Pocketbook Hudson Hotel Annoys Neighbors with Noise from Undisclosed Utilities
The completed sections of the hotel look beautiful, but a constant buzzing from the roof utilities is driving residents crazy.
The impending opening of Pocketbook Hudson, a sprawling 70,000-square-foot hotel and cultural complex carved from the remains of the city of Hudson’s long-vacant Pocketbook Factory, has many excited. The hotel will include a restaurant, European bath-style spa, a gallery and retail space. While the plan sounds great, lately the building itself has started to emit an irritating noise from the roof.
A number of neighbors have reported hearing a persistent mechanical hum coming from giant, recently installed, rooftop utilities, the size and volume of which were never detailed in any public-facing planning documents. The issue is creating the wrong kind of buzz around the major new business’s launch.
As RI reported in June, the hotel was originally slated to open October 1, but today the structure is still visibly under construction—with portions of the building missing windows, workers actively on site, and fresh sod just laid in the courtyard.
Photo credit: Pocketbook Hudson
Trouble on the Roof
Amidst the final preparations, questions are now swirling around how the rooftop utility units, now looming over neighboring properties, were approved without public input. These mechanical systems were not shown in any of the presented site plans submitted to the City of Hudson Planning Board in 2021, or any time thereafter. While internal design documents as early as 2020 reference "possible location for packaged rooftop units," no public accounts of their placement or noise impact appears in Planning Board minutes, zoning variance hearings, or Historic Preservation Commission reviews.
City records confirm that the Planning Board approved the Pocketbook site plan in November 2021, with the Zoning Board of Appeals granting a use variance in April 2022. The Planning Board did impose a condition requiring a sound attenuation plan, but this focused on controlling amplified music from the courtyard and events, not persistent utility noise. No subsequent site plan amendments or additional reviews concerning rooftop mechanicals have been made available.
“At first I was shocked about the aesthetic of this being dropped on the roof,” says Neil Allen, who lives just yards away and works in design and construction. He says he can hear the utilities at all hours when he steps outside his home. “Once they got the cooling towers up there and running I was like, ‘Well now our back yard has a constant humming.’”
A rendering of Pocketbook Hudson from the planning proposal submitted to the city in 2021.
Allen says he doesn’t want to be a “squeaky wheel” but there are established remedies like screen walls that could easily resolve the issue. He has even worked on such projects himself. He ran into Roland earlier this week and asked about it directly but received no answer.
City Silence, Resident Frustration
Craig Haigh, Hudson's Code Enforcement Officer, when reached for comment Wednesday denied knowledge of the rooftop units. "I have no idea what you're talking about. I haven't heard anything about it, so I'm not gonna make any comments about it," he said. When asked to explain why not, he responded only, “Because I said.”
The only publicly available image regarding the potential placement of utilities on the roof.
If it were true that Haigh did not know, then the developers underwent installation of massive electrified utilities without code oversight, which would be a big deal. More likely however, Haigh is being evasive. Records show that former city council member, and current Department of Public Works city board member David Marston filed a complaint in September regarding the initial rooftop work, stating that it had not appeared in approved plans. The matter was dismissed by Haigh’s office in an official response to Marston with the short explanation, "This was approved by the building code."
Pocketbook Hudson is, by nearly every architectural and cultural measures, a positive bit of progress in the city. The restoration is both respectful and imaginative, the programming diverse and ambitious. For Hudson, a city accustomed to balancing its historic charm with modern reinvention, this new addition marks a milestone.
Yet the dissonance, literal and figurative, brought on by the rooftop utilities issue underscores a gap in the public planning process by a planning committee already under fire for its handling of other development plans. The buzzing above the neighborhood is reminding residents that even well-intentioned development can stumble when there’s a lack of transparency.
As construction continues Hudson waits for the developers to acknowledge the concerns and offer solutions. A screen wall or additional acoustic measures could go a long way in restoring harmony to the neighborhood and the building's aesthetics, but no mention of those remedies has yet been made publicly.
Multiple requests for comment from the developers and their public relations firm have not yet been returned.
