Sizing up the park

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.

History is a guide, not a master

    Proposal by Cathryn Dwyre and Hudson Development Corp.

The proposal to revamp the Seventh Street Park has produced a predictable polarization in Hudson. On one side are those desiring a full, historically accurate restoration and on the other are the supporters of a more contemporary design—either the current proposal or some other.

Responsibility for this polarization lies at the feet of both camps. The contemporists have not done enough homework or engaged the design process publicly enough to justify the sweeping changes put forth by designer Cathryn Dwyre. And many preservationists have insisted on a full and literal restoration of the original park plan without considering the possibility that there might be a better way. I will focus in this post on one particular set of flaws in the original park layout; in the coming weeks I hope to explore other issues related to the past, current, and future design of the park.

View of original Seventh Street Park looking northeast.
The park was organized by two orthogonal pathways with
a fountain located symmetrically at their intersection.

At her recent public presentation, Ms. Dwyre described the original layout of the park as a "default" nineteenth century solution. While perhaps taken by preservationists as a backhanded slap, her statement is not inaccurate. The park's configuration of two orthogonal pathways with a fountain at their intersection has been used many times. It is not unpleasant, and has worked elsewhere. But it does appear it was employed here without consideration of local conditions. A brief analysis of the park's pathways suggests the design falls well short of deserving an ironclad endorsement from Hudson's preservationists.

Park pathways, properly understood, are continuations of larger systems of pedestrian movement. This is in large part because parks are activated as much or more by incidental or casual users as by deliberate users. In other words, a park's designer has a primary responsibility to encourage use by those who encounter it by chance as well as by those who make a conscious decision to go there. When incidental users are successfully engaged, a baseline of activity is assured, making the park safer and more enjoyable for all. 

Bird's eye view of the original park design. The park's internal
pathways do not relate to the natural pedestrian street crossing
locations, shown in white.

When a park is set into a street grid in the manner of the Seventh Street Park, the majority of users, incidental as well as deliberate, will arrive at a corner. From there, they will tend to move diagonally. This gives the deliberate user the most immediate route into the park and the casual user the most direct route through it. (In truth, designers visit "tricks" upon both groups to divert them from a perfectly efficient path; a discussion for another time.)

The historical park plan (above left) ignores these realities of human behavior and urban context. The entrance points are located at mid-block rather than at the corners, and the pathways run orthogonally rather than diagonally. The best-case outcome of this is undesirable wear patterns in the grass; the worst case is that pedestrians dangerously cross streets at mid-block when approaching and leaving the park. Somewhere in the middle of the best-worst scale, perhaps, is that the park simply isn't as good and inspiring a place as it could be.

The existing pathway that runs across the short dimension of the park does allow for some degree of natural pedestrian access, as it is an extension of Prison Alley. But this advertises a different problem: the Venus fountain lies on axis with a back alley instead of with a major street or important building. Those interested in the more essential values and goals of traditional city planning, and who do not insist on preservation for preservation's sake, would recognize this as a nineteenth century faux pas. 

Bird's eye view showing diagonal pathways, as a response to the
larger, natural patterns of pedestrian movement in the neighborhood.

At left I've shown the park with diagonal pathways. The result is much more accommodating of how most people will actually encounter and traverse the park. It doesn't solve the problem of the fountain lying on axis with the alley, but it does suggest the park layout can be changed and improved while still respecting the symmetry and formality presumably valued by Hudson's preservationists and traditionalists. (Although this is not to call this a solution; there are far more factors to investigate and synthesize than I can take on here.)

Of course, many in the preservation camp will poo-poo any proposed changes simply because they aren't "historic." This amounts to an argument that history is right simply because it got there first. Such history-centric individuals belong in the same category of non-thinkers as those who deem something of value simply because it's new and different. (Designers of the PARC Foundation Park in Hudson, take note.) A thinking person—someone open to the best of the past, present, and future—knows that history has gotten things right and wrong—not only in the usually cited arenas of politics, war, and civil rights, but also in architecture and city planning.

If you build it...

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 than it 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.