Rossman-Prospect Avenue Historic District

The Rossman - Prospect Avenue Historic District is a conservation district in a small residential area on the eastern end of Hudson, New York in the United States. The houses were largely built in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It is the smaller of the two Historic Districts in the city.

The area was built when the city built an aqueduct to a water reservoir on the land of the Rossman family. It was the first planned residential area of ​​the city outside of the street grid in the center. The historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

Geography

The district covers an area of ​​two acres on the two roads, from which his name is guided. It lies on the slope of the Academy Hills, which is sometimes also called Prospect Hill, at 128 meters the highest point in the city. Of the houses on the Rossman Avenue that leads up the hill and ends at the water reservoir at an impasse, the view over the city extends to the Hudson River and the Catskill Escarpment in the southwest. To the north lies the Columbia Memorial Hospital and behind the larger Hudson Historic District. To the east of the district is the residential houses built with the end of the main street Hudson, Warren Street.

Within the boundaries of the district are some of the houses on the south side of Prospect Avenue south of the Rossman Avenue and both sides of Rossman Avenue to the end of the residential community, a total of 12 plots with 14 contributing buildings. Two garages in the area are modern buildings and are not considered contributing. The houses correspond to a variety of architectural styles that were popular before or after the beginning of the 20th century, such as the Queen Anne style, the Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival and Craftsman bungalows.

History

In the mid-19th century, the area belonged to the estate of Allen Rossman, a former treasurer of the county and director of a local bank. Hudson grew rapidly during this period and suffered regularly from lack of water. The city council decided therefore in 1874, water from the river into a reservoir behind the Prospect Hill to pump and associated rights of way for the construction of the aqueduct over the land Ross Mans.

Rossman provided additional land, leaving to build a 15 m wide road and planted to trees, when he had divided the land into 13 plots. The first house, 11 Rossman Avenue, was built in 1887. Rossman died a short time later and his survivors sold some of the parcels on the west side of the road in the 1890s. Most of the houses were built on it incurred in a somewhat restrained Queen Anne style, as was common elsewhere in Hudson.

The plots on the east side were built until the early 20th century. Most of these houses were built under the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement, especially the bungalows. These structures differed somewhat from the style because they have detailed features of the Federal Style and Georgian architecture. The two last- built houses in the district are 2 and 4 Rossman Avenue - the latter was to build the hospital director - are more in the design of English country houses, which is unusual for the Hudson Valley.