk of creating separate senior housing when the Bliss public housing project is redeveloped. Perhaps one of these parcels would prove suitable.

4th and Columbia Buildout

2011-02-04T21:13:00.021-05:00

Keeping the county in the city: a closer look at Site #6

I've taken a closer look at a potential buildout at 4th and Columbia Streets (site #6 on my previous post) for county offices. The scheme might also be able to incorporate a new city police station and/or courthouse. My main goal was to see how much space could be created with buildings comparable in scale to the existing county office building at 410 State. In other words, I wasn't trying to make architecture or engage the nuances of a more proper urban design undertaking.

The exercise yielded three buildings of about 30,000 s.f. each (3 floors @ 10,000+/- s.f.) for a total of about 90,000 s.f. of new space. This is within spitting distance of the county's 100,000 s.f. target, and it exceeds it when the existing 30,000 s.f. building is included. With a more accurate site plan, it is conceivable that only two new buildings would be needed to meet county needs, with the third used for the police and/or court.

As noted in my previous post, the county also needs about 200 parking spaces. The garage I've drawn below is probably generous (although not so generous to TSL, whose parking lot I've commandeered), perhaps as much as three times that size. So if the TSL site were to become available to build on, the garage likely wouldn't be as offensive as what I've shown.

If compelled to live in separate buildings, the county would like them to be linked. Overhead connectors must be ruled out, however, as they improperly territorialize public streets. Instead, city infrastructure allowing, I'm suggesting underground connectors (right), which would be suited to use by employees on foul weather days. The rest of the time, it would be better if workers used the outdoors in moving between buildings to activate city streets. I would discourage any such connector between any of the buildings and the garage, however, as morning and evening commuters should likewise walk the streets.

Next time I will look at the buildout potential of the mid-300 Columbia site (Site #5 on my previous post; left side of above photos).

Will they stay or will they go?

2011-02-03T16:41:00.026-05:00

A look at some possible sites for Columbia County offices

Because of—or perhaps despite—recent events having made the intentions of Columbia County officials cloudier than they already were, I decided to take a look at sites within Hudson that might be suited to new county offices. The county estimates it needs about 100,000 square feet of space, and likely a parking garage for about 200 workers. I haven't been systematic in my site search or analysis, I've been partial to sites located within or immediately adjacent to the grid where street life stands to most benefit, and I might be engaged in a colossal waste of time, but here goes.

Several possible sites for new Columbia County offices

1. X-tyal site. This waterfront site, with a new building complementing the existing large brick warehouse, could make for a very attractive project. (Note: the foreground building in photo has been demolished but the one at left remains.) However, the owner may have a more commercial use in mind. From an urbanistic perspective, the city might not get much bang for the buck here, as whatever benefit county offices might bring would be limited by the fact that the city fabric barely touches the site. The success of a project here probably would depend on the development of a holistic vision for this part of the city, incorporating Bliss redevelopment and other projects.

2. Empty parcel, north side of State Street. I think the western part of this site belongs to the city, the rest to the Hudson Housing Authority. HHA has suggested locating a portion of the Bliss redevelopment on the parking lot at lower right, and also has expressed interest in building at Front and State (upper left of yellow area). However, the Bliss situation is fluid, so this site may be available for development. A building here would make State Street a somewhat more proper two-sided street, although the weak suburban housing on the south side is far from ideal. The site slopes fairly steeply in the rear, which would allow concealment of a parking garage.

3. Riverfront industrial area. I don't have a specific site in mind here. The area is so shapeless that it's difficult to know what a large county building would mean or where it would go. But the train station and Eric Galloway's proposed restaurant need neighbors, and additional new buildings are going to have to be built somewhere if the riverfront is to have the activity that many are envisioning.

4. Power Avenue. Two buildings in this declining industrial area are on the market. The sites appear large but they are removed from the waterfront and the life of Hudson, making these locations unappealing. However, their isolation might be precisely the thing that appeals to an apparent suburban preference among county officials.

5. 300 block of Columbia Street. This is an interesting location for a few reasons. It's a block from Warren Street and the Opera House. One parcel, now a parking lot, is adjacent to the existing 30,000 s.f. Columbia County Mental Health—er, Behavioral Services—Building. The Parc Foundation linear park would run between it and a new county building as continues to State Street; handled properly, this could be a dynamic space. Across Columbia Street, an existing tiered parking lot could be the site of another office building or garage. But are these sites large enough to give the county an additional 70,000 s.f. plus parking?

6. Multiple sites near 4th and Columbia. I find this location very interesting, as it offers a potential synergy between county offices and a future city police station, court, and parking garage. Also, it lies near Time and Space Limited, Helsinki, Musica, and the library, as well as the aforementioned sites in the 300 block of Columbia site. All in all, the location offers a wealth of space and flexibility.

Three to five parcels are involved, depending on how the counting is done. A former school building at the southern corner of 4th and State is currently occupied by the county, and this would presumably be incorporated into an overall development scenario. The empty parcel at the west corner of 4th and State is city owned, and the empty parcel at 4th and Columbia north is owned by Eric Galloway. The latter parcel was at one time the subject of a discussed land swap with the city, for a police station. At the east corner of 4th and Columbia is a county parking lot, with a private parking lot adjacent, owned by Time and Space Limited.

It should be easy to provide the desired 100,000 s.f. in this area via several smaller buildings that would be appropriate in scale for Hudson. The county, if compelled to use separate buildings, would like them to be linked. This should be done with underground passages (city infrastructure allowing) rather than overhead bridges, which improperly territorialize public streets.

7. Municipal parking lot and former shirt factory. The parking lot looks to be in excess of 40,000 s.f., while the shirt factory, currently for sale, is listed as 22,000 s.f. interior space. It's in the heart of the city, which from an urbanistic perspective is either ideal (right where the action is) or not so ideal (better to put the county in a dead spot to give it life).

8. Railroad Avenue. County Social Services are currently located in an existing 28,000 s.f. building on this site; presumably it would receive a very large addition. However, despite appearing fairly large, the site is long and narrow, which may make it difficult to develop more intensively. Also, a large building might have an undesirable visual impact on Oakdale Lake, adjacent. And somewhat like the X-tyal site, this site hardly interfaces with the city fabric, thereby limiting its benefits to Hudson.

I will look at these sites in greater detail as I am able. If I've missed some worthy candidates, please let me know.

