Get ready, Downtown Kingston – your time to shine is drawing nigh.

In groupings of three, there’s always one that gets a little lost in the sauce. Uptown Kingston gets the most attention, with its pricey homes, posh eateries and just enough authentic bohemianism to distract people from how much it costs to hang out there. Midtown is the city’s problem child – poverty, crime and brownfields take a lot of time, energy and money to fix. That leaves Downtown as, one might say, the Jan Brady of the Kingston municipal trio – we can imagine the collective civic voice of the waterfront yelling, “Uptown, Uptown, Uptown!” like an agitated middle-schooler trying to get attention from busy parents.

But all that’s about to change, and as a result, so will the neighborhood. While it’s not true to say Downtown has been stagnant these past years, it is true to say it’s the part of the trinity that’s changed the least since the pandemic. While redevelopment plans are going great guns in Uptown and Midtown, a simple fact limited such big projects Downtown: Much of the land was owned by Robert Iannucci, who bought up much of the waterfront - 37 parcels with a total of circa 100 acres – in the early 2000s, when you could get land in what seemed to be a dying city for a song.

Iannucci had big plans of his own for his land, the most recent of them being a boardwalk along the Rondout waterfront, but they usually seemed unserious and never got anywhere. Like 2018’s “Supergarage” plan where he proposed a 12,500-square-foot boat restoration facility and museum to house his collection of four World War II-vintage PT boats, as well as 60 apartments, retail space, a rooftop swimming pool and skating rink and about 175 parking spaces.

Iannucci died last year and some of what he owns is now being offered for sale, which will bring new players and new plans for the neighborhood. Already, a 47-unit mostly market-rate housing project is being pitched for the intersection of Wurts and Spring streets. We’ll likely see more proposals sooner than later.

In this time of change, the city’s revving up to revise Downtown’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan, which will decide where to spend a $21 million federal pandemic relief aid grant and other federal and state funds. “Our current LWRP hasn’t been updated in 34 years, and we know there’s endless potential in this area, which is ripe for revitalization,” Mayor Steve Noble said. “With major multi-million-dollar investments from the federal and state governments funding large-scale projects, the waterfront is getting its well-deserved renaissance.”

But "redevelopment" is a trigger word for many. Neighborhood residents who enjoy the slower pace of Downtown are going to be at the very least suspicious of plans that would bring hundreds of new residents and tourists to the area. And there’s always the “g-word” – gentrification. It hasn’t passed over Downtown entirely over the past five years, but the neighborhood still retains a working-class vibe to it. One Editorial Team member said the first time he saw Downtown’s 19th century-vintage buildings, they reminded him of the village in the “Popeye” movie that had Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall in it. We’re sure Kingston’s eagle-eyed preservationists will keep a very close watch on changes redevelopment might bring, but money does have a tendency to get its own way.

Attention is a double-edged blade. There’s an argument to be made that in a world where things are happening way too fast for all the wrong reasons, being a calm eddy in the torrent of time has a lot to offer. But the city as a whole is past that now and has been for years. Change brought by moneyed outsiders has radically transformed what Kingston used to be and given us a much higher profile to the wider world. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that rather than its time to shine, Downtown’s time in the rough and tumble barrel of gentrification is drawing nigh.

The bright side is that we now know gentrification when we see it coming. Maybe the community can handle it better when it comes to the Rondout than it did in Uptown and Midtown. We know your Editorial Team and many others want to avoid an Urban Renewal 2.0 scenario where the neighborhood’s identity and charm will be smashed and carted away as junk in the name of “revitalization.” Batten down the hatches!