Actually, Diamond Street in Hudson is still there - renamed and
deteriorating, but still there.

Don't forget Pittsfield in Massachusetts, where we lost a GREAT railroad
station and almost all businesses and residences west of the main business
district up to the railroad tracks.

Mike

On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, David Palmquist wrote:

> One could do a topology of the results of smaller city urban renewal from the 1960s and '70s.  In my opinion where too many old buildings were torn down in a smaller city, downtown life and commerce were irretrievably lost.  Some disheartening examples today are:
> Rome, where virtually every old downtown building was demolished;
> Amsterdam, where only two or three downtown business blocks were left standing and the rest cleared;
> Niagara Falls, always busy demolishing and hoping for a rebirth;
> Newburgh, which lost its waterfront district.
>
> The result in Rome and Amsterdam at least is a pastiche of two and three-lane wide one-way streets, failed downtown shopping malls, mostly empty parking garages.  Reconfigured downtown streets and new arterial highways were part of the plan.  The result makes it hard for the visitor to easily get from here to there and find simple things like a gas station and an ATM.
>
> Some cities had mixed results; urban renewal was limited and did not kill these  downtowns:
> Olean;
> Elmira;
> Johnson City;
> Geneva;
> Utica;
> Watertown;
> Oneonta;
> Schenectady;
> Troy;
> Poughkeepsie;
> Kingston;
> Hudson, which saved Warren Street but lost almost all its waterfront buildings and several blocks inland including the infamous (or celebrated) Diamond Street red light district.
>
> Today, successful downtowns seem to be those that did not renew extensively.  I could name:
> Ellicottville;
> Geneseo;
> Corning;
> Owego;
> Canandaigua;
> Cooperstown;
> Saratoga Springs.
>
> And in Massachusetts:
> Great Barrington;
> Stockbridge;
> Northampton.
>
>
> >>> [log in to unmask] 12/18/02 10:19AM >>>
> I have run across a couple of instances of "urban renewal" projects in small cities or towns in New York in the 1970s in which old structures were razed but little or nothing new was built to replace them. Was that sort of thing common, or were these most likely local eccentricities? Has anything been written about this?
>