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Hudson’s Breakdown

In 1954, Hudson and the vicinity were severely afflicted with unemployment [...] so serious that the entire vicinity was designated a critical unemployment area, and Hudson was listed as eligible to receive Federal Government surplus food for distribution.

Since then, unemployment has not appreciably decreased. For the past few years, the Gifford Wood Company and the cement industry have operated with sharply curtailed labor. [...] The reduction in the labor force in the cement industry is due to automation and the decreased demand.”

—R. MARY WEND (1963)

This November 5th would be the 112th birthday of R. Mary Wend, who was born in 1899 and died in 1975. There is precious little information about Wend on the web, and I know next to nothing about her—except that she wrote an exceptionally insightful capsule history of Hudson. It is essential reading for all local residents, new and old.

By clicking here, you can read about 20 pages of Wend’s remarkably concise and incisive 1963 master’s thesis, The Administrative Effects of the Breakdown of Law Enforcement in Hudson, New York.*  That dry title masked a story that, some 20 years later, Bruce Edward Hall would tell in more lively, if somewhat less analytical, terms in his well-known Diamond Street—which appears to have relied heavily on Wend’s text. 

Her paper is chockful of telling but largely forgotten local details, for example the claim that Hudson lost out becoming the home of General Electric because of “the unwillingness of local merchants to raise $10,000.” (That surely would have been an economic blessing, but it also might have made Hudson ground zero of today’s PCB cleanup.)

Wend traces not just the familiar story of the Proprietors arrival around the end of the Revolutionary War and Hudson’s quick rise to prominence, but also the less-rosy decades which ensued—including the decision to sell of much of Hudson’s acreage to form neighboring towns, a/k/a “the partitioning.”

She finds that almost from the start, Hudson’s wheel of fortune spun in cycles of boom and bust. These at first stemmed from the travails of the whaling industry, but continued far into the 20th Century. By 1845, which Wend identifies as the “end of the era of navigation,” Hudson was in collapse, setting the stage for the spread of vice and its concomitant political corruption:

Shorn of its prestige, divested of most of its territory, stripped of its fleet of ships, Hudson faced the future with uncertainty. As a city of commercial importance—its course had been run; its day was done.

Wend’s research also shows how political and moral corruption was a chronic and nearly intractable problem throughout much of Hudson history, right up to the 1960s. Periods of decline inevitably led to the election of a “reform” Mayor. However, the reformer quickly would either get co-opted by the corrupt City establishment, or else would quit in frustration.

The following 120 years she characterizes as “The Era of Stagnation.” Wend quotes Gorham Worth’s description of Hudson in the mid-19th Century as having “an all pervading air of listlessness.” Local politicians, law enforcement, the Chamber of Commerce and an apathetic citizenry alike get a sober but sound drubbing from Wend’s pen. About the latter she writes:

A significant contributing factor to the stagnation of the city was the penny-wise, pound-foolish attitude of the average taxpayer toward municipal expenditures.

An extreme example of this “municipal parsimony” came in 1855, when “due to an empty treasury and a dispute with the gas company,” the Common Council

was obliged to discontinue street lighting. [...] When it was bombarded with petitions to restore this service, it called a taxpayer’s election to raise $1200 to pay for this service until the end of the year. [But] the taxpayers were unwilling to be taxed for it, and at the election, the proposition was overwhelmingly defeated. For the remainder of the year the city was in darkness [and] the commission of crimes was greatly accelerated.

By 1868, the once-advanced City of Hudson had become, per Wend, “an old fogey town” and “hopelessly behind the times.” Even the purchase of a then-modern steam fire engine to replace hand-operated equipment was rejected by the populace, who only reversed their position after a calamitous fire.

Education was another sore point: in the 1880s, it was found that less than 25% of school-age children were attending classes. That problem had apparently been reversed by the 1930s, when the schools were found to suffer from precisely the opposite problem: overcrowding. Hudson voters rejected the construction of a new school despite funding offered by the Federal Public Works Administration (their version of “stimulus” funds). Again, the situation had to reach crisis proportions before the 45% funding was finally accepted and the new school built.

The ’50s-ear Chamber’s top request to a visiting Governor Harriman was to plead for the shutdown of the Volunteer Fireman’s Home and Training School for Girls (now the prison).** Much like some official present-day attitudes in Greenport toward Olana, leaders of that time bellyached about such institutions not paying taxes, while dismissing their employment, purchasing and other economic impacts.

By 1963, Wend summarized the State of Hudson as “a stagnant city beset by many problems.” These she enumerated as:

1. a high tax rate
2. a declining population
3. slum areas and substandard housing
4. lack of a public library
5. the lack of a sewage disposal system
6. the lack of imaginative leadership.

The more things change...

 

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* When first in Hudson in 1998, I encountered a copy in the musty old history room of the library, where I volunteered for some time (straightening up after visitors, who mainly seemed interested in the genealogy books). A copy also used to exist at the Columbia County Historical Society. Whether either can still be found, given the long history of misfiling, pilfering and neglect of such local archives, I do not know. The entire thing really ought to be scanned and republished.

