SamPratt.com

A very Stockport Halloween

Giant, scary pez dispenser spotted on Alvord Dock Road.

Storm reports and outage maps

You can check the status of your power (and possible restoration times) at the links below:

NYSEG Outage Viewer | National Grid Power Outage Map

As of 10:30 pm, NYSEG shows over 900 customers without power, and National Grid shows over 3,000. Of those with the latter service, Germantown, Livingston and Taghkanic appear to have the most outages.

The storm at this point has an erratic, volatile feel to it. For a half-hour this evening, it was quiet and dry, and stars could be seen through breaks in the rapidly-moving clouds overhead.

Here are some of the tips that have come in so far, but at this point they are too numerous to mention:

• Power is out in the Glenco Mills area as of 8 pm, with sparks seen flying off a pole on Old Route 82;
• A downed tree and power line closed Route 22 in Hillsdale near Route 21 around 5 pm, according to a Philmont resident; UPDATE: Officials say 22 is back open;
• Multiple trees down on Route 28 have knocked power out in parts of Kinderhook, according to Columbia County 911.
• Power went out around Churchtown a bit before 9 pm;
• On Facebook, Columbia County 911 reported the closure around 11:30 pm of Route 9 between County Route 10 and Maple Lane in Livingston, due to “several power poles down,” saying that this “will be an extended closure.”

If you have storm-related news, pictures or alerts, feel free to post them below in comments, or email [email protected] ... Lastly, this NOAA Flash animation of the storm’s water vapor loop is pretty amazing.

UPDATE: As of Tuesday morning, it's breezy but calm and mostly dry here in Taghkanic. Seems we were mostly spared.

Hudson time warp

An unusual aspect of living or working in a town with dozens of antiques stores is that from time to time, one encounters remnants of an earlier life in someone’s shop.

The other day my travels took me to see a building which houses an upholstery business. Passing through their garage storage space, I stopped in my tracks: Hey—my old wingbacks!

I bought the two chairs above in 1998, and sold them at a yard sale in 2006. The peculiar brick-patterned fabric leaves no doubt these were in my old place at 32 Warren for that entire time... But I’d also recognize those cat-scratched corners anywhere. Plus, the tags safety-pinned by the upholsterer to each chair refreshed my memory of which antiquer bought them off my sidewalk.

The pair came out of an odd, long-gone store in the 600 block of Warren Street, now occupied by Red Chair. It’s then-owner Ken used three floors of the cavernous building for retail, and his business model was baffling at first glance. Unlike pretty much every other Hudson merchant’s store, this one seemed to have absolutely no point of view or ruling aesthetic... One might find a mint-condition George Nelson desk next to a stained Rent-A-Center overstuffed couch, in front of an Ikea screen, illuminated by a beat-up lava lamp, atop a chipped faux-Colonial sideboard. Everything was priced low, almost at random, and anything decent tended to sell fast—then reappear in another shop’s window at 5-10 times the price.

One had to check in frequently to catch a deal, and as a new homeowner with little furniture to populate a large house, I stopped by regularly and got to know Ken a bit. A white-haired guy probably in his late 50s or early 60s, but with a youthful countenance, his politics were vaguely libertarian. He liked to tell rambling stories, often with an undercurrent of skepticism of political authority. Most days he sat in a small booth on the 2nd floor overlooking the main space, surfing the then-nascent web at a snail’s pace via dialup on an older computer. A stooped assistant with a slight stutter handled much of the hauling of Ken’s wares in via the alley entrance, and out via the front door.

Eventually, Ken explained the seeming randomness of his ever-shifting inventory: he was buying the contents of abandoned storage lockers, usually sight-unseen, and reselling anything of value contained therein... an original Storage Wars guy, long before the A&E show. Most of what he sold was true junk; otherwise it wouldn’t have been abandoned. But now and then one could pick up something of real value, typically for well under $100. Sometime around the turn of the century, he sold the building to Angelika Westerhoff, whose store has also since evaporated. I was told that Ken had a similar but even larger warehouse store in Poughkeepsie for a while, but I never could find it.

