On the Waterfront
Plucky Poughkeepsie perseveres through thick and thin

By Steve Hopkins

More than 11 years ago, I penned an article for the now-defunct Taconic Press lifestyle imprint, Dutchess Magazine, attempting to give voice to a sense of hope I’d detected in dozens of people attempting to bring life to the City of Poughkeepsie. There was a fair amount of history in the article as well. Today, despite the dampening effects of the Great Recession, Poughkeepsie remains in the game. In the spirit of the financially hamstrung but still feisty Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial, it’s as good a time as any to re-visit the Queen City’s status in the historical firmament, as well as give it a little nudge toward what should yet be a fabulous future.

Poughkeepsie prologue

A mere 300 years ago, unlike most eastern American riverfront cities, the place where Poughkeepsie now stands was nothing more than a decent spot to park a boat on an otherwise forbidding shoreline. During the brutally industrious Dutch Colonial era currently being celebrated, bargeloads of heavily armed frontiersfolk transporting their precious beaver pelts swept busily past the small notch on their way downriver between Fort Orange and New Amsterdam much like an Amtrak express train; there was next to nothing going on inland that would warrant stopping at that particular spot. Except for the Poughkeepsie landing and a few others (notably those of present-day Peekskill, Fishkill, Rhinebeck and Hudson), the entire eastern shore of the Hudson consisted of high, stony banks, thick with trees and swarming with revenge-prone Native Americans who were not unaccustomed to taking out one or two white folks during frequent beaver-hijacking expeditions.

The intermittent traveler who managed to pierce the virgin-forested interior was unimpressed with the future Dutchess County’s untapped bounty. In 1694 the Rev. Benjamin Wadsworth, a proper Bostonian on the way back from a powwow with some Iroquois chiefs in Albany, inadvertently veered south into Dutchess and found a wild, untamed landscape that he took the time to dismiss on paper as “very woody, rocky, mountainous, swampy; extreme bad riding.” Most other people felt the same way, and it took another 100 years for things to get rolling.

Initially colonized by a very few hardy Ostlanders, what is now Poughkeepsie and surrounding Dutchess County were, not surprisingly, jump-started by pure power politics. In 1664, the (Catholic) Duke of York blockaded New Amsterdam with a spanking new fleet of state-of-the-art warships and bullied the flinty old Dutchman Peter Stuyvesant into handing over the keys to the New Netherland colony. The Duke, apparently not one prone to self-effacement, promptly renamed his new toy “New York,” and set about trying to hold onto it in the face of encroachments from the north and west by the wily French and from the east by the hated New England Puritans. After nearly 20 years of monkeying around, the aging Duke, with the help of a new (Irish) colonial governor, Thomas Dongan, finally got his act together.

Dongan placated the colony’s predominantly Dutch populace with a nifty new constitution that was radically fair-minded by existing New World standards. In addition, Dongan in the late 1680s began doling out “patents” to wealthy and well-connected pals, so as to line the newly strategic Hudson River with private bastions of property, keeping the Puritans locked up behind the Taconic hills to the east. No “blue laws” were allowed, and no one had to pay an extra tax to fill church coffers. Thus was born New York’s reputation as a “liberal” stronghold.

Settlement increased moderately until the end of the Revolutionary War; Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County were unscathed by mainstream bloodshed, as there was nothing strategic to fight over and it was an excellent place for statesmen/warriors like Gov. George Clinton to hang out and plot moves against the British. As Poughkeepsie was a stronghold of anti-Tory sentiment along the safest stretch of the Hudson, it was rewarded with the status of default state capital in 1777 following the British broiling of nearby Kingston, bringing in an influx of lawyers and politicians who have never really left. They all had a whale of a time in 1788 at the old courthouse, arguing over whether or not to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

As late as 1795, Poughkeepsie was still the smallest of Dutchess County’s three principal towns; both Fishkill and Rhinebeck were more populous by a third. There was but one dry goods store, one grocery store, one hardware store, one lumber vendor, and a general store at the river landing. The town boasted a graceful courthouse with a short but rich Revolutionary history and an annoying tendency to burn down, but not much else. With a small hat factory and intermittent ferry service to Highland, 18th-century Poughkeepsie couldn’t hold a candle to 20th-century Millbrook.

