ON THE WATERFRONT: HUDSON’S LONG JOURNEY TOWARD ADOPTING AN LWRP

In the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of the railroad which cut off Hudson’s principal harbor, South Bay, from the river brought new kinds of industry to the waterfront. In this era, the waterfront was dominated by the fiery, smoke-belching Hudson Iron Works. The first half of the twentieth century saw the Hudson waterfront dominated by cement and oil. A huge conveyer brought cement down from the Atlas plant on Route 9 to be loaded on barges, and a cluster of giant oil tanks filled the space were there had once been ferry slips and restaurants and warehouses.

Today, with the tank farm gone and an epic victory won over a plan for a massive new cement plant, Hudson officials and residents struggle to reach a common vision for the waterfront. The City’s draft LWRP, which disappeared from the public eye in the fall of 2007, reappeared in recent weeks on the desks of Common Council members. As attention refocuses on Hudson’s waterfront, ccSCOOP asked John Cody, who in the 1980s was president of Save Hudson's Only Waterfront (SHOW), in the 1990s was chair of the Waterfront Committee of the Vision Plan Task Force, was recently appointed President of the Common Council, and who has spent his adult life living near the waterfront and advocating for its enlightened development, to share his long experience with this underappreciated and controversial Columbia County resource. —CO

With the City of Hudson moving ever closer to adopting its Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan (LWRP) and given the importance of the Hudson waterfront, it seems fitting to provide a brief history of the last thirty years of action taken by the citizens of Hudson to improve one of our most valuable resources.

As early as 1977, a group of local businessmen proposed a new restaurant and marina complex for Hudson’s waterfront. This was an exciting concept to those of us living here at the time. For reasons now lost in time, the project never came to fruition, but the idea of having a recreational facility on the waterfront that would provide public access to the river for residents and visitors did not go away.

In 1982, in an effort to increase the tax base and bring economic development to an area that had less than a decade before seen the last of the cement plants close, City government embraced a proposal to build an oil refinery on an 18-acre site on the waterfront. A group of local citizens, realizing the threat such a facility posed to the waterfront and to the quality of life in Hudson, organized to oppose the refinery. Calling itself SHOW (Save Hudson’s Only Waterfront), the group waged a three-year battle and eventually succeeded in preventing the refinery from being built.

The same year it was organized, SHOW asked the NYS Department of State to hold a meeting in Hudson. In 1982, the Local Waterfront Revitalization Program was just getting started (New York City was the first to adopt an LWRP in September 1982), and the purpose of the meeting was to have representatives from the Department of State Division of Coastal Resources provide local officials with information about the new program. Elected officials from various municipalities in the county were invited to attend. City of Hudson officials were encouraged to attend, but few did. While other communities up and down the Hudson River got on board and adopted their LWRPs (Saugerties in 1986, Rensselaer in 1987, North Greenbush in 1990, Albany in 1992, Kingston in 1993), the City of Hudson chose not to participate.

Throughout the refinery fight, SHOW continued to advocate for Hudson's participation in the Local Waterfront Revitalization Program but to no avail. The refinery plan evaporated in 1985 when, based on the questions and concerns raised by SHOW, the NYS Department of State issued a declaratory judgment to which the oil company did not respond, but SHOW's efforts to get City government to do a Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan continued for a few more years. Members of SHOW made presentations to the Common Council, and eventually, with the help of Scenic Hudson, SHOW succeeded in persuading the City to begin the process of preparing an LWRP.

Work on the first draft of Hudson’s LWRP began in 1987 and continued for two years, but in 1989, for reasons known only to the mayor and members of the Common Council at the time, work on the LWRP was abandoned.

In 1992, yet another group of Hudson residents, calling themselves Hudson Tomorrow, organized to find out how the community felt about developing the waterfront. After several very successful meetings, again held with the participation of Scenic Hudson, it was clear that there was much interest in exploring the possibility of getting something positive started on the waterfront.