The style trap: One thing I was taught in architecture school but didn't learn until later

2011-01-28T12:10:00.009-05:00

Carole Osterink has a way of beating me to the punch. While I am still processing raw thoughts or gathering background information for a blog post, it seems she's already captured most of the issues on her blog, and more elegantly than I would have done.
Her post today, Rebuilding the Second Ward, speaks to the housing to be built on Columbia Street, something I've been looking into for a while. The buildings will include three units by Habitat for Humanity as well as the eventual replacement for Bliss Towers by Omni Development, which will total about 132 units. What should these buildings look like? From where should their designers derive their design cues, given that the neighborhood is so broken apart? How can these buildings be contextually responsive when it's hard to say what the context is and whether some of it even should have been put there in the first place?

from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

     Carole covers these issues well, so I will only add one point: Style is the last thing we should be thinking about in addressing these concerns. When architects dwell on style, they invariably neglect more essential considerations such as proportion, massing, and texture. A building can be compatible with its surroundings if it hits all or most of these marks, even if it is in a different style. Likewise, it can be very incompatible even if its style is "correct." Certainly, we've all seen bad additions to old buildings that were built in the same superficial style but that simply look wrong.
   Important as such visual considerations are, however, they are merely that—visual considerations. The underlying reality of a building is far more important than its outward appearance, and this is where the design process is properly rooted.
     When I was a student of architecture a long time ago, this was the last thing I expected to hear. Architecture is a visual art, after all. As a confused student it only made my life worse to hear an instructor define architecture in a way that seemed to have little to do with bricks and mortar: Architecture is the physical manifestation of a social order.
     This didn't seem particularly helpful or relevant at the time, but I've come to realize that it's the most important value to bring to the design process. What is the social order the building needs to accommodate? How do the people who will dwell in it need to live their lives? How do they sleep and eat breakfast and raise their kids and relate to their neighbors? What about the people walking by the building and living near it? How might they get to know the occupants? Should they be able to look directly into the house and see them? Or can this social relationship be accommodated and enriched by creating gradations of private-public space?
     Such investigations of social order, when considered sensitively, knowledgeably, and patiently, ultimately will lead to the building that needs to be. Appearances will tend to take care of themselves if you do the rest right, but the doing-the-rest-right part is very difficult. And so far, I am concerned that the developers of the aforementioned properties don't seem to have the inclination to engage the design of their buildings in this way, or perhaps more dangerously, that they believe they are designing this way when they really aren't. I don't know how to convince them otherwise; maybe this is another thing Carole can do better than me.

Quantifying the unquantifiable: relocation of county offices

2011-01-26T14:41:00.009-05:00

Two months ago, Columbia County floated a proposal to move most of its operations, currently housed in four separate buildings in Hudson, to an empty Walmart building on Fairview Avenue. The proposal was widely criticized, although perhaps not as much as an earlier proposal to move social services to the Ockawamick School in Claverack. More recently, the county issued a Request for Proposals to attract a qualified firm to formally study its spatial needs and recommend how and where county offices (save for those legally mandated to remain in Hudson) ultimately ought to live.

The Ockawamick School in Claverack [photo from http://newsroom.wgxc.org ]

I briefly considered throwing my own hat into this ring, but quickly realized I would not be capable of the objectivity required. I am partial to county offices remaining in Hudson and I wouldn't be able to conduct a study that might have to conclude they should move out. Too, I think any formal study of the matter is automatically stacked against Hudson on two crucial counts:

Parking. Any suburban site wins against Hudson, unless someone figures out how to get a parking garage built in the city for short money. Although there are probably few fans of parking garages in these parts, Hudson may have reached the point where it needs to get serious about building one—for the county, for police vehicles (in concert with a new police station), for seniors (if/when a senior center is built), for visitors to Club Helsinki and TSL, for our general tourist population, and for us. Presumably a number of these players would fund it, but garages don't come cheap. I plan to blog on this in detail soon.
Culture. Hudson wins a cultural face-off against any suburban location, in no small part because suburbs don't have and don't desire to have culture—at least, not of the shoe-leather-meets-the-pavement variety. A properly located and well designed county headquarters in Hudson could be a great help to Hudson's culture, and also would bring the cultural benefits of Hudson to many of its employees. (Although I suspect a fair percentage of county employees are hardcore suburbanites that see no benefit to being in Hudson.) But how does one objectively measure culture?

The objective measurements such studies have to use are important, but they may work against Hudson. "Efficiency" has been trotted out repeatedly by the county to justify its previous proposals to move to the suburbs, and the word appears five more times in the RFP. Implicit in such usage, I believe, is a simplistic notion prevalent in American culture for decades, that a suburban building is inherently more efficient than an urban one. There's something about that unfettered, freestanding building in the middle of a parking lot that leads too many decision makers to conclude that real work is being done there, while the same operation in an urban setting is believed cluttered with irrelevancies that compromise operations. I found it telling that at the county's December 5 presentation on possibly moving to Walmart, "efficiency" was used dozens of times as an ostensible justification for the move, even though no data of any kind was provided to back up the argument. Suburbs are efficient, urban places are inefficient, is the assumption.

Efficiency is an important consideration, but it's very easy for those who control the things being measured to leave out factors that are oblique but nonetheless important to the efficiency equation. In this case, I am wondering if and how the needs, costs, and inefficiencies that a suburban location will visit upon departmental clients will be measured. Hudson mayoral aide Carmine Pierro (via Gossips of Rivertown) states that forty-six percent of Health Department clients and fifty-five percent of Department of Social Services clients live in Hudson. What costs and inefficiencies will they incur in driving or schlepping to a suburban location? This alone would seem to cancel out the efficiencies presumed inherent in a suburban location, and that's before we get to the fossil fuel burning and air polluting and paradise paving aspects of the picture.

Ken Flood, Columbia County's Planning and Economic Development Commissioner, was careful to note in my conversation with him on Monday that the county will not use bottom line cost as the sole basis for making a decision on relocation. The county knows there are benefits to being in Hudson that aren't about efficiency. So keep your eyes and ears open as to whom the RFP is awarded, and make sure you get on them to include in their study all the stuff they might not know how to measure, but that we Hudsonians know are important to both us and the county.

Waterfront compromise scheme: follow-up

2011-01-18T12:53:00.027-05:00

I've received a number of questions and comments on the scheme I presented last Thursday. I had proposed the construction of a private rail spur from the existing north-south rail line to the Greenport quarry via the South Bay causeway. My goal was to give the City of Hudson and the Greenport quarry owners/operators the better part of what each considers most essential. It was and remains a shot in the dark, as the issues involved are complex and I made a number of blind assumptions. Anyway, here goes.

Did you find out if rail-based loads from Greenport can be delivered to O&G's manufacturing facilities in Connecticut? Or would they have to be transferred to a barge?

O&G's facilities in Stamford and Bridgeport (I don't know if the gravel is currently sent to one, the other, or both) appear not to accept rail loads. Gravel is directly unloaded from barges at the plants, so the scheme likely works only if the rail loads are transferred to barges somewhere south of Hudson (I still do not know if there is a place to do this) OR (a new suggestion) if the rail loads are sent to O&G's facility in Danbury, as an existing train line leads there. This latter scenario seems highly unlikely, however.

A train can transport only a fraction of what a barge can transport. Doesn't cost inefficiency rule out rail right away?