By the century’s end, however, Dutchess County as a whole had flourished agriculturally, and trade began to burgeon through its port towns, especially Poughkeepsie. The daunting, brambly forests had succumbed to the ax, and the rolling land underneath and around the countless beaver ponds, swamps and mires proved surprisingly fertile, once it was drained. By 1800, released from the threat of war and the stifling influence of provincial patent disagreements, Dutchess’ agricultural, mining and manufacturing output had streaked to the top spot among New York counties. Yesteryear’s Wayne Nussbickels, John MacEnroes and Charlie Norths were doing cartwheels.

Poughkeepsie past

In 1799, Poughkeepsie was incorporated as a bona fide town, and during the next century, from 1800 to 1900, it became the transportation nexus for the now booming Dutchess region, which underwent a swift depletion of its natural resources to feed the voracious appetites of the city to the south and a growing U.S. military gearing up for the Civil War. Iron ore was discovered and exploited in the Taconic hills, feeding the Poughkeepsie Iron Works and, starting in 1860, the Fallkill Iron Works. Untold tons of grain, sheep and hogs were shipped to New York City and beyond by sloop, train and steamboat. In 1810 the area, already a breadbasket, was ripe for the vision of someone like Matthew Vassar, who transformed his father’s small business into one of the largest breweries in America and built a fortune vast enough to singlehandedly bankroll his dream of a women’s college.

By 1825, grain production began to wane and was replaced by forms of agricultural production higher on the food chain. Sheep, wool, beef and milk production grew. All these things continued to require transport by the river, and an elaborate ground transportation system was developed, linking the shipping port of Poughkeepsie with Dutchess County’s vast and far-flung farms. In 1832, an ill-fated whaling company was established that managed to lose a pile of money.

During this heady, confident era, slavery in New York State was abolished due to the valiant efforts of Dutchess’ John Jay and his son Pierre. Most freed slaves congregated in Baxtertown and Lithgow, working on country farms and avoiding congested Poughkeepsie. Years later, after the Civil War, a large group of African-Americans was recruited from the South to replace striking workers at the city’s riverfront brickyards. A good percentage of the African-American community living in Poughkeepsie today are descended from this influx of Southerners, many of whom fell on hard times in the 1930s when the brickyards went belly up.

In 1854, a scant 144 years ago, Poughkeepsie finally got around to anointing itself a city, and got down to serious business. Between 1850 and 1900, the waterfront became a mass of smoking factories and warehouses built to take advantage of the railroad and the river. Besides the two iron works and the brewery, the Poughkeepsie waterfront has been home to Adriance, Platt and Company, a maker of mowers, reapers, and later plows; Caire Pottery Works; the Poughkeepsie Glass Works; the Innis Dye Works; DeLaval, a manufacturer of precision tools and measuring equipment; and the William T. Reynolds Company, a major purveyor of grain and feed.

The waterfront in its late-19th-century heyday was not designed to be a fun place. Recreational activities – ice boating in the 1800s, the Intercollegiate Regatta (oars competitions) between 1895 and 1949, the old Exchange House hotel at the foot of Main Street and the excursion steamboats – all vied for shoreline access with heavy industry and its transportation needs. Something as frivolous as a riverfront park, a boardwalk or an outdoor amphitheater would not have appealed to the city’s conservative psyche in those no-nonsense times.

From the time the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad track was first laid across Main Street in the mid-1800s (Main Street and a few other east/west thoroughfares have since been lifted up over the tracks via bridgework) until fairly recently, Poughkeepsie was unwittingly engaged in the slow process of cutting itself off from the river, its former lifeblood. The Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge, completed in 1888, was primarily a conduit for shipping coal and steel from Pennsylvania east to New Haven and Boston. Its existence did little if anything economically for the city for which it was named. Since opening in the mid-1920s, the Mid-Hudson Bridge has carried automobile traffic overhead past the waterfront, at the same time eliminating the need for ferry service. The Route 9 Arterial, built in the 1960s, was the final nail in the coffin of riverfront isolation, effectively chopping the city in half in order to afford easier access to suburban malls. For decades, bereft of a reason for existence, the waterfront area deteriorated into another sad urban wasteland, dismissed even by crack addicts and winos as a proper place to hang out. And like a cancer, the devastation spread from the severed riverfront out along Main Street, as if the city was slowly losing its soul.

