Do not insert washing machines into tiny hole

Seventh Street Park, Hudson
(Thanks to Mehgan Kosa)

Hudson Urbanism visits Buffalo

Last weekend we headed upstate to visit family and friends. We paid a visit to our friend Peter, an organic farmer with a fondness for experimentation. He showed us some crops we had never heard of and a few we had heard of but had never seen up close, such as flax. Peter doesn't farm any animals, but he keeps some interesting beasts around. His pet buffalo Annie is very shy. She came out of the barn only with some gentle nudging from Peter.

Annie is about two-thirds the size she should be due to an infection in her youth. A large buffalo weighs twice the average horse, but Annie is about the same size as her friend Crowbait, a smaller than average equine. The angle of this picture makes Annie look smaller still.

A barn on the farm dated to 1810. My phone battery died, so the only pictures I got were of the interior. One of the original hand-hewn beams is visible at the very top of the photos below. The lighter colored beam was installed more recently to support a loft. A friend of Peter's did the carvings. From left to right are Crowbait the horse, an unidentified chicken, Annie the buffalo, and my favorite, Chester the raccoon. Peter raised Chester after finding him last year as a orphaned baby. He became the family pet and took to following Peter around the farm. When Peter performs repairs at his workbench, Chester picks up whatever tools are nearby and mimics his activities.

Recently, Chester went AWOL. After several days, he showed up at the barn looking surprisingly healthy. He had gained a few pounds and his coat was luxuriant. However, he was acting oddly, which led Peter to suspect he had been poisoned. Peter forced a charcoal pill down his throat to absorb any toxins. Then Chester bit Peter—hard. Peter rushed Chester to a veterinarian, who sensed that something else was amiss. A look under the hood revealed that Peter had medicated a wild female raccoon. Sadly, "Chesterina" did not recover from whatever was ailing her, but we're happy to report that Chester has found a new girlfriend, "Chesterella," and Peter is doing well following his rabies shot.

Before returning to home base we swung through Wolcott, New York to get a look at the Venus statue in the town center. It is reported to be a twin to Hudson's Venus, which has been in storage, long hidden from the public eye. Fortunately, my camera came to life for one last shot. Unfortunately, the Wolcott Venus was a little disappointing up close. Here's hoping Hudson got the better looking sister.

"Dotty Dimple." Credit: Valvo's Candy, Silver Creek,
New York. www.valvoscandy.com

Down on the farm

1949 Willys-Overland Jeepster, Cazenovia, New York

When urbanism went wrong

I wrote the following essay on Hudson for Architect magazine in September 2009. At the time, I didn't realize the extent to which those living on Hudson's economic fringes reside north of Warren Street. I also missed on my population estimate. The larger lesson of the essay holds. Also, space limitations prevented me from expounding on ways to close America's economic disparity. My approach to urban economic development is described in modest detail HERE.

Firefighters parade through Hudson, N.Y.
Macduff Everton/Corbis via Architect magazine

I love big cities, but I often find small cities more compelling. The dispiriting and encouraging aspects of urbanism are more immediately juxtaposed, often heart-rendingly so, but the disparity between them seems bridgeable. Surely, this place can be made to work, if only.

Hudson, N.Y., a settlement of 8,000 residents two hours north of Manhattan, is a two-square-mile snapshot of America’s urban disparity. Its main avenue, Warren Street, is a stunner; it looks as if eight very charming blocks of Brooklyn left the big city a century ago and moved to Columbia County. It has its rough spots, but Warren Street has been experiencing a revival, thanks to gentrification, historic preservation, an influx of antique dealers and tourists, and the helping hand of government.

In the blocks immediately to either side of Warren Street, one finds the other Hudson: comparatively poor, nonwhite, disconnected, and underemployed. The crime rate is higher, and the rough spots in the urban fabric are rougher. The industrial base is nearly gone, as are innumerable mom-and-pop shoe stores, food marts, and repair services that once made Hudson, Hudson.
 