It might. But I did some research on this, and the results were interesting. A rail hopper car carries about 225,000 lbs., while a barge carries from about 2,000,000 to 6,000,000 lbs. This means you would need between 9 and 27 rail cars to do the work of one barge. (O&G uses mostly smaller barges with an occasional super-jumbo.) In this scenario, barges probably win over trains.
However, there is an inefficiency embedded in the current model that can't be ignored: the efficiency of barging is compromised by the inefficiency of having to truck the gravel to the barges. Even using the largest end-dump gravel truck at capacity (25,000 lbs.), at least 80 truck trips are needed to fill one small barge, 240 trips to fill the largest barge. Per above, 80 truck trips can be replaced by a single 9-car train.
Update, 1/19/2011: According to the LWRP, 183,458 tons of aggregate were shipped through the port in 2007. This would have required 1,631 rail cars, or a little over 6 cars per day from Monday to Friday.

If you're looking for a rail-based solution, why not go with the old idea of trucking gravel to the ADM facility on Route 66, and use that rail to bring gravel to the Hudson port?

This may be a more viable option than what I've put forth. However, it would bring more trains through Hudson's 7th Street Park, which I was trying to avoid. Also, the ADM proposal—at least as previously put forth—continues to transfer gravel to barges at the Hudson waterfront, an activity that many in the city would like to eliminate. And finally, the ADM scheme suffers from greater operational inefficiencies than either the current practice or my scheme, as it requires three modes of transport—truck to train to barge.

How about trucking the gravel to the ADM facility and transferring it to trains, but sending the trains the other way (eastward/south eastward) to Connecticut?

The ADM line, which apparently used to continue to Claverack, has been abandoned and removed east of ADM. Incidentally, it is often thought that the ADM line is the active line that passes through Chatham; it is not.

The scheme uses the South Bay causeway, which is precisely what some Hudsonians oppose. How do you justify this?
The scheme is a compromise, so some things could not be achieved. But in many regards the scheme gives environmentalists more than what they have asked for. The city would own the entire upper half of South Bay and land on both sides of Route 9G. The city would have full ownership and control of the port, which would not be used for gravel transfer. And there would be no gravel trucks or trains in the immediate vicinity of people using the waterfront park or the train station.

Is it realistic to have a new rail crossing of Route 9G?

Politically, new crossings can be difficult to pull off, as highway departments don't like them. But if it can be demonstrated that greater overall safety results from getting gravel trucks off Hudson's streets, it might have a shot. Remember, we'd be looking at one 9-car train in lieu of at least 80 trucks. And if the trains can run off-hours, all the better.

Is the conveyor you've shown crossing Route 9 the one currently in place (but apparently not in use)?
Yes.

Your scheme would solve part of the truck route problem, but not all of it. What about all the other trucks traveling through Hudson, say from the Rip van Winkle Bridge to the malls on Fairview Avenue?

I don't know at this point. I would hope the scheme would head off opposition from those affected adversely by a truck route relocation, as it would reduce the number of trucks traveling on the new truck route, wherever it ends up.

This proposal is interesting, but ultimately it seems naive.
That's more or less why I put it out there. I think if one pursues only obvious, safe solutions, he'll miss alternatives that turn out to be viable, or the alternatives that grow out of the "naive" proposal. I have heard others say that Sarah Sterling's proposal to have the city negotiate the purchase of the dock and land from Holcim is also naive. But her proposal helped me develop a new alternative. Perhaps my own naive idea will lead to a workable solution. Naïvete is useful and even necessary to problem solving, as long as you know you're being naïve.

Is there any possibility Holcim would sell their waterfront land and dock to the city?
If I were Holcim, I wouldn’t be interested in selling my port to the city and then having to use it under the city's watch. But what if the city offers Holcim a good-sized chunk of change for the port and land, while showing Holcim that it can move as much material as it currently moves without interference from the city, and without having to run eighty trucks to fill a single barge? Does that become appealing to Holcim?

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

2011-01-17T17:33:00.001-05:00

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

A compromise scheme for the waterfront?

2011-01-13T10:29:00.008-05:00

Alderman Sarah Sterling's proposal that the city negotiate with Holcim to purchase its waterfront industrial property was a brilliant stroke, the first fresh thinking on the impasse in a long time. Even if the proposal does not move forward as conceived, it pushes both parties to boil down their needs to their absolute essence. Workable compromises only become possible when parties are willing to let go of a few things cluttering the debate and to focus on what is most central. When that happens, the resulting compromise usually doesn't give each party 50% of what they want, but much more.

What is the quarry operators' most essential desire? To move gravel to locations beyond the city without the city's interference.

What is the city's most essential desire? To have control and use of South Bay and the waterfront for aesthetic, recreational, and environmental purposes, and to get gravel trucks off city streets.

With the above in mind, I developed the scheme below. It is based on a major assumption that if wrong would immediately void it, but I figure it is worth putting it out there. The assumption is that the quarry operators move gravel by train to points south instead of transferring it to a barge on the Hudson waterfront. I have no idea if this would be safe (would the loads be allowed on the North-South rail line?), cost feasible (what are the efficiencies of moving gravel by train versus barge?), politically workable (would CSX, whom I presume controls the lines, allow the proposed use?) or operationally convenient (do the train lines go where the gravel needs to go, or is there a railyard downstream where an intermodal transfer could occur?). But here's how it would work.

A new private rail spur would be extended from the existing north-south railroad line, travel along the existing South Bay causeway, and terminate at the existing quarry facility on the west side of Route 9. Quarry operators would load gravel there and move it by railcar to points south without transferring it to barges at the Hudson waterfront. Holcim's ownership of the northern half of South Bay and the waterfront land and port (shown in green, and extending to the east of 9G, so that both sides of 9G remain natural) would be transferred to the city.

Rail-based scheme (click on image for larger view): A new private rail spur would allow gravel to be transported to points south without bringing it through crucial parts of Hudson and without using the deepwater port.

Again, the scheme requires a big assumption. But if it holds, both parties would get most of what they most want. The quarry operators would get to move gravel more freely and Hudson would get a larger, more peaceful waterfront and no more gravel trucks through the city.

Some details would have to be worked out. The new rail line would have to cross Route 9G at grade. The configuration of the line east of 9G would have to be more complex than what I have shown so the rail cars could be loaded. Environmental regulators and the City of Hudson probably would want to limit and meter the amount of gravel moved via the new line. But these details seem solvable if the larger picture makes sense.

A final point: As I have written elsewhere, I do not wish for the greening of Hudson's waterfront to become part of a large scale eviction of industry from the city. Real industrial activity (locally owned and operated, not the conglomerate variety) needs to be accommodated and even intensified in some areas near the waterfront for the more general well-being of Hudson. It's another compromise that is necessary to give everyone most of what they most want. A topic to be expanded on another time.

If you build it...

