BY JOHN BAYLES | A project is underway that promises to enhance the way workers, residents and visitors utilize Hudson Square’s streets and sidewalks.
To date the Hudson Square Connection Business Improvement District has held two meetings with neighborhood stakeholders to solicit their opinions on how the streetscape can be improved. The B.I.D. has put together a team of professionals with experience in redefining streetscapes throughout the city to move the project forward. The lead design firm is Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, who helped redefine Greenwich Street in Tribeca back in 2000, and has worked in other neighborhoods like Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The firm is currently wrapping up a project in West Harlem around 125th Street.
“We feel strongly that the street is a public space,” said Signe Nielsen, principal at the firm. “If I think neighborhoods with grimy or unpleasant streets in the city, Hudson Square is not one of them. But improvements could still be made.”
Currently the project is in what Renee Schoonbeek, director of streetscape and sustainability for the B.I.D., calls the visioning phase. Schoonbeek said the stakeholders meetings are geared to a “who’s who from businesses and residents” in the neighborhood and allow the design team a chance to present their findings based on their analysis and to ensure they have done their due diligence and not missed anything. There will be one final stakeholders meeting later this fall.
“I think our challenge is to bring the creativity in the buildings out onto the streets,” said Ellen Baer, president of the B.I.D. “The identity of the place will flow from the excitement that is already here.”
Baer also noted the importance of the visioning process.
“Community input makes for good plans,” said Baer. “What we’re planning here is [to improve] the public spaces that belong to everybody.”
Baer noted that the B.I.D. was specifically formed to deal with three issues: traffic, improving the retail environment and improving the streetscape. As for enhancing the streetscape, Baer noted, “By doing that, we’ll be addressing issues of street-level life in Hudson Square, which will improve the quality of daily life for everyone who uses our streets and sidewalks.”
Baer expects to have a preliminary phasing strategy and an implementation strategy in place by the end of the year.
“We’re hoping that by having gotten stakeholders’ input up front, that it will ease the way for the plan’s implementation,” said Baer.
Nielsen said the stakeholders meetings have been very helpful.
“I called part of the [first] meeting ‘digging deeper’ because some goals have already been identified,” said Nielsen. “We used many of those as a jumping-off point — making sure we understood them.”
Nielsen described the visioning process as essential to the project’s success. For example, she said one point of holding numerous stakeholders meetings was to find out exactly what the stakeholders in the community deemed “cutting edge” in terms of streetscape design.
“[The meetings are] incredibly helpful in terms of getting a sense of what resonated among people,” said Nielsen.
Since Hudson Square has such a rich history highlighting the industrial era, particularly the printing industry, Nielsen wanted to explore that theme.
“There was concurrence, for example, that the industrial era is an era we should try and celebrate,” said Nielsen. “Someone commented on the idea of past, present and future — from the print medium to the digital medium and then the future… the idea that a neighborhood can evolve, even in the same building, and thinking of how creativity and innovation continues on within a historic shell.”
In a nutshell, the project is about “staying fresh and fun.” Nielsen alluded to the ultimate goal, which is to give Hudson Square the opportunity to embrace the inevitable.
“One of the things that attracts [people] to New York is that there is always something changing,” said Nielsen. “We want people to breakout of their routine.”
