With the goal of making the stretch of Route 9W that runs through Downtown Kingston a more urban and less car-centric corridor, the city is seeking a consulting firm to conduct a feasibility study on its overhaul plan. The work will be funded by a $240,000 grant through the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last year, Mayor Steve Noble announced plans to rework a 1.9-mile stretch of Route 9W in Kingston named for former Mayor Frank Koenig. The plan would also encompass 0.4 miles of road on the other side of the 9W bridge in the Town of Esopus and another 0.1 miles in the Town of Ulster. The 9W corridor was built in the late 1970s as one of the last major efforts in Kingston’s Urban Renewal era.

That era saw the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods and large-scale public works projects to bring the city into line with an increasingly car-dependent postwar society. The 9W project, for example, entailed the demolition of some 100 residential and commercial properties and was the capstone of decade’s worth of Urban Renewal projects in the Rondout that destroyed more homes and businesses in the name of “slum clearance.” The construction of the four-lane highway also had the effect of walling off the Kingston Housing Authority’s newly built Rondout Gardens apartment complex — which absorbed many of the poor and minority residents displaced by the demolition of Lower Broadway — from more affluent parts of the Rondout neighborhood.

“It is clear that the 9W corridor through Kingston was overbuilt for the city’s traffic needs and creates an unnecessary barrier to connectivity, pedestrian access, economic development, and social equity,” said Noble in a statement announcing the request for proposals for a design consultant. “We look forward to seeing the possibilities to correct these historical errors.”

Plans for the transformation are similar to a major overhaul of the Broadway corridor that concluded in 2021. Like the Broadway project, the proposed reworking of 9W would include a “road diet,” narrowing the corridor from four lanes to two. The plan also calls for the removal of a partial cloverleaf interchange, installation of bike and pedestrian safety features, the addition of new intersections and other changes. The overall goal of the effort is to return the area to its pre-Urban Renewal form as walkable urban corridor with greater density and more opportunities for residential and commercial development. The plan would also reconnect downtown neighborhoods that were cut off from each other during the Urban Renewal era.

In the statement, City Director of Housing Initiatives Bartek Starodaj cited a 1976 editorial in the Daily Freeman warning of the consequences of the proposed expansion of 9W, including properties removed from the tax rolls and inaccessibility to pedestrians. It urged the city to turn back before “the damage was irreversible.”

“Exactly 50 years later, this is a transformative opportunity for the city to think how the redesign of the 9W arterial could address the physical and social divides created by urban renewal and bring new housing and economic opportunities throughout the current 9W corridor,” Starodaj wrote.

The RFP is available at https://kingston-ny.gov/filestorage/8399/8469/48370/RFPK26-18_Reconnecting_Communities_Route_9W_Kingston.pdf

Additional information about the project can be found at https://engagekingston.com/reconnecting-communities-9w-reconfiguration-study.