Your Editorial Team saw a post on Facebook the other day that made us think of something we hadn’t thought about in a long time: The Kingstonian.

Since we in an editorial two years ago exhorted the community to never stop talking about the Kingstonian we figure that includes us, too. The first question we had: What’s its legal status? We admit to losing track of all the Article 78 motions filed against it by a certain Uptown property holder who obviously doesn’t mind paying lawyers thousands and thousands of bucks. Man, we hope his law firm had something like a Stewart’s Milk Club card — pay for 10 lawsuits and the next one’s free. Hopefully he can use the freed-up money to actually do something with one of the building’s he’s been sitting on for years now.

Litigiously speaking, the Kingstonian is currently in the clear, with the last Article 78 being resolved in the city’s favor last month. We suppose more can be filed, but there is a time when even the most determined of plaintiffs has gotta wake up and smell the coffee, bite the bullet and throw in the towel. (Other clichés optional.)

Existentially speaking, the project is in a state of suspended animation. Just before last Christmas, the developers announced they would “not be in a position to commence construction in the near term,” i.e., for at least two years. Which we don’t think is a random number — our second question was when would the developers have to come back to the Kingston Planning Board to get their site plan approval renewed? (For those not familiar, planning board stamps of approval are not evergreen; if shovels don’t go in the ground before whatever period of time the board set expires, developers have to go back to the planning board for an extension.)

The answer to that is: October 2024. When the planning board OK’d the Kingstonian, it added unusual language to the resolution:

Section 13: That owing to the resource intensive litigation commenced by the project opponents, the Planning Board hereby grants the request of the project applicants to extend the time limit on the site plan approval granted herein from four (4) months to two (2) years from the date of this Approval …

So all that litigation did have one effect: some breathing room for the project. If we actually continue to have a functioning civil society after several months of the upcoming presidential campaign — buckle up, everybody; the ’24 forecast calls for completely batsh*t berserk — it will be interesting to hear what’s said at October’s planning board meeting. Theoretically, the board could continue to renew the approvals indefinitely, or at least until it gets started, or gets abandoned. Developers promise the Kingstonian will one day rise above Uptown. We'll believe it when we see it.

Which, of course, reminds us of a similar controversial project which riled the city during a tortuous approval process, only to never come to fruition. Hudson Landing was the larger of two pretty big residential projects being pitched for the Rondout in the early years of the century. The real estate titan AVR Realty bought 500-plus acres upon which once sat a cement factory and pitched a plan for 2,000 units of housing: apartments, townhouses, single-family homes, along with retail, restaurants and access to the water for recreational purposes. Who’s AVR? According to itself, AVR “is a leading private real estate development, investment, and management firm. Headquartered in New York, our portfolio spans 20 states and over 70 cities and includes hotels, multifamily apartments, retail centers, office buildings and ground-up developments.” Locally, they own the plaza in Highland where the Hannaford is and probably other stuff too. The company is privately held so we don’t know its precise net worth, but several sources put its annual revenue a little north of $15 million.

The same kind of resistance met by the Kingstonian faced Hudson Landing, and the same kind of difficult approval process the Kingstonian navigated awaited as well. In 2010, AVR finally got site plan approval for a scaled-down version. Only problem was, the 2008 crash in housing prices made Hudson Landing less viable as a business prospect, so AVR put it on its back burner. On a regular basis, the company would ask for, and receive, another site plan approval. Until one day in early 2019, AVR announced it was selling the land to Scenic Hudson, one of the groups in the vanguard of the opposition to Hudson Landing to become a state park. For many, this was a happy ending — the people stood up and, with a little help from a huge global recession, stopped a project that would’ve fundamentally changed Downtown Kingston. Some wonder, though, if Kingston’s housing crunch would not be quite so crunchy if AVR had built the 1,700 units of housing for which it got approval. We’ll never know.

Here in New York State’s First Capital, it’s impossible to deny that organized and effective resistance to major projects like Hudson Landing, Niagara Bottling and the Kingstonian has made a big impact. It would seem that at this point the only kind of change the community will accept, if it’s the kind of change it has any say over, is that of the moderate and incremental type.

Perhaps that’s for the best. It’s a lot more sustainable than the boom-bust economic apocalypse Kingston’s gone through more than a few times in its history. And it’s more in line with the hard reality of infrastructure: The economic heart of the Hudson Valley is the intersection of Interstate 84 with Interstate 87 in Newburgh. That point where those two superhighways meet, near an airport with military-grade runways, offers access to the entire continent. That’s where big jobs projects happen, driven by actual successful businesses rather than speculative startups that always disappoint. That’s where the same company struggling to make iPark 87 work enjoys a full iPark 84.

Perhaps those who won’t give up on a Big Blue-level employer coming to Kingston could take inspiration from a certain movie popular this time of year: build from wicker three 20-foot-tall letters — “IBM” — and set them ablaze. (Human sacrifice optional.) At the very least, it will be every bit as effective as another star-studded press conference out in Lake Katrine.