** Hall provides one of the only known details about Wend’s life, and obliquely acknowledging his debt to her writing. Wend, he says, served as the Training School’s “resident dentist,” and describing her as “an older woman of frugal ingenuity and worldly knowledge; she had tried to straighten inmates’ teeth with bamboo braces of her own design, and she had written a master’s thesis on the history of prostitution in the city of Hudson.”

Politician gives himself a gold star

Patting himself on the back for a job poorly done, Hudson Council President Don Moore awards himself a gold star in the pages of The Register-Star. The achievement of which he’s so proud? Ushering through a sorry excuse of a Waterfront plan, one which doesn't guarantee Hudson any new jobs, or any meaningful environmental protections, or even a realistic new location for a boat launch... The one thing it does guarantee is plenty of headaches for future leaders and residents alike.

If Moore actually believes any of what he’s written, why have few if any of the concerns that he himself raised in his own March 2010 letter been addressed in this plan?

For example, Moore argued last year that if a certain zoning change demanded by Holcim/O&G were made, the City would lose control over its activity, and (in his words) there would be “no longer any restriction” on their South Bay activity.

Yet exactly that change was made for H/OG—with Moore’s apparent blessing—and now he ignores his own warning. Instead, he attempts to place gauzy halo over a Plan that has gotten weaker with each revision that he’s overseen in office.

If the Council President actually believed any of what he has written, he presumably would not have been so afraid to allow any of the 80+ people in the audience who attended the recent “special meeting” on this plan to speak, before rushing it to a vote.

What was he afraid of, exactly? That if the public were allowed to participate, this carefully-manicured veneer of responsibility might be punctured by actual facts— from both citizens and legal experts, who were waiting to speak?

Moore’s Politiburo-style move was un-democratic and un-American no matter what your position is on this plan. It was conduct ill-befitting any Common Council President, and something his precedessors such as Mary Anne Lemmerman, Mike Vertetis and John Cody never stooped to, even in the midst of other controversies.

As to the tissue-thin “substance” of Moore’s commentary, it reveals that he either does not understand his own Plan, or simply does not want to understand it—because to do so would be to require him to show some political mettle. (Moore has been heard many times to make bilious remarks about Linda Mussmann as a public figure, but his current position on the Waterfront is indistinguishable from hers.)

Moore apparently doesn't want to understand that the issue is not whether such activity stems from the cement, or gravel, or some other industry. If it were garbage hauling, or incineration, the concerns would be fundamentally the same, just with slightly different particulars. The public's concerns have been, for years now, the impacts.

Can Moore look the owners of, say, the Basilica, and tell them that a four- or five-fold increase in trucks running all day past the entrance used by their patrons and workers is not new "industrialization"? Can he tell us that the dust and fumes and noise from such a major increase is not further "industrialization" of the dock area, with no impact on neighbors trying to enjoy the publicly-funded park next door? (If he can, then he is sadly self-deluded, because such impacts have not even been assessed in the shoddy Generic Environmental Impact Statement associated with the Plan, and would likely never be assessed in the future he extolls.)

As a State attorney at the meeting said, as currently constructed the City would not be able to place limits on either trucks or the volume of gravel at the Waterfront. If that is not heavy "industrialization," what is? When attorney was asked after the meeting if Holcim were to increase the amount to the levels of the SLC Greenport Project, could that be limited or stopped under the current Plan, he could not say that it would.

The hard facts are that Holcim and O&G have estimated in a various applications that they intend to increase existing activity from the current baseline 100-130,000 tons per year to 500,000 tons per year, some 4-5 times the current amount. In 2005, the amount was zero. That is a massive increase in industrial impacts by any measure: many more trucks, many more barges, many more rail crossings, much more noise, and much more fugitive dust and fumes wafting over the Waterfront Park.

Yet the latest version of Moore's vaunted plan actually makes it harder to do anything about the industrial impacts, not just to the environment, but to neighboring businesses and public resources. Future Zoning Enforcement officers and future members of the Planning Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, or Coastal Consistency Board would have neither clarity nor many tools to deal with an ever-escalating situation.

What are the effects of trucks, or a conveyor, or diesel fumes, or fuel spills, or constant barge traffic? How are neighboring businesses or public activities (from kayaking to concerts) or habitats limited or made impossible by severe nearby impacts? Since the 1970s, local and State and even Federal planners have recognized that Hudson's waterfront is very small, and produces "use conflicts" of this kind. Moore prefers instead to stick his head in the mud and pretend that he is not rushing ahead with a plan that gives the City few real controls over these very real concerns.

At the Valley Alliance website, you can see that the group has sent an authoritative legal memorandum detailing the issues with this plan, as well as 24 pages summarizing continued citizen concerns. The Register-Star and Columbia Paper have been provided with both.