2011-01-12T00:24:00.010-05:00

When I'm not exploring the city on foot or having coffee with other Hudsonians who know the city much better than I do, I often find myself studying aerial views of Hudson on Google or Bing. I'm usually trying to make sense out of aspects of the city I don't yet understand, to identify hidden patterns, or to find ways to make Hudson a physically, experientially, and socially more coherent place. The mishmashed street geometries at the eastern corner of the street grid (are there sensible ways to realign them?), the truck route (any alternatives not yet identified?), the Promenade (can it be extended north-south?), and a million other things spill through my mind, only occasionally leaving me with greater clarity than when I started.

The other day I found myself studying the Second Ward, looking for physical factors that contribute to the social isolation of its residents. A few were easy to identify: It has more vacant lots and more random open space than are found in the rest of the Hudson grid, making for a less comfortable milieu for strolling, hanging out, and having casual social encounters. Too, the buildings sit farther back from the sidewalk and are much lower, taller, or longer than the Hudson norm. Such physical differences in low income neighborhoods tend to stigmatize their residents, increasing their sense of alienation from other city residents.

High-rise buildings are especially problematic, as it is harder for their residents to participate in the social life of the city thanit is for residents of four-story-and-under buildings. Above the fourth floor or so, it is difficult to recognize a familiar face on the street or to call out a warning to a child endangered by a passing vehicle. One's visual field tends to be oriented away from the immediate street environment and more toward the distant cityscape and landscape.

Social interaction in high rise buildings is also limited by their internal corridors. No doubt there are valuable friendships and social interdependencies within Bliss Tower, but such relationships tend to arise despite the physical environment, not because of it. The biggest problem with corridor buildings is that their residents are either completely inside their apartments or completely outside them; there's no in-between. A solid fire door on a blank-walled corridor eliminates gradations between in and out, between the private world of the home and the public world of passersby. This reduces the opportunities people have to meet each other. The single woman in 7A hoping to "accidentally on purpose" bump into the handsome guy living in 7G, or the elderly woman looking for a friendly greeting from the maintenance man won't even know when they have come and gone. Such might not sound like a big deal, but it becomes a big deal for those living with it day after day. By comparison, apartments in buildings with porches and stoops and that open directly to the street offer many more opportunities for their residents to casually interact with neighbors and strangers.

As I further considered the Second Ward's isolation problem, I looked at the city's structured public spaces. Structured spaces have built edges on two or more sides, and are usually located on or next to a highly used pathway. Thurston Park on lower Warren Street is an example, and a similar one lies adjacent to Mexican Radio. The Seventh Street Park and the Courthouse Green are much larger examples, and the buildings that enclose them are across the street. Such spaces are valuable for fostering social interaction; they are the spaces people go to to take a break from work, eat an ice cream cone, feed the pigeons, or people watch. They are also the spaces people incidentally pass through, all of which fosters the casual encounters that build familiarity and knit a community together. Soft public spaces (such as Promenade Park, Waterfront Park, and the Cemetery) are also important to cities but they tend to be located more on the periphery of neighborhoods or districts and to support somewhat different social purposes.

A structured public space: Thurston Park on lower Warren Street

If my informal survey is accurate, Hudson's structured public spaces consist of the four mentioned above, plus the Parc Foundation park. As you can see below, all five spaces are south of Columbia Street, and three of them are south of Warren Street. There are no structured public spaces in the northernmost area of the city, where the Second Ward is located. (I couldn't find a ward map, otherwise I would have shown the ward boundaries.)

Structured public spaces (in red) are important for fostering casual social interaction.

This suggested to me a somewhat different approach to weaving the lives of Second Ward residents into the life of the city, particularly if Bliss Tower is eventually replaced by low-rise development as is often discussed: We shouldn't only be looking for ways to bring Second Ward residents toward Warren Street and the rest of Hudson, important though this is; we need to create reasons for the rest of Hudson to go to the Second Ward. Indeed, there are only dead-end streets beyond the Second Ward, which means many city residents almost never pass through it incidentally. But imagine a new structured public space in the Second Ward with a few mom and pop storefronts along the edges, some benches for the elderly to sit on, some shade trees, and all the neighborhood kids coming and going.

I would sure go there to people watch.

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

2011-01-11T15:56:00.004-05:00

— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Sad days in Hudson

2011-01-06T14:14:00.012-05:00

The past few days have been the first days since I moved to Hudson that I have felt really sad. The trigger was my exploration on Monday of Hudson's barren industrial areas—Hudson Avenue, Route 9, Power Avenue, Dock Street, and the waterfront. I've wandered into these areas many times over the past four months, but in seeing all the empty, underused, and falling down buildings in the space of an hour, and in realizing how many lives have been hurt by the loss of jobs, I felt overwhelmed.

[photo from http://taintedladylounge.blogspot.com/]

But if it is overwhelming to be confronted directly by a big problem, it is truly dispiriting to not be allowed to talk about it. Such a prohibition seems to hang over Hudson today. In the wake of the defeat of the Saint Lawrence Cement plant, some Hudsonians now oppose all industry within Hudson's borders, regardless of its size, shape, or ownership, and will not tolerate any conversations on industry. They seek to ostracize those who suggest that industry might deserve a place in Hudson's future, and greet even the most neutral comment or question with suspicion. Any view that is not stridently anti-industry risks being construed as evidence that one is a closet SLC supporter, a hater of the natural environment, and an enemy of all that is good and beautiful about Hudson and the Hudson Valley. You're either with us or against us, the anti-industry crowd seems to think, and if you go looking for gray area between those two positions it’s probably because your secret goal is to sneak a 400-foot-tall toxic smokestack onto a nearby mountaintop.

I do not know what legitimate social, economic, cultural, or moral basis there could be for staking out an ironclad anti-industry position. Even ecology-based arguments against industry (e.g., prohibiting industry on the waterfront will allow the causeway to continue returning to a more natural state) are of dubious merit when considered in a broad global context. Banishing industry from Hudson simply means its negative impacts will be felt somewhere else in the world, because consumer demand for manufactured goods persists. And its new location likely will be within the borders of a nation that lacks the environmental oversight we are capable of in the United States. Which means that banishing industry from Hudson ultimately causes more ecological damage than it prevents. Which turns the ostensibly high-minded, ecology-based argument into little more than a provincial argument: "I don't want industry here because it's where I am."

NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard-ism) has a multiplier effect that even further endangers the natural environment: As one American city after another banishes industrial activity from its borders, those activities become consolidated in their eventual locations as larger, more singular entities. The resulting mammoth projects produce the worst environmental and aesthetic nightmares: Instead of five thousand scattered factories producing five thousand comparatively small sets of environmental issues, one enormous factory in one place brings more harm to its local environment than it can reasonably be expected to absorb.

This brings us to a painful irony: because industrial prohibition increases the scale of industrial development elsewhere, the eviction of industry from Hudson increases the likelihood, however incrementally, that some other small city will have to fend off an SLC-scale nightmare. Such would be the worst possible legacy for our victory over SLC: to have realized it at the expense of another city.

