I have taken hundreds of pictures of fire connections. Not sure why. Recently I have only added to this collection when I see a new use for them. Sometimes this is people perching on them. Sometimes they are holding up coffee, beer bottles, candy wrappers….

The City of Hudson clearly doesn’t believe in modern chemistry. Can’t think of the last time I saw so many dandelions.

My favorite stairs.

Maybe this is just part of a seasonal business’s normal cycle, but??

I know that this is a worn out topic here in Hudson. Nevertheless, I remain amazed at the bad taste of the county government to litter one of the best parks in the city with all of these signs. Why have a ark if you don’t want people to loll in the grass? Is the only purpose of this park to be a prop for war memorials? Why did they so proudly tout that a local builder had replaced the roof on the gazebo when it is almost never used? Strange thinking.

Getting from the old to the new took much more time and money than we budgeted.

Once having removed the old fixtures and dug into the sub floor, it turned out that the plumbing infrastructure was decrepit and need to be completely replaced. There were old lead pipes leading from the shower to the main drain line. And the whole floor, down to the joists, needed to be rebuilt.

After ripping out the floor to reveal the joists, it became apparent that nothing was holding up this section of the second floor that I thought was cantilevered from the house but turned out to have just been toe nailed onto the house.

This discovery brought the project to a halt. We needed a structural engineer to design a beam and a general contractor to install it. Though I could easily calculate the size of the beam beam using standard engineering formulas, I am not a licensed engineer. It would be hard to explain to a potential buyer of this house in the future that the engineering had been done by Mr. Wonderful himself. The might say “Who is Mr. Wonderful?”.

We did find a general contractor who had an engineer in tow. $3,500 and two months later we had our beam in place.

digging footings

The final phase of the project gave me a chance to use materials for the shower that were new to me. Several years ago I had seen a This Old House Show that featured a German tiling system called Schluter. I found a local supplier across the river in Catskill who sold me the materials and provided good practical advice about doing the actual work. This gave me a chance to do something different than the standard tile on cement backer board that I had used over the years.

With the addition of the fixtures and paint the job was completed in June, 2010. Now that we have used the bathroom for eight months we are still pleased with its appearance and funcitonality.

Rip Van Winkle Bridge and fog in front of Catskill Mountains

Up Warren St. - 7PM 041710

Time will tell about how well this building functions as a library and public building. Part of this result will depend on the library staff being inventive and welcoming to public events in the lecture hall in the second basement and the other open spaces in the building. The new building does not have the encompassing warmth of the old building with its dark woods and somewhat less vast spaces.

If you are interested in the “green:” aspect of the building go here for a review of those features (a PDF file).

I went to for a visit.

View from Broadway of old and new library

1st floor looking back to entrance and stairs up on right (red)

from stairway to 2nd floor towards entrance and circulation

study area in stacks on 2nd floor

Teen Room in old library building

kids area in 3rd floor Children's Division

Computer area in old building

It is a classic fear of anyone with a washing machine that one of the water supply hoses, hidden away at the back of the machine, will burst and bring on Noah’s second deluge. This happens because you have to turn off two valves by hand, twisting each one laboriously, to remove the pressure from the rubber hoses when the machine is not in use. No one ever does this. Thus, the rubber hoses are constantly under full water pressure.

Since moving into 114 Warren St. just a few weeks ago, it was on my early list of repairs to replace the two manual valves for the washing machine with a single convenient lever valve so that we could in fact avert this feared event.

Finally, last week I got around to the task. To my surprise (and delight at seeing that this fear was not without foundation), I discovered that one of the hoses was just about to burst.

So, my little project to replace the two manual valves with a single lever unit grew to include buying new wire mesh reinforced supply hoses

Now all we have to do is to actually flip the little single lever valve to turn off the water between uses.

Down by the Riverside

Between the Charles and Central Square sits a part of Cambridge where everyone fits in

By James McCown, Globe Correspondent | March 11, 2007

Town and gown are finally meeting in Cambridge’s Riverside neighborhood.

Long a working-class enclave between the Charles River and Central Square, Riverside is going upscale, and the long-testy relationship between residents and neighbor Harvard University has improved dramatically.

After dropping plans to build a museum on a prominent corner because of neighborhood opposition, Harvard is on more peaceful terms with Riverside residents as it now builds new dorms for graduate students and affordable housing for some Cambridge residents. The additional housing should ease pressure on the neighborhood’s rental market.

Meantime, Riverside’s combination of convenient location and rich, quirky architecture are drawing affluent young professionals, who cite Riverside’s offbeat funkiness as one of the chief draws.

“There are many people who are attracted to Riverside who could afford to live elsewhere,” said Dean Atkins , an attorney. “It’s a nice mix of intellectual progressives and working class. My wife and I were looking on Beacon Hill, but it’s plain vanilla compared to this.”

