Historic Hudson: An Architectural Portrait

An architectural gallery of the city of Hudson featuring antique maps and more than 200 photographs, most dating from 1850 to 1930. The city of Hudson, founded in 1783, has been called "a dictionary of American architecture design" because of its many 18th and 19th-century buildings that have survived to the present day. From an unlikely, but very successful, whaling and merchant seaport 120 miles from the sea, to a boom-and-bust factory town, and then to a depressed and failing city with a frontier reputation for prostitution, gambling, and official corruption, the city of Hudson, New York, founded on the shores of the upper Hudson River by New England Quakers in 1783, has recently blossomed into a vibrant antiques and arts center with a national reputation.

Through these cultural and economic ups and downs, much of the city's remarkable architectural legacy somehow survived the plagues of the centuries, making Hudson today "a dictionary of American architecture." As remarkable as the survival of so many of Hudson's 18th and 19th-century buildings, is the survival of a magnificent collection of photographs intimately documenting the city from the 1850s to the 1920s, published herein for the first time.