The Kingston Common Council appears poised to enact Mayor Steve Noble’s plan to tear down the half-century old system of canopies that cover sidewalks along portions of Wall and North Front streets. On Monday, in a special meeting of the council’s Finance Committee, lawmakers voted to advance a $1.2 million bond to pay for the demolition. The full council is expected to vote Tuesday evening on both the bond and an authorization for Mayor Steve Noble to spend the funds on the removal effort.

The canopies were built in the mid-1970s as part of a larger, never-enacted Urban Renewal scheme for Uptown Kingston. Named for its designer, noted Woodstock artist and architect John Pike, the original plan called for transforming Wall and North Front streets into an outdoor pedestrian shopping mall like Poughkeepsie’s ill-fated Main Mall. A problem-plagued rehabilitation effort in 2009-2010 failed to adequately remedy the canopies’ issues with drainage and decaying structural elements.

Last year Mayor Steve Noble, a longtime critic of the canopies, along with council President Andrea Shaut, began a campaign to have them torn down. Noble told lawmakers that the canopies had deteriorated to the point where they pose a threat to public safety; they’re also driving up the city’s liability insurance premiums. The structures were so far gone, the mayor said, that there’s no option to repair or refurbish them and the only alternative to demolition was to replace the whole structure at a cost of $10 million. If that happened, Noble said, he would pass construction and maintenance costs on to owners of buildings abutting the canopies in accordance with their original deeds.

Initial plans called for the demolition work to occur in January. But the effort was stalled when seven LLCs associated with William Gottlieb Realty and one other owner with a building abutting the canopies sued to halt the demolition. WGR is owned by Neil Bender, who over the past eight years has acquired six buildings in Uptown, including the iconic BSP space on Wall Street and the Cioni Building on Crown Street. Bender’s LLCs have launched 24 legal actions against the city since 2020 in a bid to derail the Kingstonian mixed-use project, overturn the city’s affordable housing mandate and prevent the canopies’ demolition. Virtually all of the lawsuits were dismissed after going through an appeal process or ruled moot. Some remain before the courts.

The latest lawsuit claimed that the city had inherited an obligation from the long-defunct Kingston Urban Renewal Agency to maintain the canopies and that the city had intentionally allowed the structures to deteriorate to create a pretext for their demolition. Last month, state Supreme Court Judge David M. Gandin rejected the lawsuit’s motion for a preliminary injunction preventing the demolition project from moving forward.

In addition to the lawsuit, WGR hired two historic preservation experts to make the case to the city’s Historic Landmarks Preservation Commission that the canopies had historic value and ought to receive landmark designation. The HPLC rejected the argument and signed off on the demolition. In December, the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) determined that the canopies are eligible for inclusion in the state and national register of historic places. But in an email to Kingston Wire, Noble said the ruling doesn’t impact plans for their demolition.

“No one — not our Historic Landmarks Preservation Commission, SHPO or any other authority — has elevated the canopies to historic landmark status,” wrote Noble in an email on Monday. “The fact that a structure is potentially ‘eligible’ for historic designation based on its original installation date, does not mean that the current structure would or should be deemed of historical value after investigation. We believe that the Pike Plan’s design, construction and structural integrity would in no way meet the criterial of a historic asset, as our own Historic Landmarks Preservation Commission has already determined.”

Noble added that if the council votes to approve the bond and authorize the spending tonight, the city will hold a stakeholders’ meeting for property owners and tenants of Pike Plan properties to discuss the next steps in the process. Meanwhile, the city will begin the bidding process by preparing and issuing a request for proposals. Noble said he expects the project which, in addition to removal of the canopies, includes restoration of underlying building façades to begin sometime in April and take about six weeks.