HV-Rob

It was one year ago today (December 4 as I start writing this) that the historic village hall, an old mansion, was demolished. Today I present photos of demolition day, as I have not posted them to the internet yet. We’ve witnessed the loss of many great buildings in the last fifteen years or so, but the case of Tarrytown’s village hall to me stood out and above so many losses, as an example of truly needless and egregious demolition.

The Village of Tarrytown’s municipal offices have been located in the house, once the home of Reverend Edward C. Bull, since the late 1920s. In the 2000s, there arose a desire to build a dedicated village hall, and the opportunity to do so came along with plans to rebuild the village’s waterfront, which had partly been used for industrial purposes. The industrial firms, a truck repair shop and an asphalt plant, were razed and the land given/sold to National RE/Sources for building luxury housing.

As often is the case with these projects, the developer was asked/mandated to build low-income housing as part of the plan. But the low-income housing didn’t have to be at the waterfront site – heaven forbid rich people should mingle with poor people. And it didn’t even have to be built right away. So by good fortune, National RE/Sources (which now employs the former village mayor) got the old village hall, ostensibly to satisfy the obligation of building affordable housing. Instead of renovating it into housing units, as one local architect suggested, they demolished the house and one year later still haven’t built anything on the site. It remains a gravel lot while Phase II of the luxury waterfront units undergo construction. Instead of “paying to play” and meeting certain obligations first, as ought to be the case, the developer won’t build anything at the site of old village hall until they decide they have profited enough off the waterfront site.

Village Hall was in perfectly good shape and a viable candidate for adaptive-reuse. If this house needed to be torn down, then every house in Tarrytown pre-1975 ought to be razed as well.

During lunch break, I got into historic village hall one last time. The old courtoom was intact. Those nice wood tables that could have been brought to new village hall or sent to a local school, or just given to anyone in town, were about to get smashed up instead. Old Glory was laying in a crumpled heap on the judge’s desk, so I rescued her – shame on you Tarrytown.

They at least took the old clock out, leaving behind a trace of old wallpaper.

This enhanced detail view shows at least two layers of wallpaper/paint.

Except for the demo guys, I was the last person in old village hall.

The demolition of historic village hall was also disturbing on another level. Representatives of the Historical Society Serving Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow asked several times to get inside the building and retrieve historical documents. The village and the developer flat out lied and said that there wasn’t anything worth taking out of the old building, and wouldn’t allow the society access.

Hey, look, it’s boxes of old documents. When the machine ripped the building apart, so many documents, checks, and papers, came flying out like a ticker-tape parade. Someday when I have proper video-editing software (anyone want to make a donation?), I will post clips showing this. Additionally, blueprints and building plans, municipal and personnel records, boxes of parking tickets/receipts, and a set or several sets of blueprints for the new village hall were inside. This was just callous disregard by the village for the preservation of historic records. (See more about this below.)

After three and a half hours, it was over. The building was chewed apart, and one big pull-down took care of the core of the building. Historic Village Hall should have been converted to housing, as was done with other fine old homes in the village, like the following, similar, example on Church Street.

In response to the claim that there were no historical documents worth retrieving, I present this Police Justice Criminal Docket that covered the time period December 29, 1942 to July 14, 1943. Many such dockets were left in the basement of old village hall. Granted, they showed varying levels of mold and decay, but surely the journals would have been of interest to those who preserve our history, if not deserved of official village safe keeping.

Many of the cited offenses were for violations of U.S. Army Dimout regulations, whereby lights had to be turned off from sundown to sunrise.

On the flip side, many people were cited for “Parked No Lights.” I don’t know what that means.

Here’s another wartime violation, for failing to stop on Air Raid Warden’s signal.

Haha, I guess they had foamers back then too. Trespassing at the freight yard. Note that this person’s address was the McFadden School in Tarrytown. Bernar McFadden’s Tarrytown School was a military academy located on the grounds of the old Graystone estate which became a ruin in the late 20th century.

Fugitive from justice.

Vagrants – Fred and Frank Templeton from Malone, New York.

Sadly, homeless man Thomas Hanlon, age 68, was busted just for being homeless – a “tramp.”

I’m sorry now that I didn’t just go in there every night and rescue all of these historical records myself. Shame on Tarrytown for destroying so much history.

Public School 6, one of our favorite ruins in Yonkers, is again slated for the wrecking ball. A plan to raze it several years ago and to construct a Walgreens on the site dissipated and the chosen developer was later implicated in some political scandal. Colin Gustafson of the Journal News reported yesterday that a new plan is in the works to demolish School 6 and build two apartment buildings on the site.

Displaced tenants from nearby Cottage Place may have the chance to move into these new buildings when that housing project is torn down. The City of Yonkers is aiming to demolish its mid-century public housing projects and replace them with modern apartments and townhouses. Mulford Gardens was the first such housing project to be demolished; it came down in 2009.

Yonkers architect C.C. Chipman designed Public School 6, which was built in the 1890s. It closed in 1986 after the City of Yonkers was found guilty of segregating its public schools by clustering low-income housing in one part of the city. Students from southwest Yonkers were then to be bussed to other schools throughout the city in a plan to rework the school system. School 6 was declared to be “located on a difficult site, is antiquated (in part) beyond cost-effective rehabilitation, and the need to acquire adjacent sites poses likely time and cost constraints.” Thus it was not be part of the new plan and it closed.

School 6 in Yonkers sat abandoned and neglected since it closed. Its roof began to cave in during the 20o0s, resulting in a partial roof collapse around early 2007. All photos of School 6 shown here were taken March 3, 2007.

A bonus photo today is a ghost sign on an adjacent apartment building on Ashburton Avenue, for Barton Chapin Real Estate and Insurance.

Other decommissioned schools throughout the Hudson Valley found new life in the second half of the 20th century as apartments, offices and day care centers. Unfortunately the same was not done for School 6. It certainly would have served any of those purposes well.

Bonus #2:

Yonkers doesn’t have the only abandoned Public School 6 in the Hudson Valley. Here is School 6, another nice piece of architecture, in Newburgh.