Over the years, the historic Stockade District in Kingston, N.Y., has survived occupation by British forces, near-total destruction in the Revolutionary War and ravaging waves of cholera and yellow fever. But by the 1960s, the largest threat to its survival was the suburban shopping mall.
During the ’70s and ’80s, more than 100 downtowns from Poughkeepsie to Mesa, Ariz., installed pedestrian plazas or sidewalk canopies in a scramble to compete with the rise of malls. Covered sidewalk structures were sometimes accompanied by “slipcovering” — metal panels hiding fully intact masonry facades, windows and all.
In the mid-1970s, the Kingston Urban Renewal Agency adopted the trend, bolting a series of continuous sidewalk canopies onto the exteriors of 44 commercial buildings in its Uptown business district. The concept was to unify the neighborhood into its own kind of mall, with a turn-of-the-19th-century motif and a hedge against rainy days.
Now, after two years of debate, litigation and emotional outbursts from residents about whether this midcentury fixture should stay or go, Kingston is hitting “undo.”
Over the course of two weeks this February, construction crews carried out the $1.2 million job of tearing down the “Pike Plan,” as the canopy system is locally known. When they were done, gutters hung catawampus above pedestrians’ heads. Fire escape ladders dangled 13 feet in the air. And a stripe of black waterproof roofing liner stretched across the fronts of buildings for two blocks.
