Eyesore or emblematic façade? The fate of a resolution before the common council on August 6, authorizing a $1.2-million bond to tear down two blocks of canopies and columns along portions of Wall and North Front streets in the city appears to be in question.
During Monday night’s council caucus meeting, after entering a 40-minute-long attorney-client session, Alderman of the uptown business district containing the canopies, Michael Tierney of Ward 2, announced his intention to send the resolution back to committee.
Whenever the council enters these sessions, video and audio recording ceases, making whatever they discussed unknowable.
It could also be of concern to proponents of the demolition that interested parties of the wealthy scion and owner of multiple uptown buildings, Neil Bender, appear to be massing, once again, for the legal battlefield.
Last Friday, two women came into the HV1 newspaper office on Wall Street, one of which was looking to collect signatures to stop the dismantling of the canopies. A black-and-white picture purported to reveal the considerable unsightliness underneath the canopies.
The women were Victoria Polidoro, partner in the law firm Rodenhausen Chale & Polidoro LLP, and Camila Polo, head of marketing for William Gottleib Management, Neil Bender’s Manhattan-based real-estate management firm.
Bender filed eleven lawsuits against the City of Kingston between January 2020 through November 2022. The city’s planning board has been sued twice, the DPW four times, the common council seven times, and the mayor eight. Polidoro was signed on to every legal action but the first.
HV1 emailed both Polidoro and Polo to enquire about what their vision for uptown would look like should the canopies come down, neither responded.
Mayor Steve Noble when advised of the petition being circulated by Polidoro and Polo provided HV1 with this statement:
“The City of Kingston continues to be threatened by a New York-based developer who has continually burdened Kingston taxpayers with lawsuit after lawsuit to meet his own real estate goals. Entering Uptown businesses under the auspices of caring what happens to the business owners is dishonest at best. And this is not the first time this billionaire who has warehoused properties in Uptown Kingston has used questionable methods to advance his litigation.
We recently had six legal claims filed against the City for each of the buildings that William Gottlieb Real Estate owns under different corporate LLCs. Bender uses law firms to do whatever it takes to get what he wants, which is clearly not seeing Kingston succeed. These lawsuits besiege the City’s resources and stall necessary community improvements from moving forward.
Kingston has done everything it can to help Uptown thrive and will continue working to improve this historic neighborhood. We are taking the reasonable measure to remove the city-owned canopy, which is beyond its useful life, while being threatened at every corner by this billion-dollar real estate company. This is a true David vs Goliath situation, but we will keep doing what is in the best interest of our community.”
Affixed onto the exteriors of more than 40 buildings in the 1970s, the architectural add-ons were intended as a facelift to the uptown shopping district faced with the existential encroachment of shopping malls then proliferating across the state.
Named for Woodstock artist John Pike, who designed it, the Pike Plan was an ill-fated attempt to fuse a mish-mosh of disparate architectural styles onto the facades of buildings erected in the 19th century.
The overhead roof structures, some of which sported skylights, were built to last. The same cannot be said of the reconstruction efforts begun in 2011. The new work was stridently opposed by 30 owners of buildings who proved remarkably prescient in their characterization of what turned out to be a $1.66-million taxpayer boondoggle.
Lochner Engineering, Fourmen Construction Inc. and RBA Group, which did the work, were all eventually sued. A settlement of $315,000 was reached.
The canopies remained.
Mayor Steve Noble earlier this year decided that the situation had reached a crisis point, he and council president Andrea Shaut announced his decision to pursue the canopies’ destruction.
“With the canopies in their current state, it is time to act,” Shaut agreed.
The mayor expected that the requested funding would suffice both for tearing down the structures and for repairing the building facades where the canopies were attached. Holes would be filled, mortar would be repaired, and paint colors would be matched.
The demolition, which is expected to take three to six weeks, has been scheduled to begin the first week of January.
“After the removal,” said the mayor, “I believe that we should return the store facades underneath to their original form and leave the beautiful architecture exposed.”
The mayor noted that the presence of the structure didn’t contribute to the Stockade district’s listing on the national and state Registers of Historic Places. Noble intends that the city engineer issue a bid for the services of a design consultant. He anticipates another request for proposals to identify the contractor for the actual work in October.
Noble thinks retaining the services of a design consultant preliminary to the removal would “make sure we’re not doing any damage to any of the buildings while we were taking [the canopies] down.”
At the July finance committee meeting, Noble repeatedly suggested a $2-million fund specifically for façade repairs be made available to low-to-moderate-income building owners. Such a robust façade fund is not included in the proposed August 6 resolution.
But the legislative and executive branches of government may not be in accord with the idea relegating the Pike Plan to the coal bin of history. If Tierney follows through on his motion to send the resolution back, the conundrum of just what to do with the canopies will continue.
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