In the 300 block of Warren (Third Street being the main entrance into downtown from the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to the south and west), be sure to stop by Hudson Wine Merchants to see what oenophiles throughout the Northeast will be drinking this season and next. Check out American Glory for barbecue and popular Swoon Kitchenbar across the street, or the various food trucks and Northern Italian CaMea Restaurant up on the corner of Fourth.
Ready for a couple of side trips? At Fourth, head south a block to the Georgian-style post office and the quiet square where the county courthouse sits. If you can get inside, check out the murals upstairs in the courtroom, painted during the Depression years and capturing the area’s history. Or just wander around the side streets of Allen and Union, taking in what a bit of money can do with fine old homes.
You can also head north to Columbia Street, where you’re just downhill from Helsinki Hudson, a fine restaurant and amazing nightspot booking some of the best music to come into the Hudson Valley these days, along with weekly tango milongas and a busy bar scene. Across the street and up a few doors is Time & Space Limited Warehouse (TSL), which shows live televised opera, a host of cutting-edge films, avant-garde theater (including the Valley’s annual visits from Bread & Puppet Theatre) and art shows.
Head south from Fourth on Columbia and you go by a pair of old brick warehouses, the second festooned with a subtle sign announcing it as the new Hudson home for Etsy. Hey, the place was once a cannonball factory! This area used to be known as Diamond Street, a notorious red-light district for Albany politicos and the region’s rumrunners and Mafiosi, before it was quietly renamed.
Another block north and you come to State Street, an old and new elementary school and the former city orphanage, most recently the Hudson Public Library and currently being planned for uses by a host of local non-profits once the library moves up increasingly stately State Street to the castlelike brick Armory Building at the corner of Fifth Street. These, and about 40 other historic buildings around Hudson, have all been bought up by a major housing developer from New York City, Eric Galloway (working under the moniker of his Galvan Foundation), scaring the wits out of many of the other new residents of town quietly renovating their own spaces hoping for a consistency to the local preservation work. See https://gossipsofrivertown.blogspot.com for a daily blog about all this.
And just to the south on Third Street, be sure and peek in at the million-dollar-plus Fish & Game Restaurant (identifiable by a very subtle sign atop its bent-wall brick building), where cooking’s over a central woodfire – if you can get by the doormen.
But back to Warren, and now heading into the newly marketed South of Third neighborhood: This is an area of older wooden Federalist, saltbox and turreted Georgian brick homes, mixed in with a few ugly 1970s public buildings (speaking of which, be sure to check out Savoia’s Lounge, with one of the greatest soul music jukeboxes anywhere). Verdigris is a great tea haven, with another, more British spot just down the street. Café La Perche is like stepping into a Breton café, and very cozy back by the fire. They say that this is the best hot chocolate anywhere; you can stand a spoon in it. The pain au chocolate, beignets and croissants aren’t that bad either. And if it’s warm, there’s always Lick, on the other side of the street just south of Third, for great Jane’s Ice Cream concoctions. .
You’re back down to the waterfront before long (if you don’t get pulled into some of the verdant, fast-gentrifying side streets). The Promenade has a great statue of St. Winifred in what has been called one of the prime examples of riverside park design. In the spring the place is filled with the scent of lilacs; this time of year, the view’s ablaze with fall colors framed by the sky and river.
Headed south on Front Street, see fast-reviving old ships’ captains’ homes from when the whales got floated up here for rendering into useful oils and perfumes; a great bar, the Half Moon, and then the historic train station and Basilica.
All done, you say? Ha! There are treasures hidden all over the dense four wards of Olde Hudson, from a grand old Elks home at the corner of Sixth and Union to a Greek Orthodox Church down on Union and Second. Between Second and Third on the north side, up from State, is Robinson Terrace – so unique that the city tried to make it a historical district, until its residents said “Wait a minute!” and things got put on hold. Talk about a glimpse into pre-World War II small-city America!
Take Fifth Street back towards Route 9G and the Rip van Winkle Bridge and you wind up a terrace street beside a massive 19th-century Catholic church overlooking the courthouse and stately brick homes, now turned into lawyers’ offices. Make a left and head downhill and there are signs for a correctional facility, where most people take a right back to 9G. What’s so important about that, you say? In an earlier incarnation, those brick buildings made up the New York Training School for Girls: a state reformatory from which a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald escaped back to Harlem and eventual fame and glory.
There’s a brick home where Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands stayed while visiting the US a half-century ago, across the street from the growing Columbia Memorial Hospital. The state Firemen’s Home, and truly wonderful Firemen’s Museum, lie out to the North (look for small signs).
And then there are the surrounding glories of Columbia County, including Claverack, Stuyvesant, Kinderhook, Ghent, Livingston and some of the state’s most glorious landscape, where, this time of year, one still runs into fox hunts.
For more information, log onto www.gotohudson.net.
