How To Destroy A City

Hudson, more valuable than ever

(Maeve Buckley Andersen)

“What is the city but the people?”

—Shakespeare, Coriolanus

In the spring of 1935, the City of Hudson decided to put itself on a coin.

Hudson was turning 150, and so the federal government authorized 10,000 Hudson half dollars to be sold for a dollar apiece. You used to be able to just do things! City officials initially wanted Henry Hudson himself on the coin, which presented the minor problem that there are no depictions of Hudson contemporary to his lifetime. Sculptor Chester Beach used his ship instead of improvising.

The finished coin is one of the more bizarre coins this nation has ever produced.

On the reverse, the Half Moon sails beneath a crescent moon. On the obverse, Neptune holds a trident, riding backward on a spouting whale while a mermaid blows a conch shell behind him. Around them winds a ribbon reading et decus et pretium recti— roughly the honor and reward of the righteous. Beach had not lost his mind; that is a faithful depiction of the original seal of the City of Hudson, whose Nantucket colonists had turned a spot more than a hundred miles from open ocean into a whaling port.

Then things became very Hudson very quickly.

A New York dealer is believed to have acquired 7,500 of the 10,000 coins for 95 cents each; another bulk buyer got about 1,000. Ordinary Hudsonians who walked into First National, the hometown Warren Street bank distributing them, were informed that the coins had sold out. Almost immediately, they were trading for several dollars. A month later, for $12.50.

A disgruntled collector writing as A. Shornlamb of “Antihudson, New York” asked of Neptune: can it really be the devil himself?

That didn’t make them any cheaper. Ninety-one years later, decent Hudson halves sell for hundreds of dollars and the exceptional ones for far more. One of the finest known brought $31,200 in 2023.

I guess you could say that makes it successful.

Lucifer, City Manager

Suppose for a moment that it is the early ‘80s. Hudson has been losing manufacturing jobs and people for over half a century, and you arrive at City Hall for your first day of work.

You have just been appointed municipal Satan. Your objective is to destroy the City of Hudson.

Unfortunately for you, the rules are rather annoying. Satanism 1 was crazy. People are wising up— Jane Jacobs had made it into the city library— and so the tried and true methods will not do. You cannot bulldoze entire neighborhoods. The last guy already did that.

Instead, when you are finished, Hudson has to look better.

The abandoned buildings should be occupied. Crime should go down. Property values, tourism, and the tax base should go up. Fancy people should have nice things to say about Hudson. National magazines should send photographers. The Amtrak station should be crowded. Restaurants should be booked. Storefronts along Warren should be open. Each and every indicator that someone spending a Saturday afternoon there may use to determine whether the city is thriving should flash neon green.

There is only one thing you have to destroy: the ordinary Hudsonian’s ability to lead an ordinary life within city limits.

How would you do it?

The wonderful part, from municipal Satan’s perspective, is that nobody involved would have to behave all that badly. The easy story of a place like this one is one of bad newcomers, and bad newcomers are hardly required. In a city as small as Hudson is, enough perfectly unobjectionable individual actions can add up to something pretty indefensible.

The more interesting thing to scrutinize is what measure we use when we declare Hudson came back, and is it the right one?

So what is success?

The question I keep coming back to when thinking of Hudson, and places like it along the river, goes like this: can most people who grow up in these cities reasonably expect to lead an independent adult life in them?

Not whether Josh Riley can make partner in big law and triumphantly return Upstate for his congressional seat at forty-three. Or if someone’s parents keep the childhood bedroom available. Or that a lucky tenant happens to have an unusually responsive landlord or somebody’s grandmother bought a house for $35,000 in 1978.

Can someone with an ordinary job rent an apartment of their own? Eventually perhaps buy something of their own? Find another bedroom if they have a child, or two if they have two? Can they change jobs, end a marriage, have their car die, or suffer any of the many other ordinary turbulences of adult life without the answer being to move to Livingston, Fishkill, or Hyde Park?