There is only one valid way for a city to assert an anti-industry argument, and that is to reduce its demand for manufactured goods to zero. Since Hudson is not doing this, we need to accept the moral and practical weight for how we live. We need to match our demand for manufactured goods with the responsibility for producing them. I don't mean we should have an automobile factory because many of us drive automobiles, or knitting mills because we wear sweaters. But we need to be willing to match our overall demand for manufactured goods with a willingness to manufacture some goods here in comparatively large numbers. We need to manufacture more storm doors or wigs or buttons than we use ourselves, as we once did, to keep our manufacturing responsibility on balance with what we demand from the rest of the world. To refuse to do so is to consider oneself, or one’s city, a special case. Perhaps you will want to argue that we are a special case, but every other municipality, county, and river valley in the country has its own reasons to make that same claim. We can either wait in line with the rest of them in the hope we will be anointed the holy one, or we can start getting realistic.

What does getting realistic mean? That we ought to accept the next outrageous SLC-scale proposal that comes along? Not at all. In fact, we need to get entirely past the ridiculous, widely accepted notion that economic development means "attracting" businesses from somewhere else. Real, meaningful economic development—the kind that not only provides jobs but that interweaves basic human needs for self-actualization, creativity, and cultural enrichment—has to come from the community itself. Further, if economic development is to be genuinely creative and meaningful, in the words of the late Jane Jacobs, “you can’t decide ahead of time what activities you want to see. Economic life is full of surprises, and if you decide what you’re going to base your economy on — what do you have to think about? Things that already exist. You’re ruling out innovation right away, and yet innovation is of the essence for a live and prospering economy.” I am sure Jacobs would have agreed that innovation is of the essence for a truly vibrant culture as well.

I arrived in Hudson at an interesting time, to say the least. It is a time at which the city is very, very unsure what it should become next. This uncertainty is itself a big part of what drew us here. The only certainty that seems to exist is that Hudson will not be the home of a mammoth cement plant. But the struggle to not be something is very different from a concerted effort to be something, to shape and pursue a genuinely inclusive vision of the future, to work as a community toward it, and to willingly accept the headaches that come with it. The anti-industry, arts and recreation-based vision of Hudson's future really isn’t a vision at all, it’s a simplistic extension of the what-we-don’t-want-to-be mode of thinking with a few innocuous activities thrown into the mix. The resulting picture appeals to a small, influential group of Hudsonians that do not directly depend on the making of things for their own well-being, and they somehow seek to translate this narrowness into a model for everyone else to adhere to. But if a gallery walk, some window shopping, and dinner at a waterfront restaurant constitute a full urban day for this set, it is incredibly self-centered of them to think that an urban community can subsist on such a narrow range of activities. I enjoy these activities myself, but to turn them into the totality of the future of Hudson is to subject much of the city to a dearth of employment opportunities, not to mention a first class yawn festival.

In my recent review of Miriam Silverman's Stopping the Plant, I ended with a question posed by the author toward the end of her book: Who gets to determine the direction of development in a community? I think most reasonable people would agree it should be the community itself—the entire community, not just a vocal fraction whose personal circumstances allow them to get out in front of and control the dialogue.

To this end, Hudson needs to embrace a patient, inclusive, human-scaled model of economic development that builds organically and creatively on who we are and what we have—warts and all—from the bottom up. And right now, we have people of ambition, talent, and need sitting idly all over our city (although more north of Warren Street than south of it) who could become productive businesspersons in their homes if they weren't forbidden to do so by intrusive regulations and the fears of the anti-industry set. Up and down State and Columbia Streets, in living rooms, bedrooms, and garages, residents could be opening repair shops, second hand stores, weaving studios, cafes, and a thousand other things we can't predict in advance, if only our economic development environment didn't force them to forever sit on their hands. In time, a few of these mom and pop entrepreneurs would outgrow their home locations and move to Hudson’s outlying industrial areas, where they would become exporters to other parts of the world. These industries would not only be in Hudson, they would be of Hudson.

What an exciting and original city Hudson would become, if only we were willing to let it be.

A Hudson master plan?

2010-12-30T00:18:00.008-05:00

The present is a particularly pregnant time for urban development in Hudson. Within the next several years, the following major projects could rise from the ground: a Hudson Senior Center (to be built as an addition to the Youth Center), a city police station, a city court, a consolidated headquarters for the Columbia County Department of Social Services (if the department stays in the city, as it should), a new parking garage (to serve social services and the general public), a new housing development to replace Bliss Tower, a new restaurant on the waterfront, and the restoration of Washington Hose.

I think it likely that five of these projects--the police station, courthouse, social services, parking garage, and Bliss II--will be built within a several block area between Columbia and State Streets, from around First Street to just above Fourth. Their combined impact could be wonderful, but I have a sinking feeling that the default course of events will lead each project to be conceived and built in isolation from all the others. If so, in a few years we will be stuck with a number of aloof, oversized, badly designed buildings, and a permanent affliction of the What ifs. Many of us already know the feeling; it's the one we get when we walk past the Hudson City Center: it's in Hudson, but it isn't an integral part of Hudson's extraordinary fabric.

And if we do things right? Columbia, our most abused street despite being one very short block away from Warren, will become an asset to the urban experience of Hudson. Its toothless gaps will be filled by thoughtful buildings that shape the public realm, generate streetlife, and foster community. The Fourth Street axis from the county courthouse to the library will become an elegantly walkable procession. The Parc Foundation's pathway from lower Warren Street to Columbia Street will engage new buildings and become a highly trafficked, way cool pedestrian way. And the residents of our public housing, instead of dwelling in isolation, would have an opportunity to be far more active players in our community. (People living in towers do not interact with life on the street to the same degree that people in three story buildings do.)

Even a well sited, well designed parking garage could be an asset instead of the blighting bunker that garages usually are. For example, if the garage is located a little ways down the street from the social services building (instead of being right next to it or underneath it), the several hundred drivers arriving to it each morning will turn into several hundred pedestrians that need coffee, newspapers, and a drycleaning dropoff.

There are many more opportunities to discover, if a real masterplanning effort were to take place. To this end, I've been contacting as many of the parties involved in these projects as I can in the hope of encouraging a coordinated planning effort. If everyone is willing to step back and look at the big picture before plunging further ahead, each will get a much better project for their efforts. And the rest of us will get a better city, not just a handful of new buildings.

Ten things I love about Hudson

2010-12-27T21:08:00.002-05:00

1. great architecture
2. rough edges
3. big sky
4. the grid
5. no one asks why the new guy (me) is calling them with a thousand questions about the city
6. two hours to Manhattan
7. the sound of the train whistle
8. cheap rent
9. alleys
10. (tie) The post office is five doors from my front door.

There's a coffee shop 200 feet from where I shower.

My electrician lives 1 block away.

My plumber is located 1 block the other way.

I got my computer repaired 2 blocks from home.

I walked 2-1/2 blocks to register my car.

I walk 3 blocks to the movies.