Moore-onic

Last May, arguably the dopiest (or at least most unnecessary) gaffe in local political memory was committed by Don Moore, the president of Hudson’s Common Council.

To a packed room of some 80 concerned citizens, Moore announced that he would suppress the public release of a much-anticipated and highly-controversal document—the City’s latest update to its draft Waterfront plan—for two weeks. 

His ostensible reason? Moore stated that he did not want Aldermen’s initial opinion of the document to be influenced by comments from their constituents, a/k/a the voters. Treating his colleagues more like wards of the state, he apparently deemed Hudson’s elected officials to be so frail that they needed to consider the document “free from public scrutiny” (according to then-Register-Star reporter Jamie Larson’s paraphrase of Moore’s sentiments).

After a firestorm of protest and a raft of bad press, not to mention key excerpts of the new draft appearing anyway at The Gossips of Rivertown, Moore finally relented—belatedly releasing the already-leaked document and admitting that his initial decision was “wrong.” 

As head-scratchingly clueless as that unforced error struck many people at the time, one might have assumed that Moore had learned a lesson... Learned, for example, that keeping the public out of the loop is always a political mistake, not least when a controversial, long-running decision is in the balance.

Yet tonight, Moore repeated essentially the same boneheaded blunder.

On Monday, word leaked out that attendees of a special meeting to discuss the Waterfront plan would not be allowed to speak until after the Council voted on a crucial portion of it.

Attempting to pre-empt criticism of this latest move against public participation, Moore claimed in a comment on Gossips that citizens would indeed be given a chance to participate, along with a 10-day opportunity to submit written comments—after the vote was already taken. Since there would be no opportunity for such after-the-fact comments to change the vote, the offer appeared to be meaningless.

And so it proved to be: utterly pointless.

At the meeting tonight, Moore initially indicated that there’d be an opportunity for questions and comments from the floor before a vote. But as the meeting wore on, he forced the issue to a vote without any chance for public input. He then quickly dismissed the State and City attorneys, quite obviously eager to hustle them out before anyone spoke up. Aldermen began to leave even as Moore lamely suggested that comments could now be heard. By then, the crowd was dispersing. Even those inclined to stay and comment knew that this would be an empty exercise.

Waterfront plans, even more than most legislation, are supposed to be based upon a detailed and responsive public process. By State mandate, they are meant to result in public understanding, acceptance, and enthusiasm for the final plan. The current version fails on all three counts.

In this case, Moore appears hell-bent upon ingratiating himself to a few political players—most particularly, outgoing Mayor Rick Scalera—at the expense of public trust of an empty process.

It’s often said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not learn from their own mistakes are doomed to be remembered by cheap (yet apt) puns about their last name.

Ghentlemen, start your engines?

Motocross is rumored to be slated for the former Meadowgreens site on Route 9H in Ghent (once my preferred place for watching Red Sox playoff games).

A proposal abutting the Columbia County airport, is expected to be discussed at a Zoning Board meeting tonight in Ghent.

UPDATE: See the comments for added details, post-meeting.

Either/Or-ism

THE REVITALIZED MAIN STREET OF LEE, MASS.

The current issue of the normally-astute Hill Country Observer contains a sadly shallow article about an important topic, entitled “The Second Home Economy.”

As is too often the case when the press wades into such complex issues without really sounding their depths, we’re offered only a surface analysis of just two possible development directions for Columbia and Berkshire counties. Evidently, we have only two choices: either an artsy-fartsy tourism model, or a 1950s smokestack model. 

Naturally there are many other choices; and in reality there is a much greater mix of populations and business in both places than the press would have us believe. Such Either/Or-ism leaves out many obvious examples of businesses which don’t fit either oversimplified model (e.g.: Etsy’s move of 50 jobs to Hudson). It also ignores the local history and national trends which led to current conditions in both counties.

The article first offers a sympathetic look at the lifestyle of a second-home couple, as well as thoughts from solid sources like Nat Karns of BRPC and Bert Freed of The Kinderhook Group. But then come the less-nuanced but more-predictable quotes from (a) someone who says their area has gotten too expensive and their kids have to move away, and (b) a habitual doomsayer who predicts his town’s whole economy is on the verge of collapse.

Two specific examples cited are Lee, Massachusetts, and Hudson, New York. But neither example lives up to the article’s reductive billing.

In both cases, the author and several commentators ignore the obvious and crucial fact that both places were essentially moribund 20 years ago. (Yes, I remember the closing of the five-and-dime in Lee, and the toy factory. Both have been gone a very long time now.) Culture and tourism and second home owners didn’t push people out of these places. Rather, small businesses and new taxpayers filled a gaping void left behind by heavy industry, which abandoned them. Without those willing to risk their modest savings on an abandoned town, where would either place be? Probably still dying a lingering demise. Yet the Either/Or-ists like to scapegoat the one, while waxing nostalgic about the other.