This is of course different from saying that a city has failed whenever a child grows up and moves away. I have moved away. But for those who want to stay, is it possible to without being increasingly dependent on unusually high earnings, inherited property, family subsidy, or luck?

This seems to me a modest bar for determining whether a city is functioning.

Before I go on, my grandmother reads these, and if I imply Hudson leaning on a visitor economy is a new phenomenon, or that the concept of a second home is downstream of COVID, she will text me to object.

Hudson has always had a visitor economy. At various points it had a spectacularly amoral visitor economy. From its very beginning, Nantucket deckhands came through the old port. Later, outsiders came to Hudson for Diamond Street (now Columbia Street), which was notorious for prostitution and gambling dens until Dewey sent in the State Police in 1950.

The distinction is that this visitor economy once existed alongside a much larger economy of Hudson itself.

Hudson made things. It was a whaling port until whaling died, and then an industrial city until industry died. It produced stoves, bricks, tools, cement, and manufactured goods. Later there were firms like W.B. McGuire, once one of the largest employers in Hudson. One of my maternal great-grandfathers worked there, became a vice president and general manager, and co-invented an automatic loading dock in the ‘70s. The factory moved production to Wisconsin and Arkansas and laid off its remaining Hudson employees in 2006. My other maternal great-grandfather was the agricultural extension agent for Columbia County, an intermediary between the land-grant agricultural schools and the people like his parents who actually grew apples.

They were not exactly aristocracy, and not exactly paycheck-to-paycheck either. I find their lives useful to describe here because they are fundamentally ordinary. Two men worked in a place in different but complementary sectors of the economy, two of their children met, and their grandchildren were born at the local hospital.

Hudson could, at one point, stand on its own two feet.

Its population peaked in 1930 at 12,337. Fifty years later, there were 7,986. Of course, in 1930 households were larger and the industrial economy was thriving. Neither of those two things could be frozen in amber, and so a familiar story played out: factories closed, people left, and the downtown went into a very real tailspin.

The antiquers who began arriving in the ‘80s were attracted by the shells left behind from said industrial decline: extraordinary architecture, lots of it, and hardly a bidding war to acquire them. Warren Street slowly came back over the coming decades, and other businesses soon followed. This was unambiguously a positive development when the alternative may have easily been another forty years of abandonment and decay.

But the recovery of a downtown does not necessarily entail the recovery of a city as a place to live.

The rise of remote work came decades after many of Hudson’s problems, yet it certainly removed a speed governor for the process. Suddenly, a much larger share of those competing for housing in Hudson were not bound to the jobs market of Hudson, or even the Upper Hudson Valley more generally. That has happened before, obviously, but never on anything like this scale. By 2023, the number of Hudson Valley residents primarily working from home had nearly tripled from its 2016 level.

The income numbers are stark. Between 2013 and 2023, median household income went from about $46,000 to $54,000 after inflation. That is noticeable, but not spectacular on its own. The mean meanwhile is rather dramatic: roughly $64,000 in 2013, $107,000 by 2023. The average¹ household income of the richest fifth is quite comfortable at $324,612.

The bottom fifth remain comfortably below the poverty line at $11,977.

What does the commercial street of a city like that become?

Warren Street

At 427 Warren Street, FINCH hudson [sic] is selling a set of 1970s Swedish leather lounge chairs with an ottoman and table for $9,800. There is also a $1,850 19th century Italian painting of an unidentified bearded man. For the more budget-conscious shopper, there is a $92 candle.

The average retail job in Hudson pays $45,981 a year, or about $884 a week before taxes. The FINCH chairs therefore represent nearly three months of a retail worker’s gross pay.

Who is Warren Street for?

None of this, by itself, proves all that much. Nobody expects the cashier at Bergdorf Goodman to buy everything at Bergdorf Goodman. Hudson has been an antiques destination for over 40 years, and tourist money supports jobs that otherwise would not exist in Hudson.

Fine. But at what point does scale override that? At what point does the question of whose purchasing power determines what kinds of businesses can profitably occupy downtown Hudson reach criticality?

