While an outstanding court case to save the Pike Plan canopies is still up in the air, Mayor Steve Noble is getting a head start on the removal effort, tearing down one section of sidewalk-covering porticoes that, he said on Wednesday, needed to be removed because it had become structurally unsound.

On Tuesday, workers removed a section of the canopy abutting the LGBTQ Center of the Hudson Valley and 300 Wall Street. In an email to Kingston Wire, Noble said the demolition is separate from the larger removal plan. Back in September, Noble said, a city worker noticed that a support beam for the section of canopy in front of the LGBTQ Center appeared to have deteriorated rapidly. Workers installed a temporary brace to uphold the structure, while the city prepared for the demolition.

“It was deemed necessary for quick removal on an emergency basis,” said Noble. “We put out an RFP and moved the process along as swiftly as possible to secure a contractor for just the section at 300 Wall St. … This section was in such disrepair that immediate action was needed.”

Back in April, Noble and Common Council President Andrea Shaut began a push to remove the system of covered sidewalks on Wall and North Front streets. The structure, named for its designer, Woodstock artist John Pike, was built in the 1970s as part of a larger, never-enacted, Urban Renewal plan to turn the area into a pedestrian mall to assist Uptown business owners who were rapidly losing customers to suburban shopping plazas. A botched 2011 reconstruction effort failed to address structural and drainage issues that had plagued the aging canopies.

Noble returned to the council in July to again urge the removal of the canopies, telling lawmakers that the structure had deteriorated to the point where “there is no option to repair” and they now pose a liability issue for the city. Noble proposed spending $1.2 million to remove the canopies and restore the building façades they had been attached to for half a century. Noble told lawmakers that the only alternative would be to demolish the canopy and build a new one from scratch at an estimated cost of $10 million plus $150,000 in annual maintenance costs. If the Pike Plan was rebuilt, Noble warned, he would enforce a clause in the deeds of all properties abutting the canopies that would place responsibility for construction and maintenance with property owners rather than have the city bear the costs out of its general fund. Funding for Noble’s plan was approved last month.

The effort to remove the canopies moved ahead on two other fronts this month: the city’s Historic Landmarks Preservation Commission and state Supreme Court. A group of Uptown property owners led by real estate mogul Neil Bender, whose William Gottlieb Realty owns five buildings abutting the Pike Plan, filed a petition to have the HPLC designate the Pike Plan a local landmark. At a Sept. 11 meeting of the HPLC, two historic preservation experts hired by William Gottlieb Realty to separately analyze the canopies, argued that the they should receive landmark status as an example of Kingston’s “progressive” approach to Urban Renewal and the colonial revival style popular around the time of the nation’s 1976 Bicentennial. But on Oct. 10 the HPLC voted unanimously to reject the petition.

Meanwhile, a group of LLCs controlled by Bender filed suit in state Supreme Court seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the canopies’ demolition. On Oct. 13, state Supreme Court Judge David Gandin rejected the petition. The real estate firm, which has filed at least 19 legal actions against the city since 2018, plans to continue the fight. A separate class-action lawsuit filed in the August on behalf of Uptown property owners — another effort led by Bender’s William Gottlieb Realty — remains before the courts.

Noble has said that once the funding is in place he would begin the process of seeking an architect to design a plan for the demolition and a contractor to carry out. Noble said that work on the removal would be scheduled for early next year to avoid disrupting the holiday shopping season in the Uptown business district.