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.