What has happened in Hudson, as elsewhere, is that the middle has dropped out. But before blaming its vanishing middle class on the global economy, look closer to home. In fact, look in the home, for this is where American businesses—and American urbanism—used to get started. Before we became enamored of top-down urbanism—funded by government, propped up by feasibility studies, packaged by city hall, guarded by aesthetic review boards, and delivered by developers—urbanism arose through an organic process of small entrepreneurs opening home-based businesses to the sidewalk. Their one-of-a-kind shops and industries were the starting point for innumerable mixed-use streets, districts, and downtowns that we love today. Read more...

Creeps on park benches

Thanks to Tom DiPietro of WGXC Radio for graciously hosting me on "We the People" this past Thursday. We talked about plans for the Seventh Street Park, the politics of sharing a bench, what might happen if Hudson had 50,000 people, and more.

The full program can be heard via the audio player below or on the WGXC website by clicking here.

On gas stations, street walls, and beer gardens

The view from the park to the northeast/east is unwelcoming.

Urban spaces succeed through their relationship with their context. If a public space is of a type that is to be activated by workaday activities, it usually needs to be fronted by a well-defined street wall. Strong built edges generate life in a park, define it as a meaningful place, and provide a sense of "hereness."

Hudson's Seventh Street Park is defined reasonably well on most of its perimeter, where two and three story buildings directly front the sidewalk. But the northeastern/eastern side/corner is "spatially leaky." A homely, one-story Citgo station sits sixty or more feet from the public way. A train right-of-way immediately west of the Citgo station and some odd building and street geometries to the east contribute to additional spatial weakness. A park user walking toward this corner is presented with a destination that ranges from unclear to unpleasant.

Most of the park's perimeter has fairly well-defined street
walls, but on the northeast and east it is spatially leaky.

Of the several offenders, the Citgo station receives the most frequent criticism. I hear occasional, hopeful musings that economic pressures from increasing real estate values will cause it to eventually go away. I think this is unlikely. It is difficult to get rid of gas stations under almost any economic circumstance, because they earn more than almost any other use. If we are going to address the problems at this end of the park, I think it would be wiser to seek an urbanistically friendlier design for the gas station site that maintains Citgo as a tenant. If nothing else, the exercise is good practice, design-wise and emotion-wise, for learning to work with undesirable constraints.

At present, vehicles enter and exit the Citgo site on the same side, i.e., Columbia Street (below left). This design decision, made long ago, required that the building be sited on the back of the site. A more sympathetic building placement can be achieved by employing a drive-through circulation pattern, from Columbia Street to the alley (below right). 

Vehicles currently enter and exit the site via Columbia Street.

A through circulation pattern would permit a friendlier building placement.

This would allow the placement of a building on the Columbia Street edge, where a building stood years ago. Ideally, a new building here would be three stories high (the former building was two stories) and would house ground floor retail (including the gas station mini-mart) and other uses that would activate the sidewalk and park edge.

The Citgo site with a 3-story building fronting on Columbia Street

This would solve part of the problem, but the railroad right-of-way to the west (i.e., left) of the gas station would remain spatially leaky. At bottom, I've illustrated one way of strengthening the street wall here. I offer no warranties on the quality of any of the architecture represented, although I suspect some will find the beer garden compelling.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to concern ourselves with oddities such as a gas station and a railroad on our town square. If we were facing the decision today for the first time, would any of us, other than Citgo and ADM, choose to have them here? And yet many Hudsonians, even some staunch formalists, admit to liking the intrusion of the railroad. It is part of who we are, part of what the park is, part of what makes Hudson different from other places. Indeed, the things that by some measures don't belong in a city are the very things that make it authentic and interesting. Granted, it may be easier to romanticize a railroad line than a Citgo sign. But before declaring that a conclusion, we probably should check in on the question with the Red Sox fans among us...perhaps even some Yankees fans.

Some possibilities for strengthening the street wall at the northeastern side of Hudson's Seventh Street Park.