The median household in Hudson makes $54,139, and more than one in four live in poverty. Take a stroll down Warren Street and there is no obvious sense of a place in a state of stark economic bifurcation. The buildings are all occupied and many people who arrived Friday evening are plainly spending a great deal of money. What bothers me is that Hudson can apparently be very prosperous without very many of the people living there sharing in it.

And then on Washington Street— about a half-hour walk from the Amtrak station— there is Pocketbook Hudson, a 70,000 square-foot former textile mill and pocketbook factory. After the factory closed, it sat empty for a time and later stored antiques. A $25 million redevelopment has brought it back as a 46-room boutique hotel with shops, a restaurant, a nightclub, and a 6,000 square-foot bathhouse. 2026 room rates started at $379. Vogue went to check out the baths.

At Pocketbook’s Ambos restaurant, bread and butter costs $15. Pappardelle with mutton ragu is $38; a picanha steak is $55; a 22-ounce ribeye meant for sharing is $130. The Times Union spent $250 after tax and tip on dinner for two without wine. Across the courtyard, a massage costs $250, a facial $275, and a full bath and studio membership $325 a month.

The average accommodation/food service job in Hudson pays $37,798 a year: about $727 a week before taxes.

Pattern for Progress admirably does not bother dancing around the implications. Its 2025 housing report found the average wage for all Hudson jobs was $56,221, and the minimum income needed to afford the city’s median rent was $52,360. Manufacturing averaged $64,657²; healthcare $59,793. Retail averaged $45,981; arts and entertainment was $40,344. Accommodation and food service— 748 jobs, growing by 35% from 2017 to 2023 while healthcare fell by 13%— averaged $37,798. The report’s conclusion is best not paraphrased: “People who work in these Hudson jobs cannot statistically afford Hudson housing.”

This is more or less the new economy in miniature. More rich visitors and residents mean more restaurants, hotels, shops, and things to do, which mean more jobs serving those people. Those jobs do not suddenly have to pay enough to continue living in Hudson.

Somebody has to make the bed in the hotel room with the $4,100 bedding. Somebody has to bring the $130 steak to the table. Somebody has to stand behind the counter while a customer ruminates whether the $9,800 chair works in the country home.

Where are they supposed to live?

Beautiful, unlivable

Hudson’s housing stock provides an answer, and it is infuriating.

Between 2013 and 2023, the city gained only 33 housing units while losing 208 households. Over the same decade, units in two-to-four family buildings fell by 333 while single-family units rose by 383. Pattern concludes that many duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes were likely converted to single-family homes.

Think about how perverse that is. Capital flooded into renovating the city’s housing stock and housed fewer people on the other side.

Hudson once fit 12,337 people within city limits. The 2020 census counted 5,894, and the July 2025 estimate is 5,721. There are all sorts of reasons why an old industrial city might house fewer people that are not unique to Hudson. What is harder to handwave away is said city remaining at less than half of its historic population while simultaneously being so desirable that the people who work there increasingly cannot afford to live there.

Hudson, whose population density is comparable to Austin’s, did not run out of room. In many cases, room is being actively taken away.

A current listing on Parkwood Boulevard asks $995,000 for a property described as a partially converted eight-unit multifamily building. The listing suggests possible futures including continued multifamily use, condos, a “boutique bed & breakfast (subject to approvals),” or a “gracious single-family residence.” On State Street, an active two-family listing advertises either rental income or the option “to convert to a single family residence.”

This is not just realtors throwing out ideas to move stock, or the admittedly wide error bars of the ACS housing unit estimates erring notably to one side either. It does not take much trawling of county lot assessments and street view to see entrances and mailboxes that have disappeared in the past decade. In just over 40 minutes, I was able to eyeball over a dozen apparent conversions.