Anyway, these wingbacks were purchased with the intention of getting them recovered... I liked the shape, not the upholstery. But I never got around to it, and by letting the cats attack the eventually-to-be-recovered fabric, it seemed to spare the rest of my stuff from their claws. Below are two of them (one who died last Winter) enjoying a nap together by the fireplace. Apparently I only needed to buy one of these chairs, not the pair.

Revolutionary re-tread

Sticker on a van parked on Warren Street, Hudson (NY).

Bob’s Trailer

I accidentally discovered where Bob went after the finale of Twin Peaks: his spirit relocated to Elizaville.

The Great Wall of Hudson

 

Train passing through the public park at the corner of 7th and Warren, Hudson (NY).

TCI files to rebuild (but screws that up, too)

According to well-placed sources, PCB handler/processor TCI of NY filed an application last week with the Town of Ghent to rebuild its facility on Falls Industrial Park Road. The company’s application is said to have been accompanied by a check which has been placed in escrow by the Town.

However, the application reportedly has been returned to TCI as incomplete, as it did not contain all of the required information. Some town officials have informally signaled that TCI would need to go before its planning board if it wished to resume operations

As it happens, the Ghent Town Board has its regularly-scheduled meeting tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 pm at Town Hall, located at 2306 State Route 66.

To date, the Town has not cited TCI for any of many evident zoning code violations which have been brought to its attention. Activities such as fuel and explosives storage, handling of high-concentration PCBs, safety precautions and hazard prevention, and the introduction of multiple tenants into a building, are all clearly regulated by the Town’s zoning code and State fire safety regulations which are the Town’s obligation to enforce. Records obtained via FOIL and from private legal files held by neighbors indicate that many or most of the company’s uses of the site have never been the subject of a permitting review.

TCI left Ulster County in the mid-1980s after a fire similar to the one in Ghent led  Newburgh fire and code enforcement officials, as well as State regulators, to cite the company for multiple violations. The company then attempted to set up shop again in Greene County, but were blocked among other things by stiff opposition from Athens firefighters, who noted that Athens did not have the equipment or resources to fight a major fire at such a facility. It was then that TCI came to Columbia County, representing themselves as an electronics recycler, and claiming that any transformers accepted onsite would be drained and contain at most scarce traces of PCBs.

In addition to having two fires at its plant in just the past year, TCI’s tenure in Ghent includes the death of a young worker on the job due to exposure to freon gas, and two failed applications (one to build an incinerator, the other to process household hazardous waste) which cost the Town enormous legal fees.

More on Hudson youth, and rents

In a comment on the previous post here about Hudson getting younger, 3rd Ward Alderman John Friedman noted that:

One problem that I hear from younger Hudsonians and those aspiring to be is that the cost of rental housing in the city has climbed precipitously (is that an oxymoron?) in the last year or so and make finding a decent place to live difficult for this particular demographic. The City is trying to figure out ways to stimulate a market response to this demand but that usually takes 2 years or so...

Speaking as a former Young Person, I can attest that every generation thinks that The Rent Is Too Damn High. But since complex issues like this require more than cursory analysis, below are some examples and considerations that might be taken into account:

1. In the documentary film Two Square Miles, recently screened at Basilica Hudson, a local resident complains that landlords are asking “six, seven hundred dollars" for an apartment, calling these prices “crazy.” It is suggested by some that “those people” are trying to “push all of us out.” Now, that interview was shot almost ten years ago. A decade later, I still see that same interviewee daily, walking his dog on Warren Street. He’s still here; he didn’t get pushed out, in spite of the alleged “craziness” of Hudson rents. 
2. Today, one can readily find on Craigslist listings such as this: a newly-remodeled three-bedroom apartment in uptown Hudson for under $1,000. Three young people could share it and pay just $325 each per month. (Does unsubsidized rent get any cheaper than that anywhere in the Hudson Valley, unless you’re prepared to live in a free-fire zone in Newburgh?) One can find many similarly-priced options on Craiglist; while offerings from local realtors tend to be more of the luxury variety.
3. If rents do need ameliorating, the main way the City of Hudson can help is to get its budget and taxes under control, since rents correlate closely to taxation here. Overall, private investment has been a great benefit to Hudson: derelict structures are saved, delinquent properties go back on the tax rolls, contractors get work doing renovations, and formerly-closed-up apartments go back on the rental market, increasing supply. But if a landlord is paying taxes that exceed their montly mortgage payment, that is going to add substantially to what they have to charge in rent just to hold onto their building. Few if any landlords will take a loss on a rental, and high taxes will lead to high rents.
4. Another strategy that could moderate rents would be for the City to encourage or require un(der)used properties to be activated again. One example is Galloway’s apartment building on the corner of Warren and 2nd street: it was cleared of tenants at purchase time nearly a decade ago, and inexplicably has remained empty ever since. Ditto the former “Apartments of Distinction” building at the corner of Union and 5th Street, formerly home to multiple families, There are many other examples of “warehoused” residential space all over town—I recall seeing a figure of as much as 15-20% of housing stock being empty here in one recent report. Get those apartments back on the market, and rents will surely come down, if the law of supply and demand is not an economic fiction.
5. As far as rents going up, it’s worth trying to sort out anecdotal reports from the actual situation before officials take any major action. If a couple of folks’ rents go up, and they talk a lot about it at a local bar frequented by young people, it becomes easy in a small town to jump to the conclusion that everyone’s rent is exploding—even when those two examples are exceptional. For example, just yesterday I went to watch football at the newly-purchased house of a Hudson “young person.” (That in itself is, anecdotally, a good sign.) There were about seven of us hanging out—two of whom had just moved to Hudson to work at a local business. They had been crashing on friends’ couches in search of place to live, and literally during the Patriots/Seahawks game, one of them got a call and they left to move into their new apartment. So what is the reality? Are rents going up too high, or are young people finding apartments? If rents are so problematic, why are young people moving here at a rate unheard of a decade ago? In short, the City might first want to try to collect some rigorous data to find out what is really happening on the ground, rather than acting in haste based on sketchy info.
6. It remains that Hudson has a tremendous amount of subsidized housing, per capita—certainly higher than any other municipality in the County. This subsidized housing stock has not diminished in the past 10-15 years. And it probably also ranks in the top five in the region in terms of providing affordable housing (again, per capita). In the Terrace apartments, for example, if your situations qualifies you, you can get an apartment at a rent which is pegged to your actual income: you only pay what you can actually afford at any given time. This is not something that most towns offer.
7. In that context, it would be useful to determine how Hudson rents compare to rents in other towns and small cities nearby. Is it more expensive to rent an apartment in Hudson than, say, Philmont? Kinderhook? Catskill? Albany? If one thinks that rents are too high in Hudson, where else would one go—and what would one be passing up by moving, in terms of either job or lifestyle opportunities? If you move to a place where rent is cheaper, will there be any work or anything to do after work in that place, or would it be cheaper precisely because it is dead? If housing is really hard to come by in Hudson, it must be even harder elsewhere; and to that extent, rental pressure is a New York State or American problem.

Our American capitalist system is an unfair one, and one that needs fixing. Even former Alderman Quintin Cross (a past master of divide-and-conquer local politics) acknowledges toward the end of Two Square Miles that it is “not the fault” of people who have embraced Hudson’s potential that our society remains full of economic and social ills. With that in mind, it would be good for City officials to consider ways to address the most catastrophic rental situations—such as when a building sells, and longtime renters are given minimal time to move out. Renters ought to have the right to a lease, and a reasonable amount of time to find new quarters if owners change. 