A kid with whom I went to gradeschool in the Berkshires returned to the area after a long absence, and created a successful brewpub in downtown Lee, catering to “locals” and weekenders alike. Lee, whose main street businesses mostly bled out in the ’80s and early ’90s, is on the upswing again. Likewise over in Great Barrington, two brothers with whom I rode the schoolbus started and built a small business over the past two decades into a very successful clothing and outdoor furniture business, frequented by a wide demographic of customers, largely thanks to their terrific customer service.

Yet The Observer seems to imply that all three of these kids would have been better off growing up to work somewhere like “The G.E.” in Pittsfield—where our forbears were expected to dip their arms up to the shoulders into vats of PCBs for much of their adult lives. Yes, General Electric once employed thousands in that city, where my father was born. The company also left behind vast quantities of pollution in both the Housatonic River as well as schoolyards and other private properties all over town. But ah, the glory days of good-ol’ American industry!

(It also should be said that the Berkshires are a far more racially diverse place today than when I was growing up in the ’70s. But you wouldn’t know that from the Observer piece.)

Ditto Hudson. While commenter Matt Frederick needlessly inflames the debate with a gross exaggeration that Hudson is dominated by stores only open two days a week, in fact the vast majority are 5, 6 or even 7-day operations. And overwhelmingly, local Hudson businesses are owned by full-time residents, with hardly a national chain store in sight besides the Subway attached to a laundromat. Such high levels of local ownership and downtown activity are all too rare in 21st Century America. Other main streets are mainly dead or dying, with business having moved to the nearest mall, into stores owned by megacorporations; yet we’re supposed to lament the rejuvenation of Lee and Hudson?

(Frederick elsewhere has spread the misinformation that it’s unusually difficult to operate a home-based business in Hudson due to zoning restrictions. I'm not the only one who’s asked him to specify which codes he’s talking about, and provided numerous counterexamples, to no avail. Both formal economic studies and on-the-ground evidence suggest the exact opposite: that Hudson has an unusually high concentration of self-employed people, cottage industries operating out of homes, and former residences converted to storefronts.)

Most of all, Hudson’s business mix has significantly diversified over the past decade. We can thank the pioneers in the culture and antiques trades for making that possible, since it was their businesses which patiently developed enough foot traffic and buzz to attract other investment, and create other centers of economic gravity. Much of the dining, hospitality, music, nightlife, housewares, coffeehouses, food markets and other types of business found here today were not present in the late ’90s. Arts and culture jumpstarted the process, and no one seems happier to see other types of stores and industries opening locally than those much-maligned antiquers themselves.

Meanwhile, quality of life in the Hudson area has helped retain and attract the very types of businesses those who favor the Either/Or, Us vs. Them script claim to support. A new light manufacturing business was found to fill the empty Kaz factory, nextdoor to Local Ocean, a fish farm; further down the road on Route 9, European giant L’Eurial is filling the former Entenmann's warehouse with a goat cheese operation, which over the long haul will aim to source its dairy locally. (Good time to go into the goat-raising business, as apparently there’s a real shortage.) Organic agriculture is thriving and rapidly-expanding, thanks both to local interest and the proximity to lucrative NYC markets.

And of course there are the countless other boats which have been raised by this tide, which has crept up from a low ebb in the late ’80s/early ’90s. Hardly anyone around here except lawyers earn more per hour than competent local plumbers, electricians, HVAC, and other contractors. The stabilization, renovation and expansion of the area’s amazing housing and building stock has been a prime driver of the local economy. Yet articles like that in the Observer leave the impression that few jobs have been created here except minimum-wage part-time dishwashing gigs.

And as for rising real estate prices: I’ve never heard of anyone, local or new, who was eager to sell their house for less than they paid for it. Are empty-nesters and retirees who’ve lived here all their lives, who now want to move into a more manageable house, and maybe spend the winter in Florida, supposed to take $100,000 less at closing in order just to satisfy some pundit’s pseudo-nativist ideology?

In any case, both rents and asking prices have moderated nicely after the national real estate bubble of the last decade burst. Where, precisely, can you rent a decent apartment cheaper than in Hudson, unless you’re willing (as I was in my youth) to live in an unsafe neighborhood, in an apartment lacking steady heat and hot water, and little of interest to do within walking distance? One might save $50 a month by relocating to the worst blocks of Rensselaer, pronounced "Rent-ler" by some denizens, but it’s unlikely anyone’s economic or personal prospects would be improved by such a move.

The false choices of Either/Or-ism not only present a distorted, defeatist picture, they also serve to pit residents against each other. Those residents pigeonholded as “weekenders” and “lifelong residents” have a lot more in common than those making snap judgements based on a windshield view of Main Street. Is the economy perfect in either the Berkshires, or Columbia County? Hardly. But I’d like to know where economic Nirvana has been achieved and sustained in any part of America today. Overall, the prospects in both counties seem a whole lot better than average.