I got my business cards printed 2 blocks from my home.

I walk 2 blocks the other way to city hall.

I walk 6 blocks to the Amtrak station.

Who gets to control development? Part 1: SLC redux

2010-12-21T23:38:00.007-05:00

Miriam Silverman, Stopping the Plant: The St. Lawrence Cement Controversy and the Battle for Quality of Life in the Hudson Valley. SUNY Press, 2006. 176 pages, $24.95 paperback.

I just finished Miriam Silverman's Stopping the Plant. A short book, it provides an intelligent retelling of the Hudson community's struggle against the mammoth Greenport plant proposed by Saint Lawrence Cement. But Silverman goes beyond a mere he-said-she-said rehash, illuminating how Americans' relationship to the natural environment has evolved over several centuries. Ultimately, it came to inform and shape the arguments on both sides of the SLC debate.

Early European settlers of the Americas were necessarily fearful of the natural environment, as it presented a continual threat to their well-being. Nature was seen as something that needed to be "conquered" for the sake of survival. In the industrial era, this evolved into a desire to exploit natural resources for economic development and material gain. But as our comfort became more assured, the attitude that produced it became less necessary. No longer fearful of the natural world, we became open to appreciating it aesthetically. This appreciation found expression in various endeavors, such as the Hudson River school of painting (celebrating the beauty of nature and its peaceful co-existence with humans), the national park system (formally protecting large areas of the natural environment from economic interests), and more recently the mainstream environmental movement (calling for personal accountability to nature). Such attitudes didn't evolve uniformly; those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder have perhaps (perhaps!) valued economic development over environmental aesthetics, while those on the upper rungs have had the freedom to embrace the opposite. For instance, the greater mobility of the wealthy might allow them to designate geographic areas of their choosing as worthy of aesthetic protection over economic development. Such was the label often hung on the anti-SLC faction: wealthy outsiders or recent arrivals to Hudson who aimed to impose their personal aesthetic vision on the region at the expense of Hudson's more indigenous working class.

There is plenty of room to pick nits in this model, and Silverman herself is willing to do so. As she pursues the ramifications of her model, she ultimately moves beyond it and turns to the longer term, more deeply embedded conflicts in the Hudson community. Here she finds commonality and sympathy in the needs and values of the two sides: Saint Lawrence Cement, a Swiss and Canadian company, is itself an outsider to our region. Thus, writes Silverman, "the overriding question, to which there is not always an easy answer, is who gets to determine the direction of development in the community."

Who, indeed? Stay tuned.

THE Holcim?

2010-12-21T23:11:00.010-05:00

Is the sponsor of this design competition for sustainable construction the same Holcim cited by the EPA as one of the state's top polluters?

Shameless Commerce Division

2010-12-13T21:16:00.001-05:00

If you are looking for a holiday gift idea, could there be a better idea out there than a book from the 101 Things I Learned book series, by yours truly? 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, one of the bestselling architecture books in the world over the past three years, has been joined by four new titles--Business, Culinary, Fashion, and Film--from Hachette Book Group. You can check them out at the official 101 Things I Learned website and purchase them at bookstores everywhere, including The Spotty Dog on Warren Street. And if you stop by my office in Hudson before the holidays, I will personally autograph your purchase for the recipient.

New City Jail, er, Senior Center on tap

2010-12-12T23:47:00.015-05:00

Last week I attended a meeting on the proposed Hudson Senior Center. The meeting brought out over 30 seniors as well as a number of local officials, including Mayor Richard Scalera and Common Council President Don Moore.

The Senior Center is to be built as an addition to the existing Youth Center building at Third and Union Streets. If well conceived it promises to be a boon to seniors as well as others using the building and this part of Hudson. But from what can be discerned about the project at this point, there are many reasons for concern. Chief among them are a weak design concept and, I believe, an unrealistic schedule.

The existing building (above) is not a classic beauty; it is rather brutish in scale and is not in the best of repair. It appears that some detail has been stripped over the years and replaced with mismatched brick. The upper windows have been replaced with bronze aluminum storefront while the front entry was mismatched with anodized aluminum. Nevertheless, it is a building of substantial presence in Hudson, and it lies at a significant entrance to our small city. As such, the addition needs to give far greater respect to its location than the proposal (below) allows. The addition put forth is badly proportioned (squat height, a meager 8’ ceiling on the first floor, windows more scaled to a suburban split-level than a public building, oversized rather than standard brick, and more) and arbitrarily detailed. Note, for example, the quoins pasted onto the corners of the addition and the dentils applied along the cornice line; no such features appear on its predecessor.

Existing Hudson Youth Center. Senior Center addition will be at left.

Proposed Senior Center: Cherry Alley elevation

I have to think that these aesthetic problems point to some more elemental problems in the design process. How carefully have the needs of the building’s users been considered when, for example, this proposal was put forth without benefit of a single meeting with the seniors’ group? How practical can the design be when it was created without knowledge of the specific programs that may/should/will go on inside? To what extent did the designers put themselves in the shoes of the elderly when they didn't think to put an overhang above the door? How much study was made of the relationship between the seniors and the youths who share the building? What opportunities and problems was this found to present? The apparently unaddressed design issues go on from there.

To be frank, this is what happens when a city hires an engineer instead of an architect to design a building. I do not mean this as a swipe at my colleagues in the engineering profession. Engineers can do things that architects cannot do; thank goodness for that. But the opposite is true as well; architects do things that engineers cannot. We are trained to work closely with a building’s users to uncover the core issues--practical, psychological, historical, material, all the rest--that need to inform the design process. Only after some real understandings are attained do we move the process forward. Crucial to this process is an understanding that architecture is not something that gets applied to a building after it is "engineered"; if anything, it is the other way around: The engineering of a building is but one of many concerns the architect integrates holistically into the design process.

As for the schedule, the mayor said the building will be ready next fall. Buildings can be designed and built in this time frame, but most often the process takes much longer. In fact, the more one rushes a design and construction schedule, the more things are likely to cost. The city will have to hire the first available contractor instead of taking time to find the right one. Cost increases during construction will be more likely, as oversights are discovered as a result of having rushing the design process. ("Oops, I didn't realize we'd have to relocate that utility pole...")

At the risk of parting with a cheap shot, I found myself wondering what this building will look like in three dimensions, so I Photoshopped the engineer's drawing onto a photograph. I then asked myself, if I were to drive by this building unawares, what would I guess it was? The only answer that came to mind was the city jail.

This isn't the right image for our seniors or our city. So before we walk farther down this path, can we all take a deep breath, step back, and engage the design process the right way?

