Last Spring I completed an
historic structure report for the
present owner of the former NYS armory in Hudson, New York. I also submitted paperwork to the NY State Historic Preservation Office to have the
armory included on the National Register of Historic Places. I received word earlier this week that SHPO has reviewed and accepted my submission - - it's been sent to the National Park Service for final review.
Plans are being drawn up now to repurpose the structure as a new home for the library. Below is an excerpt from the historic structure report:
The Armory as a New Building
Type
The term armory
was introduced in the militia’s vocabulary in the 1860’s and used almost
exclusively after 1870 to describe facilities built or adapted for the sole use
of the militia. However, it was not
until 1879 when the Seventh Regiment erected its armory in Manhattan’s Upper
East Side that the term came to define a new, uniquely American building type. Because of its scale, prominence, setting,
design and decoration, the Seventh Regiment’s armory on Park Avenue was—and
still is—regarded as the epitome of the building type.
In
general terms, armories built after 1879 were structures that served many
purposes, the foremost of which was the headquartering of local militia
units. They are all two part buildings:
a forward administration structure with attached drill shed to the rear. Many, such as the armory in Hudson, were
castellated fortresses whose design was derived from the medieval European,
gothic military architecture they sought to emulate. The characteristics of the building type can
be divided into four categories:
function; form, layout, and construction; location and setting; and
architectural design and decoration.
Function
Armories
served as military facilities, clubhouses and public monuments. As military facilities they served as
headquarters for localized units of the state militia. Weapons, munitions, tools and equipment were
stored there. The drill sheds afforded a
place to train year round, unhampered by weather conditions. And they served as a place to gather in times
of emergency. Armories were also
clubhouses for their members, many of whom were members of the middle- and
upper-classes; they were a gathering place for social and recreational purposes. As public monuments, armories stood as a
symbolic (and quite literal) reminder of the government’s presence and military
might in the community, particularly during the post-Civil War era of
labor-capital conflict.
Form, Layout and
Construction
As far as layout and construction are concerned,
armories built after 1879 followed the model and design of the Seventh
Regiment: multi-storied forward
structures for office and administration with massive drill sheds attached to
the rear. All late nineteenth century
armories were masonry structures that featured load bearing walls. Aesthetically, the administration buildings
dominated the design and appearance of armories after 1879; functionally, the
drill sheds were their reason for being.
Practice on the village green was often impeded by weather; the need for
a climactically controlled space, year round, was the reason for the advent of
the new building type.
The construction of the drill sheds, often tens of
thousands of square feet of open space, required the use of state of the art
engineering and technology, particularly the use of enormous steel trusses to
support the vast roofs of the sheds. The
inspiration for the massive open floor spaces was the relatively new train shed
building type (Grand Central Depot, New York, 1871) and the exhibition hall
(Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876.)
In the Seventh Regiment’s and all extant, subsequent drill sheds, the
truss work remained exposed, a hallmark feature of the armory building type.
Location and Setting
Armories
were erected as near to the center of their communities as possible. They were a daily reminder of the
government’s military strength and presence, particularly in times of unrest
when they reassured the law abiding citizens and were a foreboding symbol to
those who would create disturbances. And
members did not want to travel to the outskirts of town for drill practice or
mandatory meetings, or a social event at the armory.
Architectural Design and
Decoration
The design of the Seventh Regiment and all armories
erected after 1879 was most influenced by the architecture of European castles
and forts built between the 12th and 15th centuries. Like the structures that influenced their
design, armories featured towers with battlements and crenellated parapets,
battered masonry walls, tall, narrow windows with steel bars, and gated
portcullises and sally ports. But these
were not for aesthetic purposes alone.
The armory was a fortress in times of unrest that could withstand a
siege, and its militia could fire upon rioters from those towers and through
those windows.
History of Building,
Occupants and Architect
The Building – The Armory in
Hudson
Twenty
years after the formation of the 23rd Separate Company on the 24th
of May of 1878, plans were made to erect a new company-sized armory in the City
of Hudson. The new armory was designed
by architect Isaac G. Perry and is remarkably similar to his other armories in
Whitehall, Tonawanda and Ogdensburg, all of which are listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. The armory
cost $6,000 to build and was paid for by Columbia County. Prior to the construction of the new armory,
the rear of the courthouse was used for meetings and administrative purposes;
the unit drilled on Washington Park. The
administration building most closely resembles his armory in Hornell; the drill
shed there, however, is perpendicular rather than at the rear. The Hudson armory features a raised and
battered stone foundation, a tripartite, arcaded entrance pavilion and a four
story tower topped with a crenelated parapet.
A shorter tower with a conical roof creates an asymmetrical façade
typical of Perry’s armory designs. A
major fire on December 31, 1928, destroyed much of the interior; repairs were
completed in 1930.
The Occupants – Military
Units Stationed in the Armory
The
armory in Hudson, New York, was home to several company-sized units in what is
today the New York Army National Guard.
These units were engaged in conflicts that included the Spanish American
War, World War I and World War II. In
the wake of the Civil War, the office of the New York State Adjutant General
undertook an ambitious reorganization of the state’s militia designed to
achieve more centralized control over training, supply and mobilization. Among the new units of the New York National
Guard was the 23rd Separate Company at Hudson.
