Ultimate Trash to Treasure
Abandoned site transformed into green community hub
By ML Ball
Photograph by Scott G. Morris Photography / Courtesy of ScenicHudson
What does environmental stewardship existing hand in hand with urban revitalization look like? Take a stroll inside, and just as importantly, outside Scenic Hudson’s newly completed Northside Hub in Poughkeepsie, and it becomes unmistakably clear.
Just steps from Walkway Over the Hudson, this 100-year-old industrial manufacturing building (which once housed a Ford Motor Company subsidiary, and later the Standard Gage factory) sat derelict for decades, surrounded by contaminated soil and groundwater.
Now, after a Herculean five-year renovation and cleanup, the site is home to Scenic Hudson’s staff offices, an auditorium, gallery spaces, a covered open-air pavilion and terrace event space, and three acres of outdoor parkland. Future plans include tenant opportunities for a restaurant, retail, or office space.
Yet the Northside Hub represents far more than a mid-size city’s latest urban renewal project. It signals a shift in paradigm. Instead of the “tear down and rebuild” mentality of the past, it embodies a direction of “reuse and adapt.” Beyond a highly innovative reclamation, it is the return of an abandoned space to active use by its surrounding community, in a neighborhood long marginalized by redlining and disinvestment.
Says Scenic Hudson president Ned Sullivan, “When Scenic Hudson was first introduced to this property, its shattered windows and polluted grounds were the picture of neglect—but we also saw a special place with a promising future. On the factory floors where the Standard Gage Company manufactured cutting-edge instruments during much of the 20th century, we’ve started a new chapter of innovation. The Northside Hub is not only a stunning, sustainable home for Scenic Hudson, it’s also a vibrant community resource for our home city of Poughkeepsie and its visitors.”
It is also a net zero building, meaning that it generates more electricity than it uses. Aligning with Scenic Hudson’s mission of protecting the health and beauty of the Hudson Valley for future generations, the six-building campus utilizes rooftop solar arrays, air and water source heat pumps, natural lighting, a rainwater collection and retention system, a green roof, and angled solar panels and timber canopies to shade the parking lot.
It also features “trickle vents” to heat and cool the building—a state-of-the-art system, and the first of its kind in the United States—which provide up to twice the amount of fresh air compared to traditional systems. The structural engineering team consisted of all women, and many laborers involved in the project are locals, able to directly benefit from the transformation.
The project’s lead architect, Justin Brown of MASS Design Group, says that the Northside Hub “represents MASS’s commitment to adaptive re-use as the lowest-carbon approach to development. It exemplifies the practice of ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,’ at the building and urban scale.”
Amazingly, fittingly, the former factory—which played a key role in World War II, and was visited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943, who gave it an award for Excellence in Production—is once again at the forefront of technological innovation, boldly stepping into its second act.