Like every place inhabited by humans, Hudson has some greedy landlords, some slumlords, as well as some elitists whose rental rates are calculated to enact some sort of social engineering. And like every place inhabited by humans, some people latch onto shallowly-understood buzzwords such as gentrification, deploying it as a social pose or way to assuage their own guilt over being privileged, without ever backing it up with actual data or acting meaningfully upon that concern. Gentrification is common in our society; people interested in really understanding and addressing are rare. If anything, thanks to Hudson’s situation, its resources, its walkability, its building stock, and most of all its people, the City may be better positioned than most rural towns to address with the profound flaws of that system.

As noted by that film’s co-producer Sven Huseby at Basilica the other night: if you visit similar towns around the country, one quickly realizes that Hudson’s survival and slow, steady improvement is not merely exceptional in America today, it is almost unique.

Hudson is getting younger

DJ event at Basilica Hudson

There’s still a lot of hand-wringing about the Hudson population dropping over the past decade, as if this were some sort of catastrophe for the life of the town. Official census figures show the number of residents dropping about 11% between 2000 and 2010, from 7,524 to 6,713—about a third of that drop attributable to changes in how prisoners in the Hudson Correctional Facility are counted.

Whether such figures actually speak to the health and fortunes of this “small city” is debatable at best, verging on dubious. Hudson’s population was never higher than in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when residence rose well over 12,000 people. Does anyone want to go back to the mid-1930s, just to be able to say that the population has risen again?

Still, ever since this writer moved here full-time in the dank February of 1998, it’s always been fashionable to predict imminent doom for Hudson. Yet things have kept steadily improving, despite the efforts of certain officials and entrenched interests to impede progress. Then-City Attorney Giff Whitbeck once was heard to declare that the merchants of Warren Street were shell businesses on the verge of collapse—mere façades. That was in the late 1990s. Today, there are probably five times as many occupied storefronts on Hudson’s main street.

Indeed, closer look at voter rolls maintained by the Columbia County Board of Elections tells a somewhat different story about what’s occurred in the past decade or so. Despite the Census showing nearly 800 fewer people in town over the past decade, the number of voters on record in 1999 in comparison with today has dropped by only 56 people.

The percentage of Hudsonians registered to vote thus has actually increased, from 49% to 54%. As a basic measure of civic engagement, one could argue from these numbers that while there are fewer people in Hudson now, there are more interested in its future. To some extent, this reflects the number of concerted voter registration pushes in the years of 2000-2005, when there was a series of hotly-contested City races in the individual five wards as well as Citywide. 

Now, turnout in the 2011 Hudson election was notably dismal, possibly because of the lack of contested alderman and supervisor races in the City; the upcoming Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Assembly and Legislature contests may be a better test of how engaged these voters really are.

More telling is the average age of registered voters, which has dropped from 54 years old to just 50 over that same period (1999-2012). In other words, the Hudson electorate is getting younger—an improvement, many would say, as a frequent concern in the 1990s was that Hudson’s population was not merely dropping, but also aging. That measurable shift demonstrates with hard figures the anecdotal sense that Hudson is indeed getting younger.

One sees the benefits of this shift economically when venues like Basilica Hudson can routinely bring out 600-800 young people on random weekday nights for bands like Grimes and Godspeed You Black Emperor. (Obviously, many of those attendees were young people from around the region, from Bard to RPI to SUNY to as far away as the Five College area of Northhampton, Mass. But the attendance was also boosted by local residents.

The answers as to why Hudson might be getting younger are not hard to imagine. There is a growing music scene, with multiple venues on both a grand and small scale, from Basilica to Spotty Dog—few of which existed until the last five years or so, let alone in the late ’90s. There are far more options of places to hang out in both day and nighttime, and more places for young people to work. Countless businesses which many newere residents take for granted (from retail and restaurants on Warren Street, to service and manufacturing off it) just weren’t here a decade ago, such as Etsy and Digifab. There’s just a lot more to do now.