This was not a scientific count, and for that reason I don’t want to make a data viz or even a spreadsheet that would appear comprehensive. Perhaps even some of those destroyed units were truly uninhabitable. But the ACS pattern is large enough, and the physical evidence obvious enough, that the possibility this is doing far more harm than good deserves more scrutiny than I think it gets.

This is municipal Satan’s favorite trick. Why demolish buildings when you can destroy units invisibly?

The objection here is interesting: a lot of Hudson’s little apartment buildings were not born apartment buildings. Many Victorians and Foursquares began as single-family and were subdivided later.

But I do not understand why this is supposed to make reconversion unobjectionable. A growing, changing city once responded to social change by taking the houses of the affluent and finding ways for several ordinary households to occupy them. We are now watching some of that process run in reverse.

The typical American housing market is about cities where demand grows faster than construction, and no doubt Hudson can fall squarely in that paradigm. But not perfectly. Hudson remains at less than half its historic population yet is sufficiently desirable that local workers cannot afford the median rent, while at least some existing housing capacity is being consciously extinguished. Housing scarcity in Hudson’s case seems to not only be a matter of too few existing units for too many people; in at least some cases, it is being actively accelerated.

At a certain point, this is just antisocial. I mean that both in the pejorative sense and in the more literal sense: against society. If success means the dollhouse-ification of the City of Hudson, its prime function being to run fiber-optic through otherwise faithful examples of 200-year-old architecture, fewer apartments and fewer people able to afford the place, then what the fuck are we doing?

Hudson still contains poor people, public housing tenants, immigrants, young families, retirees, and people whose families long predate the hotels. They didn’t disappear. Calling Hudson “bougie” badly misses what has happened. The Census puts 28.2% of the city below poverty. The new rich city was laid directly over the poor one.

They can still see each other.

They are sometimes serving each other dinner.

Where did the children go?

Columbia County has the second highest median age in the state at 50.5, and the Hudson statistical area has the 30th oldest population in the entire country— trending upwards. Countywide school enrollment dropped 21% in 12 years. Hudson’s school district closed John L. Edwards Elementary School in 2018 after years of declining enrollment. Voters have since approved its redevelopment into a community space and 65 affordable apartments for 55+— good! But there is one fact about the building I keep getting stuck on.

They stopped needing to teach a school’s worth of children.

Like clockwork, the next year, Columbia Memorial had an announcement.

My mother was born in Hudson, at Columbia Memorial Hospital. So were my uncle, my aunt, the slew of first and second cousins Irish Catholicism demands, and their children that grew up in Hudson and Germantown, or across the Rip Van Winkle bridge in Catskill and Athens, where my grandfather once collected tolls. Today no one is born in Hudson’s only hospital. The last baby was delivered in 2019. Former³ Mayor Kamal Johnson can see Columbia Memorial from his house, and when their daughter was born in 2021, they had to drive up to Albany (45 minutes with no traffic, an hour in real life).

It is the case all across the country that there is a shortage of obstetricians and towns where school enrollment is falling rapidly, yet Hudson has a lot more in common at least on paper with places where that is decidedly not happening. Yet the city can close an elementary school because there are no longer enough children to fill it, lose apartments, and stop routinely delivering its own babies at the local hospital— and somehow come out the other end wealthier, safer, and prettier.

Downriver

“Change” feels far too vague for what happened to Hudson. It became harder to make an ordinary life there at almost exactly the same time that owning some piece of the place became extraordinarily valuable. Hudson is farther along that path than most of the Hudson Valley.

Beacon is not very far behind. But it is not Hudson a decade or two late.

My parents were married at St. John the Evangelist’s in 1998, five years before Dia opened in May 2003, the month after I was born. I knew Beacon later, as a kid, when Main Street had already started changing but still unmistakably felt like the commercial street of a small Mid-Hudson city. It was an auto repair and nail salon city, an obvious first apartment out of high school city.

Walking it recently for the first time in five years, I felt like I was looking at the Vegas Eiffel Tower version of what I recall. After a trip to Cold Spring with my girlfriend two weeks ago, we found ourselves hopping MetroNorth despite my apprehensions and I could not stop talking about the place. I must have talked about Beacon for three hours straight. I found myself looking down this beautiful street and wondering if I’d feel any better if they had just bulldozed it.

