Downtown Revitalization

Hudson, NY 

Winning application for 2017 NYS Downtown Revitalization Grant, Captial District. 

Our first encounter with City of Hudson was in the fall of 2014 when we interviewed for the feasibility study for the Dunn Warehouse Adaptive Reuse. Our fee proposal didn’t match their budget, but we left a good impression. 

Fast forward to May of 2017, we received a call from the Executive Director of Hudson Development Corporation, Sheena Salvino, stating that she finally had the opportunity to hire us. Would we help her pull together a Downtown Revitalization Grant application to help Hudson win $10M? The other Client partnership would be Mike Tucker representing Columbia Economic Development Corporation. Of course, we said, “YES!”


They asked us to pull the necessary team members from our original Dunn Warehouse proposal. We reached out to Kathleen Foley at Mirador Consulting who has a doctoral degree in Urban Planning from Cornell University. River Architects would provide the concepts and visionary images and Mirador would provide the writing.


The project entailed much more work than anyone expected. With the Clients’ guidance, we attended multiple public outreach meetings, defined the boundaries of the downtown focus area, identified priority and secondary projects, and provided visionary images and rewrote the entire application (from what they had submitted back in 2016). After gathering public support and data, we had less than 2 weeks to pull together the winning proposal. It took many all-nighters and weekends to make it happen. 

After we hit the “SEND” button with shaking hands, we looked back and realized we never had the time to think, “What if we don’t win?” Of course, all the self-doubts rushed back during the waiting period, even when the email from Mike Tucker arrived on Monday, July 31st, asking, “Are you available for a quick call?” 

As he was trying to make the conference call happen, a beautiful email popped in with the title: “A Special Announcement in Hudson.” We screamed with joy and cleared our calendars to attend the August 1st announcement ceremony with none other than the Governor Cuomo himself. Of course, we rolled with laughter when the Assemblywoman Didi Barrett told the Governor, “You are lucky to be in Hudson!” 

We had never imagined that we would, someday, help bring $10M to a city. It was more rewarding than designing a signature building.