Unspoilt By 'progress'

Unspoilt by 'progress'

By Cait Murphy, Financial Times

August 20 2004 (slightly abridged)

Ten years ago, a photographer took pictures of every building on Warren Street, the five-block long commercial heart of Hudson, in upstate New York. It's a depressing chronicle of boarded-up shopfronts, empty sidewalks and two antiques shops.

Fast forward a decade, and the picture is entirely different: almost every single building, many of which date back a century or more, has been restored. About 70 are antiques shops, and there must be a dozen art galleries. The streetscape bustles with traffic and pedestrians. A number of the Hudson River's little communities have seen a revival, but perhaps nowhere faster than in the eponymous Hudson, a town of 7,500 inhabitants 110 miles north of New York.

"We've gone through extraordinary changes," says David Birch of Barns & Farms Realty. "A guy whobought a building for $1 in the early 90s sold it in late 90s for $150,000. Now it is probably worth $350,000."

Many people in Hudson have this kind of story about the metamorphoses that have left architectural and social marks on the place. The first European to land there was Henry Hudson himself in 1609; the Dutch settled in 50 years later, followed by Quaker merchants known as "The Proprietors". In the 1780s, they laid out the grid that still defines downtown Hudson, and turned the sleepy farming community into a thriving little port city, with a sideline in whaling (the street signs in Hudson still feature a whale).

When whaling declined, Hudson reinvented itself yet again, this time as a travel hub and industrial centre, with a brothel district on Diamond Street that was a popular embarrassment. The year 1962 marked a sea-change, recalls Denis McShane, whose family has run Rogerson's Hardware on Warren Street since the 1860s. That was when the first out-of-town shopping mall opened. Hudson began to lose its role as the market town for the county, and was also hit by successive factory closures.

The only thing that went right was that the local administration somehow in the 1960s and 1970s managed to avoid getting money for "urban renewal", which left wreckage in so many other places. Untroubled by economic growth, Hudson sank. But its buildings still remained, an attractive, eclectic mish-mash of Italianate, Greek Revival, Georgian, Federal and neo-everything. The antique dealers saw the architecture, the old-fashioned town common, the access via train and major highways, and took a chance. The rest is history.

[The] community, however, is under strain. St Lawrence Cement, a Canada-based subsidiary of Switzerland's Holcim, wants to replace a cement factory on the other side of the Hudson with a coal-fired plant in next-door Greenport, with barging facilities in Hudson itself. The community is divided; the mayor, re-elected in 2002 with 62 per cent of the vote, is for it; basically all the newcomers are against it.

Daniel Odescalchi, SLC's spokesman, figures the company has spent four years so far on the project, and is waiting to get the go-ahead from state environmental authorities. Will that happen? "Absolutely," he says. "When you look at science and facts," in terms of public health and air quality, it's "not a problem at all." But much of Hudson does not agree: red signs screaming "Stop the Plant" are as common as posters advertising an upcoming Philip Glass concert.

Sam Pratt, executive director of Friends of the Hudson, a lobbying group that has become the focus of opposition to the plant, notes that the cement barges would be right next to a park, and disputes the company's assertions on air pollution and the effect of a massive smokestack. And yet the property boom has taken off despite the threat of a cement plant in Hudson's back yard. "I can't tell you the number of people who come here because they want to reinvent themselves," says estate agent Tom Eaton, a resident since 1977. That kind of passion doesn't go out of style.