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Quotable Gass

Consider how the titles of tyrants change. We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen's Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in the future: beneath the banners of Il Duce, Der Führer, the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the CEO of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.

— WILLIAM GASS, FROM THE TUNNEL (1995)

Tolstoy died in a train station

From my youth, when Mr. Fawcett at BCD assigned us to read one of the Count's short stories, I pictured the place like the Hudson Amtrak station.

Quotable Orwell

The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

—GEORGE ORWELL, POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1946)

The Hudson Windmill

Upstairs in the shabby and disorderly history room of the Hudson library—a former insane asylum—I stumbled years ago upon a badly-xeroxed page out of an old book. The page had a small sketch of a Dutch-style windmill, and claimed that in the early days of the Claverack Landing settlement, one such windmill stood at what's now the corner of Sixth and Prospect Streets in Hudson, currently the site of the Pocketbook Factory.

I’ve never been able to find that page again, nor can recall any other references to a Hudson windmill.* Maybe I imagined it, or the author got it wrong. Or maybe (like so many projects in the Hudson of today) it was something people talked about but never actually got around to doing.

The Pocketbook Factory, in turn, was a handsome manufacturing building that by the late 1990s was becoming derelict. A Long Island City investor decided to partially refurbish it, replacing its many broken windows, getting rid of the pigeons and flammable stacks of old newspapers, fixing the roof, and generally stabilizing the place. But no heating or plumbing was ever installed, to my knowledge; and nearly 10 years after the building was saved its windows are beginning to be pockmarked again with the silhouettes of stones that can fit in a teenager’s hand.

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That’s just one small slice of the history of just one of Hudson’s many street corners. I thought of it when reading former Harper’s Bazaar editor Scott Baldinger’s recent ruminations on Hudson in Rural Intelligence. Scott (who’s a friend) writes of a nighttime walk up one of Hudson’s atmospheric alleys, thinking...

[... a]bout how Hudson looks as if the buildings from a dozen upstate towns and country roads have been transported and squeezed together into a tight urban configuration, and how this tight squeeze has kept so much of the town standing, despite years of neglect. About how there probably wasn’t anything in the world quite like this picturesque disassembly, magically unique and at the same time so vulnerable to “improvement.”

As for that “picturesque disassembly,” Scott elaborates:

It is a disconnect between the town as you are seeing it—the visual evidence of Hudson’s miraculous and continuing preservation—and the gnawing sensation that, despite all the apparent progress, and everyone’s best work and intentions, it is, like Generalissimo Franco, still dead.

Scott’s essay put me in mind of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which I must have been assigned to read in some college seminar. In the essay, Freud used the city of Rome as a metaphor for the human mind:

The temples and public buildings of [the republican era are] now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction. [... A]ll these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance.

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is [...] an entity in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.

Hudson seems a bit like Freud’s version of Rome: an overlapping catalogue of the past and present, with the ruins of one era buried under the ruins-in-progress of another—all jammed up against stabilized or restored buildings, plus the very occasional newer edifice thrown in for good measure.

People encountering Hudson for the first time quickly sense the presence of a secret past, alongside the palimpsests (to whip out the most pretentious word I know), the ghostly ruins, the just-starting-to-crumble, the static, the restored, the gussied-up and the newfangled. Spend more than a year in such a place, and these presences become a tacit fact of life—less keenly felt each passing day, until they're taken for granted, unless we’re reminded of them by essays like Scott’s.

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Even dull places have a history. But even the exceptional places don’t usually make their extravagant, hydra-headed histories felt to quite the same extreme extent that Hudson imposes itself on the senses. My own belief is that this intense (again, for lack of a less pretentious word) historicity is a byproduct of Hudson’s endless series of boom-and-bust cycles. Those cycles are succinctly outlined in a yellowing 1960s graduate-school thesis on the breakdown of law enforcement in Hudson which a patient visitor may find in the archives of the Columbia County Historical Society on Albany Avenue in Kinderhook. The gyrations of Hudson’s fortunes, which seemed to reverse every 20-40 years, resemble nothing so much as a Hannah-Barbara cartoon character clinging to the blades of a windmill.