For those who wish to turn back the clock and live in a dead, dangerous town dominated by polluting industry, there will always be Gary. For those who prefer a main street full of Ye Olde Saltwater Taffy emporia and doily-draped inns, there’s no shortage of tourist traps all along the New England coast. The rest of us will continue to live somewhere in between—or preferably along some long detour off that straight-line highway, which exists mainly in the mindscape of the media.

Mussmann’s Folly

PHOTOILLUSTRATION CONTRIBUTED BY A DOWNTOWN READER

 

To fully unravel Linda Mussmann’s recent rants about trucks and the Waterfront unfortunately requires some frank talk and hard truths. Here’s some of the backstory:

The real reason that Linda’s posturing so aggressively lately about the issue? The TSL director (and newfound downtown real estate speculator) is hoping people in her neighborhood will forget her central role in allowing the trucks to get there in the first place.

This traffic began in earnest on Linda's watch, when she was Waterfront chair. Instead of moving to stop it, she met privately and unpreparedly with lawyers from Holcim (then still called SLC). Though having denounced the company as reckless and untrustworthy for years, she seemed flattered that they’d talk with her.

Shortly thereafter, Hudson was stunned by Linda’s announcement of a sweetheart Waterfront plan for the company—which at the time was actively debating whether to sell their Columbia County properties.

Instead, they were emboldened to stay, and even to push the envelope in the wake of their 2005 Greenport defeat.

In late 2006 before this all went south, I met with Linda, then-Council President Rob O’Brien, and city attorney Cheryl Roberts (now also Linda's real estate lawyer of record) in her office at TSL, where she preferred to do much of her politicking. I had advised Linda that previous summer not to meet with SLC/Holcim without understanding the terrain thoroughly, reasonable advice that she ignored. And as predicted, they ate her alive.

At the time of that meeting at her office, Linda and Cheryl fully recognized that the City had tools to deal with the growing truck issue on Columbia Street. A lawsuit might be threatened by Holcim, but that was probably a bluff, and such a case was winnable. Yet as was so typical of my extensive interactions with Linda whenever an obstacle was encountered, an attitude of defeatism and even victimhood kicked in: It's too hard; Claudia and I are tired; we're too old for this; Quintin [Cross] and Charlie [Butterworth] have the Mayor's ear; I’ll be asked to resign any day now; everyone's against us; and so on.

In another meeting several weeks later at Peter Jung’s house (again with O’Brien present, though not Roberts) Linda yelled and cried and stamped her feet. But by the end she promised to include in the Waterfront Plan two options—one with Holcim, another showing the possibilities without them. Then I had a quiet and amicable dinner with Linda and Claudia across the street at Baba Louie’s.

It was our last real conversion, because “Mussmann” (as Linda often refers to herself, theactrically, in the third person) broke that simple promise, to restore balance and good faith to the process. Rather than embracing a forward-looking vision that would "sunset" the decades of conflict at the Waterfront, she acted to ensure further strife—and to keep herself at center stage.

Her actions since then have been wholly protective of Holcim, the Swiss-owned company which is the sole the cause of this environmental justice problem. She is trying to use the people of downtown Hudson as human shields to cover up her own complicity. The cynicism of such grandstanding is stark indeed.

Get the trucks off Columbia and the Waterfront has been the unified message of thousands of commenters from Allen to State Street for five years now. The Mussmann Plan has stood in the way of that happening. To those who have followed this issue carefully, it looks an awful lot like “Mussmann” doesn't want such a resolution—one which would satisfy 98% of Hudson residents and businesspeople—unless Holcim first gets its pound of flesh.

 

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One last small suggestion for Linda: The next time the Bread & Puppet folks are invited to perform at TSL, please be sure to inform them of your newly-adopted belief that the natural world must be sacrificed to human greed, with no other options either within or outside that constricted, pro-corporate box. The Vermonters will surely be interested in the false choices you have been presenting to the public locally, while keeping up the pretense of red-diaper radicalism at the old Columbia Street bakery.

Divide and conquer

The Gossips of Rivertown and others have taken note of an Albany Times-Union article entitled “Nobody home, for now,” about demographic shifts in Columbia County—with a focus on Hudson.

The piece is anecdotal and shallow at best, misleading and inflammatory at worst.

For example, the reporter quotes a random pedestrian who implies that Warren Street went straight from Mom & Pop stores to antique stores (a/k/a Pop & Pop stores). Other comments in the article deepen this false impression, one with little relation to reality on the ground.

But few journalists making a whirlwind tour of a place can resist an easy us vs. them narrative; it makes writing the story so much quicker and easier. And so the paper, abetted by several of those quoted, would seem to have us ignore the following:

• Nevermind that the downfall of downtown markets and shoe stores and the like was caused primarily by the growth of Fairview Avenue in Greenport—long before antiques or art or restaurants came into play. Shoppers across the country killed their own beloved main street businesses to save a few pennies at big box stores, and Hudson was no exception.