Beacon deserves a better article than the one I wrote at 20, and it is going to get one in due time. Here, it is useful as a point of comparison.

Beacon had something like 14,000 people in 2000, a number that fluctuated a few thousand through all of the postwar period. It has about 15,000 now. In the two decades since Dia opened, despite the tourists and the churn of Main Street, not to mention two decades of people discovering Beacon is rather nice and they would quite like to live there, the city has remained around the same size.

That number obscures plenty of hardship. Those single-digit percentage fluctuations in population gain and loss through the decades contain plenty of people who wanted to stay and couldn’t, and plenty of people who gladly took their place.

Still, it has not seen the drop in population Hudson has seen census after census. Surely there are still kids, long after I was one of them, that get driven up to that Fishkill strip mall surrounded by those blessedly uncurated masonry yards for Jeet Kune Do lessons and eat at the actual⁴ Pizza & Stuff across the street afterwards.

Beacon also kept building apartments. Around 800 units since 2012, and around 30% of its rental units are in one sort of affordable program or another. New developments with ten or more units must rent at least 10% of them below market.

Hudson meanwhile, has Section 8 vouchers it cannot place.

About 220 people were on the waiting list in 2021; by the fall of 2023 there were around 40. People reached the front of the queue, got a voucher, looked for apartments, could not find one in time, and eventually fell off the list.

Beacon is deep into a process that puts it increasingly out of reach and that yes, I personally find uncanny. By the test I proposed earlier, Beacon still fails plenty of its own people. Yet it is not in nearly the same predicament as Hudson, and many of the reasons why it is not may be instructive.

I found myself so strangely revived ducking into Xin Xing, the Chinese takeout place at 250 Main Street that I knew under several revolving names when I was little. Besides government buildings and the gas stations, it was the only place on Main Street where I felt any meaningful continuity with what I once knew. And so I ordered chicken with broccoli and white rice, as I always did, and in my vindication I sat there and I talked about Beacon for at least another hour.

Finalizing this article, I learned that the entire building was put up for sale five days ago.

The asking price is $1.495 million. Xin Xing currently is on the ground floor and two apartments sit on the second and third. The listing calls it an opportunity for multiple income streams, to “renovate, modernize and add value,” with “significant upside.”

Putting myself in the shoes of the market, how could I not agree?

Which brings us back to the stupid coin.

Face value, melt value, collector value

Depending on who you ask, a Hudson half dollar is worth three different, very different things. The government says fifty cents. A refinery says the silver inside of it is about $24. Collectors happily pay hundreds, even thousands for the finest known specimens.

Hudson has become very good at the third kind of value.

1. Pattern for Progress’s report to the Columbia Economic Development Corporation writes these quintiles as “medians,” but looking at the underlying ACS data, they are actually means.

2. Many argue that the 1998-2005 fight over the St. Lawrence Cement plant was an important fork in the road, and it is worth reading about even just for a glimpse of Hudson’s interpersonal dynamics at the time. Or “Two Square Miles” for the visual learners. Tempting as the episode is for this essay, my own research left me unconvinced that the promised jobs would have materialized in the numbers proposed— or that, had the plant been built, some later project would not instead have become the seminal fight of late-gentrification Hudson. I have now managed to annoy both sides of a political fight that ended when I was a toddler, and I haven’t even bothered to ask where my family stood on it. Smart people may disagree.

3. You got the cement plant discourse down here, I am not going to relitigate the 2025 Hudson mayor’s race but to say those are interesting precinct maps.

4. The one that shared a wall with Fast Eddie’s biker bar in Fishkill. Pizza & Stuff II in Beacon, separately owned from its Fishkill namesake, has since changed locations, dropped the “II,” added “Restaurant” to its name, and now has a liquor license— which I gather is more or less compulsory on Main Street these days.