Thus when it comes to population, it may many less how many people live in a place, than who. Better to have three people who pay attention to what’s going on, work in town, spend their income locally, support local civic institutions, and get involved with their community, than four who are apathetic and disengaged. Hudson still has a long way to go, but the increased youth of those who have stayed or moved here is a hopeful sign.

Pond fog

27 degrees at 6:30 am, Claverack (NY). .. Supposed to yoyo back to 72 on Sunday.

Bits & bites

Image from Star Chefs

It’s been a light week for posting here, due to other obligations, and also the fact that I don’t like to post just for the sake of posting... That said, here are a few regional tidbits worth reporting:

• Chef/author Zak Pelaccio’s much-anticipated upstate restaurant with Jori Jayne Emde on South 3rd Street in Hudson reportedly will be called Fish & Game, with renovations continuing at a fever pace in hopes of opening this winter.


• HUMP, a/k/a the Hudson Museum of Photography, opens this Saturday with a solo show by Stephen Johnson entitled Moonman. HUMP is located at 552 Warren Street.


• After a hiatus following the death of Don Blasko, his wife Mady has reopened the Turnpike Inn.


• In other Town of Ghent drinking news, longtime Kozel’s bartender Ned has stepped down to enjoy some well-deserved leisuretime after many years of solid service. It’s rare to find a real oldschool barkeep of Ned’s caliber around here.


• Laetitia Hussain’s recent three-story installation at John Davis Gallery, Sycamorphology has sold and is said to be headed to a publicly-accessible space in New York City.


• According to several sources the Laskin family is no longer involved with the operation of TCI of NY, the PCB waste company David Laskin moved to Ghent from Newburgh after a fire there in the 1980s. It thus presumably was just a coincidence that (as several other sources have pointed out) the 165-acre Laskin family compound in Old Chatham went on the market for $3,200,000 on August 3rd—just two days after the most recent and most catastrophic TCI fire.


• Also regarding TCI, Albany TV stations and other print outlets are reporting that the August 1st fire has been cleared of any suspicion of arson by the New York State Police, though their official report on the cause of the fire is not complete. The August conflagration was TCI’s second fire of 2012, and occurred in the context of a series of other fires in the Route 9H corridor—one of which was affirmatively deemed an arson. (Since the time of this site’s post on that topic, residents have noted several additional fires on roads just slightly off 9H.)


• It’s come to this site’s attention that several Hudson elected officials are unaware that the City has an adopted Comprehensive Plan, which can be downloaded in two parts via this link. The plan straddled the Cranna and Scalera administrations, being developed in 2000-2001 and passed in 2002. Due to the then-raging St. Lawrence Cement controversy, and the City’s decision to hire SLC’s own planning firm as its consultant, the final plan was greatly watered down, but it does include a few useful nuggets; more on that next week, probably.


• This Sunday will feature the last farmer’s market of the season in Philmont, according to Sally Baker of PB, Inc. The market’s hours are 10 am to 1 pm.

Expert calls TCI testing ‘half-assed’

Formation of one of more than a dozen fireballs over the TCI facility on the night of August 1st, as seen in this YouTube video

Ghent resident Patti Matheney of GhentCANN attended Monday night’s meeting at the Ghent Community Center of the Columbia County Environmental Management Council. Though the meeting was scheduled on Columbus Day, some 60 people still managed to attend.

According to Matheney’s notes, the meeting was attended by Ghent Zoning Enforcement Officer Gil Raab, and two Ghent Town Board members, Pete Nelson and Richard Sardo (who apparently stayed only a few minutes). County Board of Supervisors chairman Pat Grattan was also there for much though not all of the discussion. Assembly member Didi Barrett, who organized a previous forum on the fire, sent a representative.

