Speak up now to save city's specialness
Harrowing posts by local writer deserve attention
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In a bow to public pressure, Chris Patten is reworking his plans for an apartment complex between Glen and Harlem streets, according to Jon Lapper, a lawyer with Bartlett, Pontiff, Stewart and Rhodes.
“He is scaling back the project to make it a simpler, smaller project,” Lapper said.
Patten is changing the look of the buildings, Lapper said — “He’s trying to be responsive.”
Making the changes takes time, which means the project probably won’t go back before the city Planning Board until November, he said.
Lapper is one of a group of lawyers that, over the years, has invested in connected properties near the firm’s headquarters at 1 Washington St., creating a large parcel of land and houses.
Despite public desire to preserve the neighborhood’s historic quality, Lapper dismissed a suggestion that the house at 391 Glen St. could be split off from the development parcel and preserved.
“We’re under contract to sell it to Chris Patten. He has it under contract, he has a right to purchase it,” he said.
Two of six apartments in the building are occupied, but, Lapper said, it’s “not in great shape.”
“There’s no integrity to it,” he said.
An architectural historian who lives in Glens Falls and works with architectural review commissions in New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., sees the building differently.
Katherine Luaces manages two nonprofits based in D.C. that monitor about 1,400 properties with historic easements on their facades, she said.
She hasn’t been inside 391 Glen St. but says the exterior is well-preserved. With its outstanding architectural elements and association with a prominent local person, the house appears to meet the criteria for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, she said.
Charles Bullard, who lived in the house in the 1880s and ‘90s and built a barn and carriage shed on the property in 1888, was a businessman, clerk of the Board of Education, and, according to his 1934 obituary, “one of the most widely known residents of Glens Falls.”
He was born in Northville in 1852 and moved with his family to Glens Falls in 1860, living for a time at the corner of Elm and Exchange streets. In 1864, at the age of 11, he witnessed the great Glens Falls fire, which destroyed much of the city’s business section.
He worked as a printer for the Glens Falls Messenger newspaper, then, in a partnership with Herstel Colvin, worked as an undertaker and furniture-seller. He moved on his own to Warren Street, continuing as an undertaker and selling fireplace equipment and tiles. A new firm — Bullard, Regan & Stafford — was formed in 1922 when Bullard retired. That business continues today as Regan Denny Stafford Funeral Home.
Bullard was active in the social life of the community, serving at various times as district deputy of the Masons, superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Sunday school and a founding member of the Chatiemac Club, a hunting and fishing lodge still operating on Chatiemac Lake in North Creek.
Luaces moved to Glens Falls in 2016 with her husband, who is from here. Their children go to the First Presbyterian preschool across the street from 391 Glen. The building’s beauty has frequently caught her eye.
“It has fairly unique features. The style is Victorian, with a lot of eclectic elements — some Greek Revival, some Queen Anne,” she said.
“It has a really interesting medley of details, which are well-preserved,” she said.
Her description also applies to Glens Falls as a whole.
“In my professional opinion, it’s a really fantastic mix of properties, especially in those downtown area districts — residential and commercial,” Luaces said of the city.
She wants to help preserve the city’s special quality, and donating her time to put together a historic register application for 391 Glen St. would be a way to start, she said.
She could get the forms filled in by the end of September.
“I do have some time to get it done,” she said.
Historic register properties qualify for large tax credits for restoration work, but getting a property on the national or state historic registers doesn’t protect it from demolition.
Preserving the house would probably require buying it, and even if the money could be raised, Patten and the lawyers who own it would have to agree to sell.
A rescue seems unlikely, although this community has rallied in the past to achieve unlikely things, such as the transformation of an old Woolworth’s into a professional-grade theater and the funding of an annual professional theater festival.
If this development is approved in a new and better form, but 391 Glen is torn down, it will teach us two things: that our voices make a difference, and, if we want to preserve what is special about Glens Falls, we have to speak up sooner.
Trauma
Stacey Morris, a writer I worked with at the Post-Star who has continued with freelance work and other personal and professional adventures, is doing a Substack — Operation Remove Shrapnel — with important content.
I was going to single out a couple of pieces — such as this one, about the trauma she suffered from a next-door bully — but there is so much good, powerful writing here that I can’t narrow it down to a column or two. It is raw, and some of it is disturbing, but it’s valuable.
What I’ve done is to browse a couple of the columns, then start reading from the beginning. I’ve got quite a few left to go, but I’m excited to read them, for the revelations of her experience and the force of her writing.
Ambivalence
One of Stacey’s pieces deals with the increasing hostility toward the other side felt by people who are both pro- and anti-Trump, and the way that is making social gatherings tense and, sometimes, explosive. She addresses what she sees as the wrongness of this antagonism, based on her experience of the goodness of people on both sides. Well … her point is more that you can’t judge character by political affiliation, because emotionally stingy and morally deficient folks can also be found on both sides.
Of course, she’s right. But this is a question I struggle with internally all the time, because I don’t think politics is divorced from morality, especially not now. Is it right to judge people based on their support for politicians I find morally reprehensible? I find I’d rather not know someone’s politics, so I can get to know them without that factor overwhelming others; and if I do know, I usually try to ignore it.
On a similar note, Bella and I did not stay up to watch the debate. I consumed lots of stories about it in the following days — especially since I was happy at the result — but even politics about which I am superficially obsessed are not worth staying up for two and a half hours past my usual bedtime.
South Street
Maybe it’s all the delays, but people seem to love to complain about the Market Center on South Street, the project being partly paid for by state money under New York’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative. It doesn’t have heat, it doesn’t have bathrooms, it won’t be usable in winter, what is it going to be used for, anyway, etc.
I’m excited about it. It seems bold to me — an unusual design, a flexible concept that will be shaped by public preferences. I predict it will succeed and that, as time goes on, it will be singled out as one of the best uses of state funding in any community in the state. I continue to feel that downtown Glens Falls is thrumming with life and our biggest concern should be not what will happen if current projects fail but how we deal with their success.
Orb Weaver
A crowned orb weaver, also known as a European garden spider, has woven a web between two chairs and taken up residence on our infrequently used back porch. I believe this is a female orb weaver, showing again how natural beauty surrounds us even in a little suburban city like Glens Falls.
Knowing Chris pretty well he most likely would not agree to selling this property.
I think it's great that with the push back changes have been made. It must be killing him lol.
I still think his apartment buildings look cheap and do not fit in with the community.
But money talks as does having an *in* with the good old boys club.
Side note - I'm really impressed with Diana Palmer. I think she'd be a great mayor for the city. She seems to really follow through and push others to do the same.
I have no say in GF politics, I live in SGF.
I can attest that people can bring change if they unite. We managed to replace our supervisor and two board members, in a landslide vote.
Keep going !
Although the “rescue is unlikely,” I am heartened by the response of the good citizens of Glens Falls. Getting this beautiful building on the National Register would at least marshal public opinion even more vigorously against the money interests, and just maybe convince them to look elsewhere for a building site.
Thank you again, Will, for spearheading this effort!