Rip Van Winkle Bridge and fog in front of Catskill Mountains
Up Warren St. - 7PM 041710
Tag Archives: Warren St
Hudson’s 13th Annual Winter Walk – a review
Fireworks begin - 114 Warren to extreme right of photo.
Yesterday was Hudson’s 13th annual Winter Walk, a three hour event up and down Warren St.
Our BeLo3rd business group made a number of efforts to attract the crowds down the street. For the first time Warren St. was car free its entire length. The parade started at Front St., instead of Third St. Merchant windows below Third featured special custom window displays by local artists following the 12 Nights of Christmas theme. Music was offered in one gallery and the wine bar. BeLo3rd even bought radio advertisements in the two weeks leading up to the event. One idea seemed compelling but turned out to be a complete flop, lining both sides of the street with candles on the curbs in white paper bags. Unfortunately between the snow and the ambient light, the effect was less than underwhelming. But, all these efforts to move people to visit the bottom third of Warren could not overcome the inertia of thirteen years in which nothing happened below Third. My theory is that next year we will save the money spent of the radio ads and hire a noisy rock band to play at Warren and Front St., at the very bottom of the street. Build in a little light show and and all of this ruckus will surely brings the mobs to our end of the street.
Still, we had a good time on Winter Walk night. We had a few interesting folks show up and our visitors from Cambridge thought the whole event was fun.
Polar Bear and Ginger Bread men - unrelated - visit the Gallery
Getting Ready for Hudson’s 13th Annual Winter Walk
Lighting for this three hour event that brings 15,000 people to Hudson’s Warren St.
Diamond Street Hudson, New York – the story of the little town with the big red light district by Bruce Edward Hall
Bruce Edward Hall’s Diamond Street Hudson, New York – The Story of the Little Town with the Big Red Light District1 is every new resident’s introduction to a part of the history of Hudson missing from conventional touristics materials. Turns out that Hudson has depended on weekend traffic far longer than the current economy of Manhattanites (and others) coming to enjoy the mile of antiques and art along Warren St. For over a hundred years up to 1950 Hudson served a different weekend crowd, almost all men, men in search of sex, alcohol, gambling, and other male excitements. According to Hall’s history, Hudson ( a city of just 2.7 square miles and never more than 11,000 inhabitants) had over 60 bars and dozens of brothels, floating crap games and telegraphic feeds of horse race results from upstate and down. Hudson was a sleepy factory town that was transformed by arrivals via car and rail into a thriving hub of vice every weekend.
Virtually very public official was on the payroll or at the very least winking broadly. There would be sporadic attempts at ending the corruption but it seems that for most of this period, occasional police raids, mostly netting the female side of the traffic and leaving the “johns” to wander home unscathed, was the norm. During periods in the 1920s and 1930s, the city attempted to normalize the prostitution by imposing weekly blood tests on the prostitutes for venereal diseases.
As a newcomer to Hudson it is interesting to learn that the divide between the North and South sides of Warren St. is not a new phenomenon. One block, the 300 block of Columbia St (long named Diamond St.) was the center of the prostitution for much of the city’s history. Today it is a truck route with ramshackle housing.
Somewhere in this story may be an explanation for why Hudson was one of the few cities to be offered a Carnegie library that turned it down leaving the city without a public library until 1949.
The book appears to be very well researched with ten pages of Notes and Bibliography as well as a serviceable Index. Hall’s writing is fluid and journalistic with lengthy stories that dig into key moments and bring to life the details of how the city became so interwoven with it life of crime and dependent on it. There is a five page “Diamond Street – The Hudson “Red Light District” Tour – A Self-Guided Low Life Adventure, 1994″ at the end of the book for those who want to visit the scenes in person. The 223 pages are a delightful read.
Who is the author, Bruce Edward Hall? He died in 2003, but lives on at his own eponymous website. It is not clear what brought a Chinese American who grew up in NYC’s Chinatown to research and write about Hudson. Perhaps it is just the delight in a good story that also happens to be history receding into the mists.
- Black Dome Press Corp. 1011 Route 296 Hensonville, NY 12439 www.blackdomepress.com © 2005 [↩]