• Nevermind that there was a long gap of 15-20 years between the collapse of the “old” Warren Street and the slow but steady arrival of new businesses. During that interim period, much of downtown was given up for dead. Yet the “new” entrepreneurs (most of them middle-class or below) who saw Hudson’s promise and opportunities, rather than looking at it as a ghost town. And they keep getting scapegoated for having taken a chance on Hudson when it had hit rock-bottom, then succeeding with their small businesses against long odds.

• Nevermind that virtually every store in town is locally-owned by a Hudson or County resident. Or again, that these folks have turned a once-forsaken street full of empty storefronts, derelict buildings and street-level apartments back into a vibrant commercial district (propping up sales and property taxes in the process).

• And nevermind that there are many other types of businesses thriving in Hudson today besides antiques, from Vasilow’s to Steiner’s to coffee roasters and hair salons and more. Or that larger-scale businesses, from online marketer Etsy in Hudson to goat cheese manufacturer/distributer Coutourier in Livingston are moving jobs into the area, bucking expectations and trends. Why? Because this rural-but-sophisticated area is attractive to certain types of businesses. That they don’t have belching smokestacks or workers who routinely get injured doesn’t mean they don’t count as economic development.

Bottom line: Can anyone say with a straight face that the Columbia County or Hudson economy between 1975 and 1995 was thriving, healthy, or in any other way enviable? Those who resent the positive changes that have taken hold in the past 15 or so years should at least stop making false connections between the collapse of previous models from 1-3 generations ago, and the positive attempts more recently to get the area back on its feet.

Meanwhile, we get Matthew Fredericks opining that “deindustrialization” will cause people to pack up and leave. For where, one wonders? Is there some fairy-tale part of the United States where the 1950s never ended, everyone carries a lunchbucket to work, and every child is apple-cheeked? And how, precisely, will those who find themselves destitute in our new economy (which is by no means perfect) find the means to move? Moving is always expensive, in both obvious and non-obvious ways.

Moreover, 90% of the loss of industry in this area happened already, much of it a generation or more ago. So by Fredericks’ theory, those folks who depended upon it should already be gone. The County’s stagnant-but-stable population figures don’t support that idea.

Next we hear from an armchair pundit that “they’ve jacked up rents.” (It’s always a nebulous They.) Where, precisely, can one find lower rents than in this region? If the rents are actually lower there, the likelihood is they have even fewer traditional job opportunities, or other major problems. How, one wonders, is that magic place managing to outmaneuver the same national social and economic trends which affect every American community? And if this Land of Eldorado, with its low rents and plentiful jobs, really exists, how long can their cost-of-living stay at that level?

The article (and its haphazard sources) of course never mentions that Hudson provides far more subsidized rental units per capita than virtually any other municipality in the region. Hundreds pay only that rent which their income allows them to afford in the Terrace Apartments and elsewhere; there is tons of Section 8 and senior housing in town. If anything, the quality and numbers of these units has improved over the past decade, with some exceptions.

Those who launch facile attacks on the economic changes in Columbia County rarely recognize that the move from a heavy manufacturing to a service-based economy has been a tectonic international shift, occurring for 40 years or more. U.S. consumer demand for ever-cheaper merchandise, coupled with vastly lower labor costs overseas, has steadily stripped manufacturing from the landscape pretty much everywhere. The vast majority of traditional manufacturing was out Columbia County’s door already when I was a kid, when second-home owners were few and far between.

(Not to mention: Where is the support for greener, more sustainable, compatible industry from official quarters? When a traditional boat builder wanted to buy a piece of land owned by the City on the south end of the Hudson Waterfront in the early ’90s and create jobs, he was spurned, and took his business to Ulster County instead. The City sold the land to St. Lawrence Cement, now Holcim, and it’s remained unused and blighted ever since.)

If every County second home owner left their house and went away, and every Hudson antiques store and gallery closed, would heavy manufacturing suddenly roar back to life here? Would Warren Street suddenly fill up with dress stores and supermarkets? Please. What we’d have left is abandoned homes, empty main streets, still very little manufacturing—and everyone putting their meagre paychecks into the hands of the Walton family at Widewaters Plaza, exporting our local capital off to Arkansas.

We also get from the T-U article the same old simplistic analysis of population and the schools: “The population is stagnant, but there are more second home owners, so our schools will suffer!”

Well, sorry, but all I can say here is... duh. If you have more properties but the same number of residents, with the same or fewer number of kids in the schools, the results should logically be:

(1) A lower tax burden on each property owner, since the costs of running the schools can now be distributed across more properties; and/or

(2) The ability to spend more per child without raising individual tax payments, since once again you have more properties to tax but the same or fewer number of students.

Here’s the real tax problem at the moment: With the State essentially bankrupt and cutting back aid, but with many School districts unwilling to be disciplined and transparent about spending, the opposite is happening... higher taxes but declining education. Ditto local municipalities: In the face of Federal and State cutbacks, towns and small cities are in many cases simply passing on those costs to homeowners (new and old) rather than seriously looking at where their budgets could be trimmed.