New city jail? A three dimensional view generated from the engineer's drawing

Happy Festivus

2010-12-10T17:21:00.000-05:00

Holiday lights, Joslen Boulevard

On fusbol tables and economic development

2010-12-08T14:58:00.006-05:00

Photo by Jon Cockley

A few weeks ago, while riding my bike in the vicinity of 5th and Washington, a friendly voice flagged me down. Jamal asked if I was lost; my stopping and starting and aimless observation of the neighborhood must have lent that impression. We ended up talking at length about Hudson, in particular the Hudson known to citizens like Jamal--young, minority, and living north of Warren Street. Jamal didn't tell me anything surprising, but it was nonetheless saddening to hear him say that "kids around here think that only white people are allowed to have businesses."

Jamal appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He works in construction doing odd tasks, earning enough to pay the rent on a basement apartment while supporting his young daughter. I asked if he had any business aspirations of his own. He thought briefly, then offered, "I'd like to run a gaming place. You know, people would come in, play video games or ping pong, I'd serve food and drinks." He presented his idea in a way that suggested he had not revealed it to anyone before.

What would Jamal need to realize his dream?

"Money," he said. It's the same answer the economic development experts give, except they call it "capital." Jamal would need a big loan in order to rent or buy a suitable commercial space, renovate it to his needs, purchase games, equipment, and lighting, hire staff, engage lawyers and accountants, pay for advertising and insurance, and so on. Before opening his doors for business, Jamal would be in for a couple hundred thousand dollars, easily.

Which makes it very unlikely Jamal will ever realize his dream, at least according to the conventional, capital-intensive business development model. But there is an alternative model, and it provides a far more natural and less expensive path to economic growth, urban development, and self-actualization. My own recent experience, if you will indulge, will illuminate.

My partner Sorche and I rent the second floor of a house on Union Street. In addition to a comfortable apartment, we have access to a large, unfinished attic. A couple weeks ago, in anticipation of hosting visitors for Thanksgiving, Sorche perused craigslist for some entertaining diversions. She found a fusbol table for $40, a ping pong table for $65, and a dart board for $35. We had to rent a van to bring everything home, but for a little over $200 we turned our attic into a pretty cool entertainment space.

Now to intersect our comparatively privileged reality with Jamal's: A century ago, folks like Sorche and me--and Jamal--would have been free to think, "You know, a lot of people in this part of Hudson would enjoy a place like this." We could have hung a cheap sign on the front of the house and charged folks a few bucks an hour to play games. Perhaps we'd have made a few sandwiches in the kitchen and sold them for a couple bucks each. And before anyone could say "business plan" we'd have a running version of the business Jamal can only dream about today.

While this might seem like merely a stray, if interesting, notion of how someone might start a business, it was how nearly all urban businesses in America got their start a century or more ago. You can still see the evidence in and around Hudson today: innumerable old buildings whose ground floors were converted to retail or business use a long time ago, only after they were built as residential buildings. These conversions allowed ordinary folks a way to make a good living while simultaneously enriching the urban landscape.

Such conversions occur occasionally today, but only within districts formally designated by zoning as mixed-use. Otherwise, the built examples you will find tend to date no later than the early 1900s. It was then that modern regulatory codes--building, labor, health, zoning, and so on--made it difficult and eventually illegal for Americans to open most types of businesses in their homes. The businesses taken off the table by regulation were not only the ones that helped make urban places urban--hair salons, laundries, restaurants, retail stores, repair shops, even taverns--but they were the businesses that citizens on the lower rungs of the economic ladder were most likely to want to open. (This is why the explosion in home-based businesses over the past two decades has been limited to professional enterprises--financial consulting, software development, and other clean-hands undertakings: unlike the aforementioned, they aren't illegal to do in your spare bedroom.)

The incremental economic development model is not perfect; I can think of a dozen reasons why it might not work in any given instance. But there are dozens more reasons why it generally works very well. The initial investment is small; so too is the disruption to the entreprenuer's life. Jamal wouldn't have to leave his daughter behind just to tend to his business. He wouldn't even have to leave his weekday job right away, if he wanted to try out his business idea on the weekends. And he could easily change his business if he discovered it needed to be something different from what he originally envisioned, or he could pull out altogether if he discovered it wasn't what he really wanted to do. Compare it to the oppressive situation Jamal would find himself in were he to gain access to the capital-intensive model: He'd wake up every day burdened by debt and committed to an obligation to run perfectly a business he hadn't tried out for even a day. It's a terrible set of commitments to visit upon either a city or an individual, when all anyone wanted to do in the first place was play a little fusbol.

More Hudson pix...

2010-12-02T07:48:00.002-05:00

A "tree" grows in Hudson

Man in window

Stripes

Blue bags

Close quarters

Crosswalk

Kip goes house hunting

Social Services moving out of Hudson?

2010-12-01T12:27:00.008-05:00

According to Wednesday's Register-Star, the majority of the county's social services may be moving out of Hudson to the old WalMart on Fairview Avenue. Among the departments being relocated: Environmental Health; Mental Health; Healthcare Consortium; Office for the Aging; Planning/Tourism; Youth Bureau; Central Services with storage facilities; Department of Public Works/Facilities; DSS; Columbia Economic Development Corporation; Probation; Public Defender; County Historian, and Backup 911 Center.

As a newcomer, I cannot see all sides of an issue as it affects Hudson. But it seems to me that the removal of several hundred jobs from Hudson will have an unfortunate echo effect on the city, our needy residents, and our economy. My guess is that Hudson, given its density, has the greatest concentration of the county's needy population. If social services move, our needy citizens will have to schlep out to the suburbs to get what they used to get within a few steps of home. Factor in the several hundred people working in social services, and some fundamental city dynamics will be altered. Imagine the negative impact on the local coffee shops and restaurants that serve these workers every day, and the decrease in commercial rents that will result from a glut of empty space.

There is a point to make here that may seem a bit abstract and even cynical, but my loathing of suburbs requires that I make it: Social service agencies exist to provide formal--that is, government sponsored--social benefit. This is a good thing, to the extent they provide things that society is not inclined to provide on its own (i.e., informally). However, urban places provide informal social benefits that suburbs absolutely cannot. In cities one can walk rather than drive to the ordinary needs of life, a benefit to the young, blind, poor, infirm, and elderly. Similarly, cities provide the able-bodied a greater opportunity than suburbs to stumble upon an odd job for a few dollars pay. Certainly, cities have their problems, but all in all they do things suburbs cannot do without cost to taxpayers.

Because suburbs are motivated by a desire to minimize social connectivity ("I like being out here, away from it all," is the suburban refrain), they quietly beget a need for formal government programs to do what they cannot do informally. Moving an agency and its people from a city to the suburbs makes the needy even needier because it simultaneously reduces society's ability to help them informally while physically distancing them from fomral services. It is a form of positive feedback loop, by which government justifies its continual enlargement: Government makes decisions that on the surface appear to make it more efficient, when they actually beget even more government. Witness an early echo effect of the proposed move: according to the Register-Star, the county will provide monies to Hudson businesses adversely affected by the removal of social services. “If businesses are hurt by the relocation of employees," says Ken Flood, county commissioner of planning and economic development, "I’ll provide necessary resources to help those businesses out.” These resources would come in the form of loans, technical advice, refinancing, and the like. Thus is a bad decision by government "solved" with more government.

