Historic District Workshop

Hi folks interested in the village historic district!

The Village Board is holding a workshop and public comment about the ideas around how to handle the state/federal expansion of the Rhinebeck Village Historic District tomorrow, 4/25, at 6pm in Village Hall. Hopefully, this workshop will get us to where we need to be to get our zoning code to work well with itself, and we can get the process moving forward for legal changes.

The questions that the board needs to answer are:

• What is the date cut-off for a building to be considered a “contributing” member of the district, and thus subject to historic demolition laws (Chap 64); and

• What neighborhoods do we consider historic and thus subject to planning board review under 120-39?

By the nature of the laws, the date question is much more granular (specific buildings that we want to make sure go through a heightened review process before they are significantly changed or torn down) and the boundary question is bigger picture (what neighborhoods do we want to have heightened scrutiny over for continuity of style).

The application that the village put forward to the State that resulted in the 2020 change asked for 1970 and the boundaries as drawn below. There has been some concern expressed by various local history/historic architecture experts about the quality of the report as it concerns the analysis of individual buildings and the thoughtfulness behind the 1970 date, but it is the one that we submitted, and that the state and the feds adopted.

We’ve put a bunch of information on the cloud – see here: Historic District Workshop