All Over Albany

Laying out a new path for Maiden Lane, one of Albany's very oldest streets

Maiden Lane is one of Albany's oldest streets -- it dates back to the mid 1600s -- with a scale that makes it feel today like it's from a different time.

It's also a path straight from the heart of downtown to the pedestrian bridge leading over to Corning Riverfront Park and the waterfront.

But the current design and streetscape in that part of town don't really do a good job of communicating those ideas or drawing people in.

So the city of Albany is looking to change things up.

Here's what's in the mix...

A quick overview of the project

The city of Albany is working with a handful of consultants to use new design elements (graphics, lighting, signage), streetscape changes, and park reconfiguration to highlight the Maiden Lane corridor and its connection to the riverfront.

"The overall goal is to help people discover the waterfront and make sure that we enhance that connection to the waterfront," said Chris Spencer, the city's commissioner of planning and development, after the meeting. "Just to try and do everything we can to make it easy for people to find [the river] and make it an enjoyable journey as well. But we're also looking at it from the other direction. When people come back from Alive at Five or one of those events we want them to discover the downtown and move further into the downtown than just go to the parking garage and get in the car and leave."

The consultants -- from the CRJA-IBI landscape architecture group and Roll Barresi & Associates, a group that specializes in graphic design and signage -- showed off a handful of preliminary concepts and designs for the project Thursday evening at the CoLab coworking space in the Arcade Building at Broadway and Maiden Lane.

A bunch of slides from the presentation are at the top in large format -- click or scroll all the way up -- and they'll give you a quick sense of what's in the mix.

Here are a few bits about some of the main elements of the not-yet-finalized plan:

More prominent graphic design and signage
The consultants showed of some eye-catching designs for custom sidewalk paint that draws on a river theme, both in a style inspired by woodblock prints and something more abstract and modern. (Members of the crowd seemed to prefer the woodlblock style over the abstract.) And they also floated the possibility of using some combination of overhead signage, a street canopy, and murals to draw attention to the corridor.

Re-setting the street and cobblestones
The design team called for two changes to Maiden Lane street itself:
+ Raising the level of the street to make it more or less at the same level as the sidewalks.
+ Re-setting the cobblestones in a new pattern that would make the street easier to walk on.

Making Maiden Lane mostly a pedestrian street
Those changes flow into the proposal to make Maiden Lane primarily a pedestrian street with access limited mostly to emergency vehicles.

Reshape DiNapoli Park
That wedge of a park that sits between Pine Street and Maiden Lane is DiNapoli Park. And as city planning commissioner Chris Spencer said at the top of the meeting, the park could use some attention. So the consultants propose a few different plans for reshaping the park to make it more inviting and to open it toward the street-level shops in the Arcade Building.

Make the plaza area between Broadway the pedestrian bridge more inviting
The steps to the pedestrian bridge -- The Hudson River Way -- are set back from Broadway, which makes them a little hard to find. And if you're unfamiliar with them, you might also wonder if they just lead to a parking deck or something instead of the riverfront.

So to both continue the Maiden Lane corridor and draw people toward the steps, the consultants proposed making over the plaza/driveway area ahead of the steps with elements such as grasses and seating and pillars.

An undated photo looking up the hill on Maiden Lane at James Street from the Albany Public Library History Collection. The photo dates no later than the 1970s, because it you notice in the background Maiden Lane continues past Pearl Street. That changed with the construction of the Ten Eyck Plaza project.

Feedback

About 30 people were in the crowd for the presentation, many of them nearby business or property owners. And they seemed generally supportive. A few issues they mentioned:

How would a new, pedestrian Maiden Lane work?
People mentioned a range of questions related to the re-setting of the street and function as a primarily pedestrian walkway. Among them:
+ What about truck deliveries? (The consultants said they were planning for James Street to be the primary truck staging area.)
+ What about stormwater, which apparently just runs down the street currently? (The consultants mentioned maybe building in porous elements to soak up rain water.)
+ What about snow clearing? (Something to be worked out -- maybe heated streets/sidewalks?)
+ How can the cobblestones both be preserved but made less treacherous in wet weather? (Some of that goes back to the proposed patterns that would break up the sections of cobblestone.)

Design details
The opinions people expressed in response to the proposed designs seemed to lean toward design elements and colors that were warmer and not so starkly modern.

The street as urinal
Things took a little bit of an unexpected turn when a couple of people mentioned that Maiden Lane often ends up being used as a spot for people to pee, especially in the doorway of the retail spaces along there. Jim and Sue Donohue -- the owners of 37 Maiden Lane -- said they've seen this happen at all hours. Just the other morning they said they walked out and found a guy dressed up for work who as peeing in the entryway. So there was some discussion between the consultants and the crowd about public bathrooms both downtown and across the bridge where some already exist. (Also: The elevator at the pedestrian bridge apparently also is a frequent pee spot.) The consultants said they thought some of the streetscape improvements -- especially new lighting -- would cut down on this behavior.

Making the bridge Maiden Lane
One person in the crowd had an interesting idea: Renaming the pedestrian bridge as "Maiden Lane" so that the street, in a sense, extends from Pearl all the way over to Jennings Landing. That would be a bit of an echo of the old Maiden Lane Bridge that once crossed the river near that spot. And it also might just make it clearer for people that you can take this street and end up at the river.

Timeline

The goal is for the final design to be finished by the end of this year. The bidding process would then start in late winter or spring with an eye toward construction next summer.

Chris Spencer, the city's planning commissioner, said the overall budget for this project is about $1.2 million, much of that in the form of various grants and state funding. He said the city is looking how adjacent projects might help save money. For example: A paving project on Broadway will probably end up doing the curb bump-outs for the crosswalk at Maiden Lane and Broadway.

Spencer said the infrastructure portion of the portion will be done next year with that money. Some of the design elements might come along later as funding allows. And other bits -- like a possible mural -- would fall to property owners.

A few other things

A common visual vocabulary for how to get to the river
Downtown Albany already has a few different ways of getting over to the riverfront, even if they're not necessarily clearly marked. And it's in line to get another with the Albany Skyway project.

So design work for Maiden Lane is a good opportunity to develop would could be a common visual signal that, hey, this way leads to the river.

"This is what we asked the consultants to do was to design something sort of unique to this corridor, but include elements that we can repeat or are transferable," Spencer said. "So, for instance, if you're driving and you see this sort of blue wavy crosswalk you automatically understand that's one of those east-west connections to the waterfront. So we think we can use that at the Skyway as well as one or two other pedestrian connections that we're going to be working on in the future."

A smaller scale downtown
The buildings and street layout for much of downtown Albany make it feel tall and very much like a 20th century city. But there are a handful of streets sort of tucked into the heart of downtown that have a cozier feel. Maiden Lane is one. The intersecting James Street is another. And there are a handful of others.

As downtown continues shift toward a more residential use, it'll be interesting to see if these more human-scale streets attract more activity. The Maiden Lane/James intersection already has had a burst of renewed energy from the Arcade Building redevelopment and the new Maiden House residential/retail project across the street.

Earlier

+ Talking about a new look for one of Albany's oldest streets

+ Here's the proposed design for the Albany Skyway

+ Looking along the old lane