Those wishing to contribute an opinion on the proposal are urged to attend a public session on December 8 at 5PM at the Elks’ Lodge on Harry Howard Avenue.

Park Falafel and Pizza

2010-11-29T18:20:00.013-05:00

I've enjoyed two trips to the relatively new Park Falafel and Pizza, on 7th Street facing the Park. The falafel was very good, the pizza a tick above average. I'll give the pizza a second try soon in case I happened to have it on an off night.

I remember seeing this building on the market earlier this year. As I recall, it was a foreclosure, asking price of 89K (I think). I am told that the building was pretty bad inside, but the location is excellent. So it was good to see it turned around so quickly, particularly given the demise of the pizza joint across the park sometime after my first visit to Hudson in 2009 and before I moved here in September 2010.

The storefront renovation is simply and effectively executed--a good lesson in hitting one's design marks without breaking the bank. Inside, large color blocks, muted somewhat from primary tones, strike an appropriately jaunty note for informal dining while helping create a brand identity. (Note to Kennedy Chicken: If you ever renovate, look here first.)

From what can be seen on the MLS, it appears that the apartments on floors two and three were renovated--good to know when there are so many substandard units in the city. But I am left wondering why most of the building exterior was ignored. While I don't expect the uneven settling of the brick facade to have been repaired (rarely a cost-effective undertaking), the rest of the building should not have been left in such a shabby state.

Perhaps the building owner (I don't know if this is the same party as the restaurant owners) has plans to address this and hasn't gotten to it yet. With a bit of work, the building could be an amenity for the whole city, not just for those seeking a reasonably priced dinner, given its prominence at the busiest entrance to Hudson.

Personally, I'd like to see the signature color blocks used as a bold color scheme for the building exterior. The more visible the building, the more people will visit the restaurant and the more interesting and alive this little stretch of Hudson will become.

Windows, doors, and fences

2010-11-17T12:20:00.001-05:00

I hadn't used my camera for purely visual purposes in a really long time (years), so the other day I took a walk around Hudson to exercise my eye. The camera frame compels one to make the most elemental and important decision about a composition: what's in and what's not.

I noticed the clothes iron in the upper middle window while having coffee at Swallow, and liked that it disrupted and humanized the repetition of the facade. I came back later with my camera.

Workers at the Union Street Guest House

A lonely spectator... wish I had had my polarizing filter with me.

Doors on Partition Street

No parking, no parking, no parking, no... oh good, I can park in front of this one.

Window mannequins

This house looked unoccupied... who put the pumpkins on this second floor sill?

This shot of some tarps on Partition Street is my favorite. They look like flowing water. Someone came onto the alley and seemed surprised I was there. I told him I liked the way the tarps looked, and he said, "Well, you're the only one."

A peek over a fence. (Why won't this caption left justify?)

And another... the leaf at upper right is actually a rotting piece of fruit with an insect on it.

Another favorite. I like how the organic jaggedness of the foreground fence counterpoints the more regimented pickets behind it. Not sure if I should edit out the tree at upper left.

Imperfect, but OK

2010-11-14T21:53:00.046-05:00

I came across this nifty little house on lower Union Street the other day. It is only about ten feet wide and the ground floor looks barely tall enough to stand up in, but I found it rather appealing. Note how carefully it is composed, with all elements in perfect symmetry: the center of the porch, the bay window, and the brackets above align precisely. Even the squatness of the ground floor contributes to the whole, as it makes the bay above it seem all the more ambitious.

Actually I'm fibbng; the image above was Photoshopped. The real house looks like this:

Notice that almost nothing lines up. While the bay window seems to be centered in the facade, the bracket above it, which one would expect would be centered, is several inches to the left (see below). Meanwhile, the middle porch column stands obtrusively in front of a window (I deleted it from the first image) and is even farther left of center than the roof bracket. And the left and right ends of the porch roof overhang differ from each other.

Why do such flaws occur? Why can't architects or builders get things lined up?

The reason is that when buildings abut, as they often do in urban environments, architectural features such as roof edges cannot turn the corner as they would on a freestanding house. The roof overhang on the front of this house couldn't be continued on the right side, because it would intrude on the neighboring house, which would create not only an aesthetic problem but a legal one. So the bracket on the right was pulled in a bit from the edge(below), even though the bracket at the left side is flush with the left edge of the house. To make the whole assemblage look more three dimensional, that is, to give a sense that at least part of the assembly turns the corner, the topmost molding was returned 90 degrees into the facade.

The abutment problem in urban places has a domino effect on the design of a facade: if you can't place a roof bracket quite where it wants to be, do you adjust all the brackets so they are evenly spaced, or do you let the spacing of the end one be mismatched? Do you place the windows so they align with the roof details or do you place them symmetrically in the facade without regard to the roof? Which "mistake" would be more or less noticeable?

No answers here, but on a completely different note, as I played with this facade, I found myself wanting to grow something out of the top of the bay. I had no idea why, until I realized that in removing a porch column I had turned the porch into a de facto table... a good place for a vase?

Mmm, maybe not.

Thus begins...

2010-11-09T18:36:00.010-05:00

Having moved to the remarkable city of Hudson, New York two months ago, I will be using this blog to provide graphic and written commentary on the physical design and planning of my new home town. I am a practicing architect and urban designer, so I will aim to provide a professional perspective on topics from specific buildings or details (e.g., suggestions on improving an unattractive or underperforming storefront) to major projects and sites (e.g. Bliss Tower) to large-scale planning issues (the LWRP, truck route, open space, hospital growth, etc.). At other times I will offer a more general commentary on American urbanism, or I might discuss how architects and planners think about urban design problems. Along the way, I will be trying to get up to speed on Hudson's social and political terrain; I hope a few readers will show up and help me get this on straight.

My commentary won't be neutral, which no one in this city really seems to expect of those around them anyway. I like urbanism that is truly alive, and I err toward messiness over tidiness if it helps a city become a richer, more inclusive place. I love historic buildings, but I also believe in freedom of architectural expression--wouldn't it be better if people made good buildings on their own rather than being told how to do it by government?--and think Hudson would benefit from having a few provocative modernist buildings. I'm an outspoken advocate for home-based business enterprise, and I want to see more of Hudson's residents--particularly those on the economic margins--become business owners in their homes and economic players in the community.

Incidentally, I wrote a short article on Hudson for Architect magazine, a national publication, last year; you can read it here. I've already been told by one Hudsonite (Hudsonian?) that I got some things on wrong. I also wrote a piece on "messy urbanism" for Architecture Boston Magazine; it is here. And the next time you wander over to the Spotty Dog, you might see 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School or one of the other books in my 101 Things I Learned series... many thanks to Kelley Drahushuk for getting them in stock.

Thank you, Hudson, for reading. I am looking forward to getting to know you much better.