By WILLIAM SHANNON
Dec. 4, 2019: This is an updated version of a story that appeared first in 2015 and which has continued to draw hundreds of readers a month. My new novel, The River's Never Full, fictionalizes the events of 2012 leading up to when City of Hudson officials directed a gunpoint eviction at the cabins on the North Bay. While the events of 2012 are the basis for the plot, the characters are largely fictitious and the ending is pure fiction. What’s true about the book is the setting. If plagiarism were kosher, I would've stolen the tagline from a book by Scott McClanahan, a contemporary writer from West Virginia who has written in raw and honest and dark ways about his homeland of Appalachia. "This is a biography of a place."
The characters in The River's Never Full certainly do breathe life into the place however, and many of the stories re-told in the book are based on research of mine between 2012 and 2018.
If you'd like to hear more about the book, there’s more at the bottom of this article.
So, here's the updated Six Things to Know about Hudson’s North Bay Shacks:
What is the Furgary?
The Furgary or Fugary Boat Club is also sometimes called the North Dock Tin Boat Association, Shantytown or just The Shacks. It’s a collection of seventeen small buildings—some of which may date back to the late 1800s—right at the mouth of Hudson’s North Bay, where it meets the Hudson River. They are a long stone’s throw from the northern end of the Terrace Apartments, next to the community garden, near the meeting of Dock and Front streets. The shacks were primarily used as fishing and hunting getaways until the city of Hudson, through its police force, evicted the members in the summer of 2012. The city has not maintained the shacks in the seven and a half years since the eviction.
Why weren’t the shanties knocked down after the eviction?
In the early years after the eviction, there were long stretches where the site wasn’t discussed at all at city meetings. The entire site stayed fenced off for about three years and DPW workers spray-painted big numbers on the outside of the shacks. Vandals broke in here and there. In 2015, Hudson’s common council began discussing and taking steps toward green-lighting the demolition of all or possibly all-but-one of the cabins.
As that effort was gaining steam, Linda Mackey and Daria Merwin of the State Historic Preservation Office released a report announcing that the entire group of shacks had been deemed by the state to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
“The property is a rare surviving collection of vernacular buildings, which represent a time when sturgeon and shad were abundant in the Hudson River, and people made their livelihoods fishing the river and selling their catch on the shore," the report states. "These people, commonly called ‘Furgarians’ today, formed a community where the buildings were handed down generation-to-generation.”
Why did the city kick the people out to begin with?
The shacks had been on state land and the state and the city conducted a land swap somewhere around 2010 so the city could expand its adjacent wastewater treatment plant. After the city took ownership, some of the Furgarians pooled resources and filed a lawsuit and a subsequent appeal challenging the city’s ownership of the land and arguing the land was owned privately by the proprietors of Hudson and passed down from there. The suit was dismissed in 2011, with a court ruling that the land purchased privately by Hudson’s founders was nearby but didn’t include the site. The court also said squatter’s rights would not have been applicable either, due to municipalities being exempt from such claims. The Furgarians' appeal was denied in 2012 due to a filing error. There've been some personal conflicts and some politics involved and the city’s mayor and attorney in 2012 said leasing the area was off the table due to concerns regarding liability.
What do the shacks represent?
The site is the last-surviving cluster of fishing cabins built along the tidal Hudson River during the days of abundant shad in the river. Everett Nack discussed the tradition that he’d seen during his long life paying attention to activity on the river in a Times Union story about 25 years ago. The longterm existence of such cabins, especially groups of them, has always been perilous since they were usually built on land not owned by the builders.
In recent decades, the shacks were often a working-class respite from normal life, a place from which people could provide sustenance by partaking in fishing and hunting on and around the Hudson River—a place where stories were told and traditions passed on. If you've never been able to see the insides of the shacks, they are about as gritty and rustic as you might imagine. Most have wood stoves, exposed wood beams, some wrapped in nautical rope, unpolished wide board or plywood floors and large windows framing views of the North Bay and the Hudson. One had a soda machine-turned-beer-machine and at least a couple of the cabins’ walls were adorned with centerfolds from dirty magazines.
But the site is quite polarizing around Hudson and has often stirred passions. Plenty of people living locally think the place should have all been torn down years ago and that the buildings and the former activity there was and is not worthy of preserving.
And yet, for people outside the area there’s a curiosity about the site. This story, for instance, after first published 4 and a half years ago, has continued through the present to get hundreds of hits each month. From the back-end of the website, I can see that people from all over the country and the world click on the story each week, each month. When I was down at the North Bay a couple months ago, a mother and daughter from Germany, who were on their way to visiting Albany, stopped down and spent 20 minutes or so checking the place out. They said they were perusing Google Maps and saw the site “Furgary Fishing Village” at the fringe of the city and decided to go a bit out of the way to Hudson to check it out.
Back in 2017, after the state awarded Hudson the grant for $10 million to revitalize its area near the river (which included some money for action at the North Bay), I pitched a story about the North Bay shanties to The New York Times. I wasn’t sure if they would go for the story, but a metro desk editor I’d worked with on other stories responded to my emailed pitch with an email that said, “Ok. Why not.” From there, the Times photo desk dispatched a photographer who took a drone video, a 360-video and several photos that accompanied the story. The article received myriad comments on the story itself and on social media. One commenter from California said, “In all my life I can't ever recall seeing shacks as unique and original in their concept, design and construction as these.” Some commenters offered to help out in a preservation effort. Others were skeptical that around $150,000-$165,000 would do much at the site. Others shared feelings along the lines of one commenter from Tennessee: “Gee. If you really wanted to preserve that environment, why did the government evict all the people there?”
What’s next at the site?
The fate of the site is not much clearer than it’s been for the past 7-plus years. More than two years after Hudson was announced as a Downtown Revitalization Initiative winner, a committee of city officials now generally meets twice monthly to discuss the city projects. The shacks seem fairly low on the priority list, with more effort going toward planning the larger-dollar projects, like revamping Promenade Hill Park, improving sidewalks and planning a million-dollar stabilization of a brick industrial building on the waterfront. I’ve reached out to Chris Round of the Chazen Companies, an engineering firm leading the city of Hudson on its DRI projects. I’ve also reached out to Kamal Johnson, who will become mayor of Hudson next month (and a member of the DRI committee) for updates and thoughts about the site. If and when I hear back from them, I’ll update this section.
A bit more about the book
The short novel is available for order here: Lulu.com
It’s officially out Dec. 8, 2019, with a book release party at The Spotty Dog Books & Ale in Hudson. The Cold Club of Queens will be playing live gypsy jazz and they are likely to cover a 1930s hit called “It’s only a Shanty in Old Shantytown.” Here’s the Facebook event with more information: event
Here’s a taped talk between Joel Craig and myself, filmed on the porch of my favorite shack at Shantytown: The River's Never Full: Hudson's Lost Shantytown
Also, a 25-minute radio interview with Jon Bowermaster on WKNY’s Green Radio Hour: Radio Kingston
And a review from Hudson Valley journalist Roger Hannigan Gilson: Hudson's Shantytown Explored in New Novel
The mystique around the Hudson River’s last shad shantytown will continue. One shack fell into the river last year. More are likely to follow. City officials and engineers and people who show up at DRI committee meetings will be the ones to determine if and how abundant river activity can be brought back to that site at the fringe of an improving city.
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