Part and whole

Hudson has much of the complexity of a larger city, but its small size makes one continually aware of the whole. When looking at a small part of it, one almost unavoidably becomes aware of the other systems and the whole with which it interacts. This interaction of parts with systems, of details with whole, is a big part of what makes urban design compelling to me.

It was in this vein that, while looking at the potential redesign of Hudson's Seventh Street Park, I became distracted by the presence of U.S. Route 9 running along its southeast side. As one of the official truck routes through Hudson, it brings heavy traffic into the heart of the city. Reducing this traffic would go a long way toward improving pedestrian experience.

U.S. Route 9 takes an odd jughandle at Hudson.

Route 9 enters the Hudson street grid due to an abrupt jughandle in the route's more general path. A more natural course lies a couple blocks to the east; why doesn't Route 9 follow it? Are there physical factors preventing this, and can they be successfully mitigated to the benefit of park users?

The bird's eye view below allows a closer look at the route's circuitousness. Drivers traveling northward on Route 9/Worth Avenue must turn left onto Warren Street, right onto Park Place, right onto Columbia Street, left onto Green Street, and finally left onto Fairview Avenue. A shorter and simpler route would involve a soft right onto Prospect Avenue, which leads almost directly to Fairview Avenue and points north. Your GPS knows this: ask it to get you from a point south of Hudson to a point north of it, and it will skip the jughandle and have you follow the dashed line.

The reason trucks do not have this option apparently lies in a two-block stretch between the end of Prospect Avenue and the head of Green Street. The roadway here is particularly narrow, with parking on both sides and residences sited close to the sidewalk. There is barely enough space for passenger cars, and widening the street for trucks would be disruptive to a number of residents and property owners. I'm not eager to demolish houses, whether or not of historic value, but from my armchair blogger perspective the possibility is worth a look.

Existing: A two-block stretch--one block of Columbia Street and one block of Fairview Avenue--is very narrow. This limits
road capacity and forces U.S. Route 9 to follow a complicated jughandle through the heart of Hudson.

The street widening I look into below began with a revision I suggested several weeks ago to the end of Prospect Avenue, where it meets Columbia Street and Columbia Turnpike. At the time, I proposed simplifying the complicated street geometries into a more conventional four-way intersection. I also introduced a public garden in a triangular space that resulted from the closure of a portion of Columbia Street. These suggestions are shown in the images below.

With that as my starting point, I've widened one block of Columbia Street and one block of Fairview Avenue. Assuming street parking is maintained (desirable for the residents' convenience, as well as for the safety of sidewalk pedestrians), this would necessitate the removal of at least three residential buildings on the north side of Columbia Street.

Street widening: An increase in the width of short sections of Columbia Street and Fairview Avenue would allow Route 9 to be
relocated to a shorter, more natural path. However, several buildings on the north side of Columbia Street would be lost.

Going a step farther, Prospect Avenue could be merged directly into Fairview Avenue, making the two streets into one continuous street (below) and eliminating a left turn for northbound traffic. This would endanger the same three buildings as the preceding scheme.  

Street merging: Prospect Avenue and Fairview Avenue merged into a continuous street. 

Such concerns aside, the possibilities are appealing. Prospect and Fairview Avenues have an inherent scale and sensibility more conducive to handling trucks and through-traffic than the streets within the city grid. And if the hospital expands in the future (as seems likely), the merging of Prospect/Fairview could allow the creation of a more coherent streetscape in an area where street identity is currently muddled.

A closer look at the other end of the jughandle, where the head of Warren Street meets Worth Avenue and Prospect Avenue, is in order. I'll save that detail, and the larger discussion it will lead into, for another time.

Hudson Urbanism takes to the airwaves

This Thursday, September 4, I will be on Tom DePietro's radio program to discuss the potential redesign of Hudson's Seventh Street Park. I'll be making one or two more posts on the park before then.

I hope you will join us. Tune in at 10AM to 90.7FM or listen online at www.wgxc.org.