Mayor Steve Noble said this week that the city will acquire a rare tract of vacant land in the heart of the Rondout neighborhood by purchasing it if possible and by eminent domain if necessary. In a statement issued Wednesday, Noble said he hopes to see a 200-unit mixed-use housing development with 30,000 square feet of commercial space at the 3.5-acre site which stands adjacent to Route 9W near the city’s police headquarters.

The parcel, colloquially known as “the bowl” and currently owned by three LLCs, is a vestige of the Urban Renewal era which dramatically reshaped the area between lower Broadway and what is now Route 9W in Downtown Kingston. During that period in the mid-to-late 1960s, a vibrant neighborhood of historic residential and commercial buildings was bulldozed to make way for a project dubbed “Broadway East.” The plan called for the construction of an apartment complex, a mall on the Route 9W side of the site and a new city hall and condos on lower Broadway. The apartment complex, now known as Springbrook Village, the city hall (now occupied by police headquarters and city court) and condos were built, but the mall never came to fruition. At some point the city’s urban renewal agency sold off the mall site, which was subsequently subdivided into 46 separate parcels indicating the owners may have planned to build housing there.

Noble said the idea of taking over the site came during the development of the city’s new Kingston Forward zoning code after consultants created images of how the parcel would look with housing on it. Noble has said that one of the challenges of creating new housing in the city is a lack of large empty parcels connected to sewer and water. The city has addressed the issue with new zoning that encourages “infill development” on smaller parcels, as well as efforts to repurpose existing sites like the former county jail on Golden Hill and the largely empty business park off Hasbrouck Avenue. But, Noble said, the Downtown site offers a rare opportunity to build from scratch.

“It really spurred our interest,” said Noble of the consultant’s conceptual imagery. “This is three acres of open space in the heart of Downtown and in a T-5 which is the highest transect in the zoning code in terms of ability to build. It just popped for us at that moment, and we decided to start moving forward in that direction.”

Noble said that he hopes to reach an agreement with the owners to purchase the site outright. But he added that he had directed the Corporation Counsel’s office to open “formal communication” with the owners to get a head start on the lengthy legal process of seizing the parcel through eminent domain if it becomes necessary. Noble said that while there was a concept for mixed-use development at the site, details of exactly what would be built there and by who would be fleshed out once the land was acquired.

“We’re focused now on how do we get the property into the city’s hands,” said Noble. “That could take a few months or a few years depending on if we have to go through the eminent domain proceeding. So we haven’t really focused a lot of our energy yet on what the next steps will be.”

The effort to acquire the site is part of a larger effort by Noble — who spent his first eight years in office largely focused on the Kingston’s long-neglected Midtown neighborhood — to address issues Downtown. Much of that work involves undoing some of the damage done by Urban Renewal which, as with communities nationwide, disrupted and divided neighborhoods in an effort to create more modern, car-centric streetscapes. A new grant, for example, will fund a study to come up with plans to reconnect the Kingston Housing Authority’s Rondout Gardens apartment complex to the Rondout neighborhood. The complex was completed in 1969, just in time to house those displaced by the Broadway East project and further isolated by the construction of 9W in the 1970s which left it cut off from the larger Rondout business district. Another grant is currently funding projects to reconnect other parts of Downtown where long-established neighborhood connections were disrupted by Urban Renewal.

“That site was sitting empty for like 50 years and I feel like we were the first people to mention it,” said Noble. “So we want to put some eyes on some of these unique sites. Downtown has been really overlooked in that regard for a long time.”