Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
It’s frequently harder to redo something that’s been undone than it is not to undo it in the first place. That’s the message of the classic English nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, in which a frequently egg-shaped caricature “has a great fall” from a wall and can’t be put together again.
Could that be what will happen to Uptown Kingston’s controversial Pike Plan, on which demolition is scheduled to begin on Monday morning, January 12? Work crews from Chester-based Beam Enterprises are scheduled to begin deconstruction on the north side of North Front Street and work toward Wall Street.
Demolition work on the awnings on the 44 affected properties are scheduled for completion on March 13, which Kingston mayor Steve Noble has said will be the end of the time period during which the affected building owners can accept the city government’s settlement offer of $1000 per linear foot of frontage on their properties.
Noble laid out the city offer to an audience of about 70 people in the council chambers of the city hall late last Thursday afternoon
The audience at that meeting had questions not just about the desirability of the whole dismantling scheme but also about the considerable costs to the building owners in restoring and repainting their properties.|
Leading the charge for the concerned citizens were the representatives of William Gottlieb Management, the owner of 311, 312, 314, 323 and 328 Wall Street and 44 North Front Street, which has maintained that it is the Pike Plan that has given the streets the charm and the historic character that have set it apart from other business neighborhoods. Moreover, they argued, its demolition would add unknown and uncompensated repair and painting costs.
Other speakers criticized the lack of detail about the disposition of signage, about transitional parking arrangements, about the deep bolts attaching the canopies to the masonry of the facades of the buildings, and about other issues in the city’s take-it-or-leave-it offer.
There was the expectation that developer Neil Bender, head of Gottlieb Management, would seek a stop-work order prior to the Monday start of work. According to a Daily Freeman story by Brian Hubert, the firm had already sued the city five times over the Pike Plan.
The situation completely changed the next day, when judge Anthony Brindisi of the Northern District federal court of New York on Friday denied William Gottlieb Real Estate’s request for a temporary injunction to stop the city’s demolition plan. He said that the firm did not have standing under its rights to do so.
The Gottlieb firm has announced there will be further litigation against the City of Kingston and mayor Noble.
More news is expected about this story in the near future. Stay tuned to Hudson Valley One.
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