That has everything to do with a failure of leadership, not with the demographic bogeymen painted in the minds of T-U readers by such articles. But rather than take a hard look at the leaders responsible for such mismanagement, it’s a lot easier to point the finger at “those people” who arrived here in the past 30 years.

It makes one wonder whether the folks advancing these canards (“Warren Street was killed by antiques! The newcomers are destroying our schools! They’re driving us out!”) paid any attention in civics and math class when they were in 7th Grade. Whether these wolf cries originate in ignorance or malice, such misleading exercises serve only one real purpose: to sow more division and resentment, allowing those in entrenched positions of power to keep propping up their status quo.

And why does the American celebration of entrepreneurship and small business not extend to our area’s independent, doing-it-yourselfers? Does a business have to be poisoning its neighbor’s air and water, or demanding a handout in the form of a PILOT plan, in order to be deemed legit?

Is our local economy perfect? Obviously not. (Whose is?) Are there people suffering, who our society has left behind, both economically and educationally? Clearly yes. (And we should pay them more heed.) Does spreading bad information through superficial reporting and opinions help anyone who’s feeling left behind? Not in the least. Will scapegoating those who have tried to improve their homes and create small businesses help anyone at all? Yes: Politicos, slumlords and other predators (who benefit from the promotion of social resentment and profiting from boom-bust cycles).

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Dan Seward (the proprietor of John Doe Books & Records and the guiding force behind the band Bunny Brains) posted the above photo to his Facebook page—saying that this image was created by the engineering firm Morris Associates to show what the new "gateway" to Hudson might look like once a long-empty house on 23B is demolished. Normally I'd assume this was a Dan prank, but familiarity with Morris Associates' work suggests otherwise... and it's a little late for April Foolery.

It's hard to say what's more peculiar here: The blank wall reminiscent of Fascist architecture; the gesturing hitch-hiker in knee-length britches, trapped on a baseball diamond; the lumplike meteor nesting in metallic undergrowth to guide alien visitors; the unreadable yellow type on orange backgrounds to ensure illegibility; the muscle car high-tailing it out of town; or the Family Feud-style Xs on a trellis from Grossman's Bargain Outlet. Survey says: Go back to the drawing board.

Six years ago tonight...

... it was Marty Davidson's 60th birthday. Also, the Secretary of State issued a far-reaching decision to stop the plant, and the Hudson aldermen voted to reject the company’s “community host agreement” which Rick Scalera tried to railroad through the Council for a third time. Five days later, SLC abandoned the fight. As I said in a Rural Intelligence interview last year,

Randy Daniel’s ruling was far more sweeping than we expected. He went beyond saying, “You are not going to build your giant cement plant here,” he gave specific recommendations for how Hudson should rezone its waterfront.  He recognized that compromise—a mix of recreation and heavy industry— would not work.  And he had fourteen thousand signatures to convince him that the public favored conservation and recreation.  He stated clearly that the waterfront should be for the people’s enjoyment, for ecological rebirth, and for sensible economic development.

Six years on, the City still has not followed those "immediate" instructions...

Now that we're almost as far removed from that date as the fight itself took, this may be the last such reminiscence until the 10th anniversary. But there's still many great memories of that long struggle, and lots left to do to preserve and protect this area from such threats.

Pictured above, from that evening’s events at City Hall and subsequent celebrations: Bob Blechman, Dorothy Lynn, Alan Skerritt, Ardal Powell, Monica & Bob Mechling, Peter Jung, Moisha Blechman, Alan Hamilton, Claire Oravec, Wilson McLean, Carole Osterink, Sarah Sterling, Sven Huseby, Byrne Fone, Ian Nitschke, Roy Volkmann, Peter Meyer, Sam Pratt, Barbara Ettinger, Ellen Thurston, Nora Hancock-Snead, and Julia Doyle.

Read about the whole saga here (PDF) and here.

The Geography of Nowheresville

Emporia, Virginia, 10:30 pm on a Saturday night (Jim Kunstler, call your office.)

Judge to Wilzig: Pave at your own risk

In the latest legal twist of the Alan Wilzig racetrack battle, 3rd Department Appellate Division Judge Michael Kavanagh signed an Order to Show Cause presented by attorneys for The Granger Group on Monday. In a signed, handwritten addition to the Order, Judge Kavanagh noted that following a conference with both sides, he advised Wilzig’s attorney that:

ANY WORK ON THE FACILITY MAY WELL HAVE TO BE REMOVED IF ON SUBSEQUENT REVIEW AND OR ALL OF THE A.D. DECISION (10/21/10) IS MODIFIED OR REVERSED

Kavanagh had authored the opinion (issued with a surprising brevity and haste) of October 21st which lifted a previous injunction barring Wilzig from performing any work on his proposed mile-long, 40-foot wide racetrack in Taghkanic.

But this new Order to Show Cause [PDF] finds that Kavanagh had heard “sufficient cause” for The Granger Group’s attorneys Warren Replansky and Bob McGreevy to either re-argue the case before the Appellate Division, or else appeal to the next highest court. The Order requires Wilzig’s lawyers to convince the court on November 15th in Albany why the Grangers should not be given another hearing.