This unit replaced a local militia company and was organized in 1878. This unit was named “Cowles Guards” after
Colonel David S. Cowles, a native son of Hudson killed in the Civil War.
David Smith Cowles was born in Hudson in 1817. The son of a Congregationalist preacher and
educated at Yale, he entered the practice of law and eventually established his
own practice. Cowles served as district
attorney in Columbia County for three terms.
When war erupted in 1861, he felt compelled to volunteer and served as a
Colonel in the 128th Regiment.
On May 27, 1863, at the Battle of Port Hudson, he was killed after
leading his troops against a rebel surge, preventing the lines from being
overrun. His death and subsequent
funeral were well documented in the media and he remains a celebrated figure in
the history of the City of Hudson.
The
23rd Separate Company retained its unit designation until 1897. The armory was also home to Nucleus Co. I of
the 203rd New York Volunteers during the Spanish American War. In 1899, Co. D of the 1st Infantry Regiment
was organized and housed at the Hudson Armory.
The armory’s men received local recognition in 1900 for enforcement of a
quarantine order during a smallpox outbreak in nearby Stockport. This unit was reorganized in 1905 as Co. F of
the 10th Infantry Regiment. The unit was
called out during the Mexican Border Crisis of June 1916. In February of 1917, the unit was dispatched
to the Catskills to protect the reservoirs that supplied New York City’s
drinking water after a German plot was uncovered to poison it. In July, the unit was called into federal
service and sent to northern France. The
unit saw action there and was involved in breaking the Hindenburg Line in
1918. In 1940, the unit was reassigned
to the 106th Infantry Regiment and sent to the South Pacific. On November 20, 1943, the United States Army
and 2nd Marine Division landed on Makin and Tarawa, initiating the Battles of
Makin and Tarawa, in which the Japanese were defeated. The Gilbert Islands were
then used to support the invasion of the Marshall Islands in February 1944.The
final unit to call the Hudson Armory home was Co. B of the 152nd Engineers,
from 1961 until the late 1970’s when the State decommissioned the armory; it
has remained in private ownership since.
The Architect – Isaac G.
Perry (1822-1904)
Born in Bennington, Vermont, in 1822, Isaac Gale Perry
was raised and educated in Keeseville, New York, where his parents had relocated
in 1829. Between 1832 and 1854 he completed an apprenticeship and entered into
partnership with his father, Seneca Perry, a shipwright turned carpenter. By
1847, Seneca Perry and Son were advertising locally as carpenter-joiners who
undertook masonry work. The Perrys were well known for their skills at
constructing spiral staircases, and the younger Perry, according to one
biographer, earned a local reputation as an architect before leaving
Keeseville.
Isaac Perry's architectural work in Keeseville is
not well documented, but it is likely that the Emma Peale residence, called
"Rembrandt Hall" (1851), a Gothic Revival-style Downingesque cottage
that contains a spiral staircase by the Perrys, is an early design. By 1852,
Perry relocated to New York to apprentice in the office of architect Thomas R.
Jackson (1826-1901). Jackson, who migrated from England as a child, rose to the
position of head draftsman in the office of Richard Upjohn (1802-1872). The New York State Inebriate Asylum (1864) was
the first major project designed and constructed by Perry, and marked the
turning point in his architectural career. Perry's inexperience is evident in
Turner's account of the building's design. Perry later recalled that he
penciled the plans with the assistance of his wife, Lucretia Gibson Perry. He
also appears to have been assisted by Peter Bonnett Wight (1838-1925), the head
draftsman in Jackson's firm, but Wight's role in the project is not well
documented.
The
First National Bank of Oxford Building, was constructed in 1894 in the Richardsonian
Romanesque style, designed by Perry and built by James M. Wright of Binghamton,
New York. The Clerk’s Building of the Orleans County Courthouse was constructed
in the High Victorian Gothic style in 1882-3. It forms a part of the Orleans
County Courthouse Historic District in the Village of Albion. He also designed
the Broome County Courthouse, built in 1897-1898. The Monday Afternoon Club,
located at 191 Court St., Binghamton, was built by Perry in the Second Empire
style. A 21-room, Queen Anne Victorian
mansion, was built for Colonel General Edward F. Jones in 1867 and is listed on
the National Register of Historical Places in the City of Binghamton. At the
same time he designed and built the J. Stuart Wells House, listed on the
National Register of Historical Places in 2009.
Perry is credited as the architect of about twenty
armories in New York State, but supervised, and should possibly be credited
for, as many as forty. Many are listed
on the National Register of Historic Places.
Perry is considered to have been the first state architect in New
York. Governor Grover Cleveland
appointed him to oversee construction activities at the state capitol. Perry
was commissioned lead architect for the New York State Capitol and served from
1883 to its completion in 1899. He was
the third and last architect of the project and designed a dome for the capitol
that was never built. Although his
official title was "Capitol Commissioner," by the mid- to late 1880s,
Perry had oversight responsibility for all state government building programs
and he was commonly referred to as the "State Architect." He retired in 1899, and the state legislature
officially created the Office of the State Architect that same year.
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