In 1993, another initiative was undertaken—this time by the board of the nascent Hudson Opera House, the same people who had recently purchased the derelict old city hall on lower Warren Street with the goal of stabilizing and restoring the building as a performing arts venue. Working with the Main Street Alliance and the Hudson River Valley Greenway, HOH used its not-for-profit status to secure a grant to hire the Cavendish Partnership, a planning group from Cavendish, Vermont, to work with the community to devise a plan for the City’s future—a plan that included the waterfront as well as Warren Street and Fourth Street. Because the waterfront was recognized as a critical part of planning for Hudson’s future, Hudson Tomorrow was asked to participate. The coalition became known as the Hudson Vision Plan Task Force.

The Hudson Vision Plan Task Force was a model of community involvement and community building. More than a hundred people turned out at meetings month after month to share their vision for Hudson. The group organized into various committees—Waterfront, Beautification, Marketing and Business, Historic Preservation, Culture and Recreation. Amazing things grew out of the Vision Plan Task Force. International photographer Lynn Davis undertook her remarkable “Warren Street Project” because the Marketing and Business Committee wanted a photographic inventory of all the buildings on Warren Street. The Historic Preservation Committee evolved into the not-for-profit preservation group Historic Hudson, Inc. But these things were happy by-products. The principal product of two years of community-building meetings was the Hudson Vision Plan, a document which, although never officially adopted by the Common Council, has been the blueprint for the City’s development of Waterfront Park.

The Vision Plan Task Force was a casualty of a bitterly fought local election in 1995, but the Vision Plan itself survived— at least the part of it that dealt with the waterfront area adjoining what was once South Bay. At the beginning of 1996, Mayor Richard Scalera, who had just been elected to his second term in office, reviewed the waterfront component of the Hudson Vision Plan and formed his own waterfront committee to see what elements of the plan might be implemented. This committee, which was chaired by former DPW Superintendent Charles Butterworth, was tasked with overseeing the City-initiated development of the waterfront and with resuming work on the LWRP. The committee focused its efforts on the area of the waterfront where the tank farm stood, which today is the site of Hudson’s Waterfront Park.

Many obstacles needed to be overcome in the first few years. First, the site had to be acquired by the City in order for work to begin. Once the City gained title to the land, the oil tanks had to be removed and much testing done to determine the level of contamination present at the site. Fortunately, the contamination from the oil tanks was minimal, but it took 18 months to get the site clean enough to begin the process of implementing the park plan.

As work began on the park in 1999, the LWRP was resurrected. Over the next five years, a subcommittee of the waterfront committee worked on revising the document originally created by consultant Dan Shuster in the late 1980s. During this time, there was a great deal of back and forth between the City and the Department of State. Changes were requested and suggestions were made by the DOS, and revisions were submitted to the DOS for review. In February 2004, a draft LWRP was submitted for review to the Department of State.

Twenty months passed before any response was received from DOS. Finally, in October 2005, six months after Secretary of State Randy Daniels handed down the decision that brought an end to St. Lawrence Cement’s massive “Greenport Project,” declaring it inconsistent with the state’s Coastal Management Program, the City received a letter from Nancy Welsh, Coastal Resources Specialist with the DOS Division of Coastal of Resources. The letter, which accompanied extensive comments on the draft LWRP, indicated that public input was an essential element of the LWRP process and public outreach needed to be done.

November 2005 saw a new mayor and new group of aldermen elected. When the new administration took office, the original waterfront committee was disbanded, and after more than two decades of involvement with the waterfront, this writer became a spectator in the process. In January 2006, a new Waterfront Advisory Steering Committee was created by then Common Council President Robert O’Brien and chaired by Linda Mussmann. Working with consultant Paul Buckhurst of BFJ Planning and DOS contact Bonnie Devine, the new committee appeared to take a fairly energetic approach to soliciting public input and identifying and pursuing stakeholders on the waterfront to build consensus. At the end of 2007, this committee delivered a new draft LWRP to the Common Council.

Recently, the zoning component of the LWRP was completed, and the new draft document was presented to the Common Council for review in December 2008. That document can be downloaded from the City of Hudson website.

The journey toward adopting a Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan has been a long one, and it’s not over yet. Still, the community owes a great deal of gratitude to the hundreds of people and the many advocate groups who from 1977 to 2009 have recognized what an important resource Hudson has in its waterfront and have had the vision and commitment to participate in a process that has been beset by many fits and starts. Continued involvement by everyone will ultimately lead to the successful adoption of a Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan for the City of Hudson.