The Granger team has already set forth in person and in writing their case for a new  reversal, pointing out that unfortunately the Appellate Division made fundamental errors of law and neglected to address key elements of the case it its decision last week. An affidavit from Warren Replansky supporting the Order and outlining their case can be read in full here [PDF]. In brief, it argues that if let stand, the court will have stood zoning law on its head and gutted the powers of every ZBA in New York State. The more dry headlines from the document are:

The Court in its determination failed to consider the res judicata/collateral estoppel effect of Justice Hummel’s September 17, 2007 ruling on Wilzig’s Declaratory Judgment action

and

This Court misconstrued applicable law and Zoning Board of Appeals procedures in determining that a Zoning Board of Appeals before determining whether a use is, or is not, permitted under a Zoning Law, must first await a determination of the Planning Board to grant or deny site plan approval

Basically, the Granger attorney is stating in the politest way possible to the Appellate Division: “Y’all completely missed the point and ignored the facts of this case.”

Prior to the issuance of this Order, sources in Taghkanic had indicated that Wilzig had already begun soliciting bids for paving of the track. Whether he’s prepared to risk having that work torn up or not remains to be seen, but the imminence of winter may make that decision for him, even if the Court does not.

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Full disclosure: Though I was one of three founders of The Granger Group and remain a financial contributor to the organization, I am in no way involved with steering or otherwise directing the group‘s activities.

For what it’s Worth

Tag-teaming here on another GoR post, this one about the General Worth Hotel...

In 1940, the Federally-funded Work Projects Administration (WPA) issued the first edition of New York: A Guide to the Empire State. The guide was reissued again in 1949, and contained among others this entry for the City of Hudson:

The GENERAL WORTH HOTEL, 215 Warren Street, is a rare and unusually well-preserved example of Greek Revival architecture [...]

But by 1969, the City of Hudson was moving to tear down what just twenty years earlier had been deemed “unusually well-preserved.” The Worth had been closed for six years—long enough for any building to require some restoration and maintenance, but surely not long enough to warrant complete demolition.

Today’s Hudson officials like to claim that every building torn down in the ’60s, ’70s and on into the ’90s was beyond repair. The simplest rejoinder is the ample local evidence of how individuals have restored much farther-gone buildings—left out in the rain for 10-40 years longer than the General Worth.

Far more ordinary structures than Hudson’s famous Hotel survived far more years of neglect, just waiting to be rediscovered decades later. First-time home owners managed to return countless historic properties to liveable standards (and in some cases, close to their original glory) largely without government assistance.

In that same year, 1969, the prolific architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. It was also the year that Huxtable published several stinging critiques of Hudson “leaders” as they moved to tear down the General Worth and push forward with increasingly discredited Urban Renewal programs.

As Huxtable noted in December of 1969, many American planners and architects had already concluded that Urban Renewal was a mistake. But that realization had not reached the developers and builders and bureaucrats overseeing these programs. And so the bulldozers continued their work erasing America’s architecture treasures. In The New York Times, Huxtable wrote:

The bulldozer approach [is] a thing of the past. Total clearance is dead. We are going to save our cities and spare our pastoral splendors and make an environment that is civilized and humane.

Or are we? Everyone who believes in fairies raise his hand and Tinker Bell will live. There is no corruption in Vietnam, no Mafia in Sicily, and there are no bulldozers anymore.

They’ve all gone to Lexington, Ky., where they moved in at night to start demolition of a three-block historic district, or they work weekends to insure the reduction of landmarks to rubble in Santa Fe. They stand poised to demolish everything around a few token preservation blocks in Denver; they wait to level 148 acres in Pittsburgh; they bide their time for the heart of the historic communities of Salem, Mass., and Hudson, N.Y.

Nothing much has changed except the statements of Federal policy that somehow get lost in the translation at the local level...

In a Wall Street Journal article earlier that year (anthologized in her book Kicked a Building Lately? (1976), Huxtable wrote more extensively about the Worth Hotel’s demise:

The Hudson River Valley Commission, the State Historical Trust, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation urged that it be saved. But political heads prevailed and Hudson demolished its National Register property. Ready for the biggest gag of all? Read it in the Hudson Register-Star:

“A modern Dairy-Queen Drive-In will be constructed on the site of the historic General Worth Hotel that fell victim to the bulldozers last year. The Common Council in special session voted to sell the site for $1,700. Council President Thomas Quigly said the purchase ‘was a step in the right direction to develop downtown Hudson.’”

There are more sadly ironic details in the original article. (Did Hudson ever get that drive-in DQ?) The point being that the approach taken by Hudson officials in the late ’60s and early ’70s was one much of the rest of the nation had already realized was a giant mistake. And yet the General Worth Hotel came down—and after that precedent was set, it was that much easier to find more local victims for the wrecking ball.