The Atkinses live in a kitschy 1960s-era round building at 348 Franklin St. that is emblematic of Riverside’s eclectic architectural mix.

“It’s sometimes referred to as the Austin Powers building,” said Atkins, who bought a condominium there in 2003. “But the apartments are wonderful; you essentially get a pie-shaped space that is efficient, quiet, and gets a lot of light.”

At the neighborhood’s other architectural extreme is an elegant 1846 Greek Revival House at 135 Western Ave. , a local landmark with four Ionic columns that is currently under renovation. According to Arthur Choo Jr. of Choo & Company Architects , the house’s owner is refurbishing it with financing assistance from Just-A-Start Corporation , a non profit community development organization.

“There’s been a lot of meddling over the years with numerous layers of siding, and we’re trying to bring it back as close to the original condition as we can,” Choo said.

As Cambridge neighborhoods go, Riverside is something of a free spirit, and it shows. Less uniform in appearance, and worn down in some places, Riverside was for years a haven of cheap housing during rent control. The elimination of rent control in 1994 forced many long time residents to move out. But the neighborhood was also among the most affordable in the city, setting the stage for the changes happening today.

“When I bought here in 1995 it was the only part of Cambridge that you could touch,” said Lisa J. Drapkin of Coldwell-Banker Residential Brokerage, a Riverside resident and a long time neighborhood champion.

Some residents refer to Riverside’s reputation in affectionate, almost self-deprecating terms.

“In this neighborhood, historically there haven’t been barriers to making dramatic changes to property. If you wanted to take a chain saw to your house, you could,” said Mick Correll. “You cross Mass. Ave. into mid-Cambridge and it’s completely different.”

Correll and his wife, Monique Brouillette, had just acquired half of a Mansard French Second Empire duplex on Kinnaird Street, and were moving furniture into the 1850s-era house one recent weekend.

“We call this the suburbs of Central Square,” Brouillette said.

“There’s a sense in Riverside that you can paint your house whatever color you want,” said Marie Koger , a resident of Franklin Street, pointing out purple and orange houses near hers. “It’s a First Amendment thing.”

Koger and her husband Jim , a retired designer of medical devices for Boston Scientific, lived in the neighborhood during the 1980s and ’90s, and then returned and bought a house on Franklin Street after living in California.

Free spirit or not, developers are providing the neighborhood with yuppie-friendly new housing. One such is 290 on River, a 20-unit townhouse development adjacent to the Whole Foods supermarket on River Street near Memorial Drive.

The townhouses are grouped among seven buildings that all face inward to a landscaped parking court. Each unit features a small garden and garage parking. Prices range from $464,900 for a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath to $549,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bath corner unit. The first phase is nearing completion and the second phase has not yet started, but 50 percent of the units in each phase are already under contract.

“The price has been non negotiable, and even so the demand has been quite remarkable” said Sandrine Deschaux , a vice president at Channing Real Estate, leasing agent for the complex. “People are buying second-phase units without even seeing them. I’ve been amazed at the demand from the biotechnology sector especially. All you have to do is get on Memorial Drive and you’re in Kendall Square in five minutes.”

If 290 on River forms one edge of the neighborhood, at the opposite end Harvard University continues to grow, although to somewhat less resistance than in the 1960 s, when it earned the community’s enmity for building the towering Peabody Terrace student housing complex nearby.

“We have a lot of common interests with the neighborhood,” said Tom Lucey , the university’s director of community relations for Cambridge.

Having dropped its plans for a museum by the Italian architect Renzo Piano in 2002, now the university is building a 250-bed graduate student dorm designed by architect Kyu Sung Woo on the old Mahoney’s Nursery grounds at the corner of Western Avenue and Memorial Drive. This site will include a riverfront park open to the public. Nearby Harvard is also building a complex that combines low-rise brick buildings with townhouse-like wood structures that will also house 250 students and other affiliates.

Once these are built, Lucey said, Harvard will have achieved its stated goal of housing 50 percent of its campus wide graduate students in Harvard housing.

Harvard is also retrofitting the former Cambridge Light Company switch house on Blackstone Street into 33 units of affordable housing, with another six units in new buildings nearby. Qualification for this housing will be administered by the Department of Cambridge Community Development.

Cambridge officials appear to be pleased by the university’s community-friendly stance. Roger Boothe, director of urban design for the city said, “Harvard had a plan before that was twice the scale.”

Big as it is, even the Harvard touch may not change Riverside’s essential character — one that give s its residents a curious kind of bragging rights in this quirky city.

“I like the idea that the neighborhood has an edge to it,” said Franklin Street resident Dan Coleman, who grew up in New York’s Greenwich Village. “Unlike the neighborhood west of Harvard Square, here it’s not all about good taste.”

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

Boston Globe Sunday March 11, 2007 (URL for article in the Globe is at bottom of this entry)