Hudson City Tour


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Published: March 1st 2008
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St. Mary's ChurchSt. Mary's ChurchSt. Mary's Church

This cathedral like structure, with it's soaring campanile and ornate decoration is a multi-stylisitic late 19th Century creation - part Gothic, part Romanesque, a little bit of everything, known as "American Ecclesiastical Architecture!" A category unto itself
The City of Hudson is known for it's architecture. Established in the 1820s as the largest inland whaling port in the US by refugees from Nantucket, it began life as a copy of a New England seaport town. Rumor has it that some of the actual houses first erected were shipped in bundles from from the same mills and housewrights who built most of the old Nantucket houses. The remaining early houses certainly wouldn't be stylistically out of place on Nantucket's streets.



Through the ups and downs of the nearly two centuries of its existence, the City has become home to a multiplicity of architectural styles, leading it to be dubbed "a museum of American Architectural style." Famed Photographer Lynn Davis did a series of architectural portraits of the buildings along the mile long Warren Street (the main thoroughfare of the city). Hudson's history has been detailed in a number of books, including this profusely illustrated one by local resident Byrne Fone.



It's a fairly compact place - less than three square miles - and home to only about 7,500 residents, making it one of New York State's smallest cities. Yet walking the street and alleys unfolds a
Grace Church EpsocopalGrace Church EpsocopalGrace Church Epsocopal

Just a few steps away from the decorative fiesta that is St Mary's, Grace Church is a relatively severe, unostentatious building, but impressive nonetheless. forty or fifty years older than St Mary's, it's dark brown stone flaring buttresses and truncated tower speak to a more down-to-earth, solid and practical approach to the spiritual life.
map of life past and present of never ending detail, with the comings and goings of today's life mixing with the constantly emerging detritus of the 19th and early 20th centuries, against a background of landscape and architecture that spans everything from the best of the Federal Period to the worst of 1980s "remodeling!"



Here are a few images of buildings in the City. More will be forthcoming as I continue my travels - to the Stop And Shop and back!


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Columbia County CourthouseColumbia County Courthouse
Columbia County Courthouse

The latest in a succession of buildings (two earlier incarnations both burned to the ground) the current Courthouse shows its early 20th Century "classical" roots. The copper covered dome tops the lobby and staircase at the center of the building, which has been "remodeled" a number of times internally. The site - at the south end of Fourth Street - which crosses half-way up Warren was balanced by the old Orphanage (which see below) which now houses the Library. Surrounded by a large park and beautiful, well-preserved (or -restored) 19th Century row houses the two churches pictured here and a few mansions, the Courthouse Square preserves much of its original character.
Courthouse PedimentCourthouse Pediment
Courthouse Pediment

This hodge-podge of details - as representative of late 19th-early 20th Century Municipal Architecture as St. Mary's is of ecclesiastical - mixes Corinthian columns with a Greek Revival pediment, a dome, and a whole basketful fof Victorian frou-frou "garlandage" It's a visual analog to the apparent discordance of "twelve tone" compostion - a sort of "Schoenberg for the eye."
Orphanage/Almshouse/LibraryOrphanage/Almshouse/Library
Orphanage/Almshouse/Library

One of the oldest surviving monumental buildings in the city is this very plain Greek Revival building of native stone, originally built as an Almshouse and Orphanage. Hudson was a seafaring town originally, full of sailors, their "girlfriends" and a number of unintended offspring. It served a number of various municipal functions over the years, eventually becoming the property of the School District, which recently sold it to the not-for-profit "Friends of the Hudson Area Library" who have undertaken to operate, maintain and restore it. This view looks from south Fourth Street - in front of the Courthouse - across Warren street (the first set of stoplights) and Columbia Street (the second set) up to State Street, where the building counterweights the Courthouse across the City's lateral axis. In this view only the central facade is clearly visible - the two wings being mostly hidden.
Jail/District Attorney's OfficeJail/District Attorney's Office
Jail/District Attorney's Office

This piece of utilitarian Victoriana was once the County Jail - which outgrew it long ago, first into an addition to the back of the Courthouse (now thankfully razed) and currently to a "modern" facility in the Industrial Tract (talk about the "Prison Industry!") But this building, now used as the District Attorney's Office, still sports the heavily barred windows of its earlier incarnation. Sadly , a \"modern\" high-security entrance has replaced the old carved wooden doors (that's what the repairs in the brick work around the door show) and that horrible little metal roof added, but the lines and proportions of the original building - with all the charming ugliness of bulldog - remain.


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