EMC chair Ed Simonsen posed 10 questions developed by the Committee to Dr. David Carpenter, a PCB expert affiliated with SUNY Albany. Previously, Dr. Carpenter and others, such as cancer specialist Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, have questioned the methodology used by the State to test for PCBs, and the cancellation of promised tests for highly-carcinogenic dioxins known to form from the burning of PCBs.

The 10 questions posed by the Committee were as follows, as recorded by Matheney, with notes regarding Dr. Carpenter’s answers:

1. Have there been incidents like TCI in other communities, and if so was it handled differently? Dr. Carpenter knew of no similar incidents. He explained that much of the State testing approach was apparently based on the infamous PCB contamination of a State office building in Binghamton in the early 1980s, but that case was quite distinct from the Ghent fire, as it involved the indoor contamination of ventilation systems, not an uncontrolled outdoor burn. Nevertheless, it required 14 years to clean up


2. Where would toxins be found from a fire like this? Contamination from the fire would be most likely found in soot, according to Dr. Carpenter. He commented that he would not have bothered so much with all of the air, water, and soil testing done by the State, focusing instead on scraping soot off of surfaces, sampling and testing that. [Editor’s note: Nearby residents who had visible deposits of black clumps of material from the fire on their decks, pools and cars reported that State officials refused to take samples.]


3. Can local residents or scientitest be trained to do the testing? Not really, said Dr. Carpenter, as certified labs are needed to do accurate testing.


4. If TCI doesn’t rebuild, will Ghent be left with a “brownfield”? Dr. Carpenter indicated that it was too early to know for sure.


5. If TCI rebuilds, what can be done to reassure the community that everything is safe? State and Federal agencies should do their job, Dr. Carpenter argued, for example by making sure that up-to-date safety measures are in place.


6. What role did sodium have in the TCI plant? Dr. Carpenter said that he does not know. [Editor’s note: Various corporate and government websites show that sodium, which can by highly explosive when exposed to moisture, is sometimes used to dechlorinate or “detoxify” PCB wastes. However, it does not appear that TCI or either of the two other companies occupying the building have obtained permits to do so in Ghent; indeed, the presence of two additional companies in the building, let alone sodium, seemingly was a surprise to officials.]


7. What limitations to PCBs should be required if TCI were to rebuild? Everything is potentially risky, Dr. Carpenter advised, suggesting that all regulations would need to be strictly enforced.


8. What was the potential impact to agriculture from the fire? Dr. Carpenter stressed the importance of keeping toxins out of the food supply to avoid health risks. While he reassured the audience that the possibility of PCBs being absorbed into plants and vegetables was low, that soot could land on these and they need to be washed. However, the risk of absorption into meats by animals eating contaminated grasses or feed was described as much more potentially serious.


9. Is the exposure to PCBs and dioxins worse for children? Yes, Dr. Carpenter answered.


10. Did the testing done by the State show the correct analysis? Dr. Carpenter still suspects that the testing was faulty. He again faulted the NYS Department of Health (DOH) for not testing for dioxins, calling that omission “inexcusable” and “half-assed.” [Editor’s note: Is that a scientific term?] He believes the labs used should still have the samples collected, and that it should still be possible for more testing to be done.

While noting that their committee has no direct enforcement power, the EMC indicated that it would make a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors to request more testing by the NYS DOH.

Dr. Carpenter also discussed a case in Louisiana in which two immigrant workers are suing a company similar to TCI, where they had worked for years with no training on how to handle toxic substances. Both now apparently have cancer. He mentioned as well that he is working with Barrett to obtain the necessary chromatograms.

Matheney further reports that members of the public askedquestions toward the end of Monday’s meeting, with most wanting to know how to go about getting more testing done. Downwind resident Mark Johnson mentioned that he had heard that the State Police burned their uniforms after the fire, but that local fireman have not. Johnson also alluded to the alleged use of “Mexican workers” at the facility.

Update: John Mason has posted his report on the meeting at The Register-Star’s website.