 The uniqueness of Hudson’s situation may be best analyzed in contrast with that of other towns in the region which also have bustling main streets. Among them, Rhinebeck, Saugerties, Chatham and Great Barrington (where I grew up) stand out. These towns are often described as “cute,” “quaint,” and “nice,” adjectives rarely applied to Hudson despite its official moniker of “The Friendly City.” These towns are likewise historic, but that description leaps more readily to mind with Hudson, which is also likely to be called “quirky” or “screwy” (the latter word being the one I preferred to use at the start of Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby’s documentary about Hudson, Two Square Miles.)

Like Hudson, places such as Rhinebeck and Great Barrington have changed since I was a kid; they were more small-towny and less chi-chi. But their evolution has been slow and steady, an incremental transformation marked by gradual maintenance, upkeep and improvement. They have been stable communities for as long as anyone alive can remember. By contrast, the evolution of the very small city of Hudson (“small city” being the technical designation under which its grantmakers obtain State and Federal funding) has been a series of extreme growth spurts and crashes, golden eras followed by traumatic scandals and abandonment.

Hudson thus flashes both the scars and the glinting relucs of past cycles of collapse and refurbishment. Even a casual stroll, like the one Scott describes, confronts a pedestrian with countless traces of past residents’ dreams and schemes, whether noble or sordid, refined or homely. This place may have been a whorehouse, that one a corrupt mining magnate’s mansion. This puddle on a marble stoop tells the story of a hundred thousand footsteps; that bare wood showing through the gaps in peeling latex exposes a corner-cutting housepainter’s decision not to bother priming.

Spend more than an hour in any of Hudson’s remaining taverns—Melino’s, Savoia, the Iron Horse—and someone will tell you that Hudson in its red light days used to have over 70 bars; now it has over 70 antiques stores. In between, it had boarded up and abandoned storefronts, waiting patiently for their next incarnation. In another couple generations, Hudson will likely play host to another improbable collection of 70 clustered-together... somethings. 70 restaurants? 70 outlet stores? 70 drug stores? (No, that last one is Greenport’s future.)

Whatever that next step in Hudson’s evolution is, it’s not likely to be something we can anticipate today—unless Hudson manages to hit some Stockbridge-like plateau of prosperity, which would mean both less misery and less diversity. I don’t know many people locally who, whether old or new, want Hudson to become generic and gentrified. Residents aren’t rooting for their small city to mimic any nicer (but paler and tamer) neighbors.

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Writing in the first half of the 19th Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that “everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition.” The literary critic Harold Bloom (who was likely the professor who made me read Freud) noted how in the work of Emerson, “power is always at the crossing,” citing the essayist’s assertion that power

resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim...

Bloom applies this idea of “crossing” to help locate meaning in poetry, while Emerson applies it to philosophical debates about issues such as self-reliance. It’s an idea which also can help explain the power of places like Hudson, which has undergone countless crossings. It’s all those remnants and hints and ghosts of so many transitions—the waves of prosperity and gloom, of immigration and emigration, building and tearing down and restoring—which confer upon Hudson its power to hold our attention.

Now that Hudson has come roaring back from the edge—as Columbia County authors Roberta Gratz and Norman Mintz put it in their groundbreaking 1998 book—the next challenge is how to stay close enough to that edge without falling over it. To avoid becoming just another staid Rhinebeck or Stockbridge, Hudson needs to keep itself on the move: prosperous enough to be viable, while dynamic enough to remain intriguing, so that it doesn’t become out-of-reach for either longtime residents or the next wave of innovators. For Hudson’s allure is both that it is in the midst of a change, and also that it projects a palpable sense of its many previous transitions. As Mr. Baldinger concluded:

Hudson manages, even just from its weary backside, to transfix at these moments, and there are enough of them to keep a person going—or at least edified—in spite of all of the “in spite ofs.”

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* ENDNOTE: It's been pointed out to me that the 1799 "Penfield Map" of Hudson features a sketch of a windmill atop a hill, placed somewhat to the southeast of the downtown. However, as that sketch is both out-of-scale and not incorporated into the rest of the detailed street layouts, this would appear more likely to be one of those vignettes or illustrational follies that often got added to old maps. I tend to assume that if a windmill had ever been constructed in Hudson, someone surely would have sketched or painted it. A detail of the map showing this sketch appeared on p. 10 of an issue of the Columbia County Historical Society’s bulletin, accompanying an excellent and important essay by Don Christensen about the South Bay.