Poughkeepsie past perfect

Grand designs for the River District are nothing new. Ever since Poughkeepsie fell into a prolonged mid-century funk following the same flight to the suburbs that left many other American cities rudderless and economically depressed, its residents and leaders have harbored dreams for a dramatic resurgence, trying to attract a single major waterfront developer that, like the Holy Grail, would be the impetus for a renaissance. The plaque adorning Victor C. Waryas Memorial Park sums up the irony of it all. “It is not an exaggeration to say that Poughkeepsie is on the threshold of a complete rebirth,” goes the Jan. 4, 1963 quote by Waryas, then mayor of the newly ailing city. “The coming year, and the years to follow, will see a physical change so vast as to make our city unrecognizable to those who have known it in the past.”

Well, not quite. A $25 million ’60s-era urban renewal project undertaken by Corbetta Enterprises, Inc., may have been the source of Waryas’ ecstasy. “Poughkeepsie, like the legendary Rip Van Winkle, has awakened from a long slumber,” trumpeted the Corbetta PR package. “The City has awakened to its destiny as the center of a rapidly growing region. Poughkeepsie is replacing the old and worn out with new and beautiful housing for its people, new arteries of transportation, and new office and commercial facilities. Symbolic of Poughkeepsie’s awakening, the first Urban Renewal structure, an 18-story apartment house for moderate income families, has been named the Rip Van Winkle House.”

Thirty years later, the gray slab of the Rip Van Winkle House and the ’70s-era River Terrace development are the only visible remnants of Corbetta, Inc.’s plans for a datedly futuristic waterfront Jetsonville of concrete, steel and glass Bauhaus architecture, including an “ultra-modern 100,000 square-foot office building,” a shopping center, a “200-room hotel with convention facilities” and a “300-boat marina,” among other urban renewal-fueled development calling for the complete razing of all but one historic building. Properties marked for destruction according to this plan included the old Vassar Brothers’ Home and the Vassar Brothers Institute of Science, Literature and Art, both part of the pivotal Cunneen-Hackett complex today. Another, even more extreme solution called for much of the city to be knocked down and rebuilt inside a gigantic translucent bubble.

Poughkeepsie present

In 1997, the Dutchess County Planning Department, abetted by its forward-thinking Development and Design Coordinator, John Clarke, managed to get a lot of people and entities onto one page (more like 10 pages, actually) in producing a seminal document, somewhat misleadingly titled the “City of Poughkeepsie Transportation Strategy.” Included in the ambitious blueprint were a number of important projects that have come to fruition, as well as a number that have not. Metro-North built the most critical component in the late 1990s: a new multilayer parking garage and intermodal center, with a covered walkway and river overlook that links the station to the waterfront.

Where crackheads once palavered in Waryas Park, there is now a lovely Greenway promenade along the riverfront, with period lighting and a textured walkway. The historic Reynolds warehouse complex, originally slated to be razed for yet another surface parking lot, was successfully renovated in 2004 into Dooley Square, a vibrant mix of retail, restaurants and offices that serves as a commercial anchor at the Main Street end of Water Street. The Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum now serves as a busy counterweight at the north end of Water Street, along with a well-utilized skate park.

All of these improvements have had a stabilizing, rejuvenating effect. Lower Main Street is dotted with thriving businesses that didn’t exist in 1996: Soul Dog. Amici’s. The Demitasse Café. To the south, although the less inclusive architecture of Shadows, The Grandview and Martin Ginsburg’s Hudson Pointe do little to warm the aesthetic soul or promote civic populism, they serviceably fill in the once yawning post-industrial gaps, providing luxury housing and quality meeting/entertainment space. The waterfront’s biggest eye- and nose-sore, the toxic 13.4-acre former DeLaVal property, is currently undergoing a $9 million remediation and is slated to someday be transformed into a recreational and commercial wonderland, including a waterfront park, marina, canoe launch, parking and retail and office space.

Along the city’s northern shoreline, a quieter, more Greenway-oriented aspect of the waterfront has begun to supplant the post-industrial. Marist has constructed a park, a walkway, a boathouse and a floating dock. Vassar built another boathouse adjacent to Marist’s. Dutchess County Executive Bill Steinhaus authorized a $9.9 million plan to carve out a nice riverfront park called “Quiet Cove” on 27 acres of state-owned land north of Marist, as well as to link the Dutchess Rail Trail to the Walkway Over the Hudson.
Back on Main Street, going east up the hill beyond Market, a major goal of urban re-designers was achieved when what used to be the barren, post-apocalyptic pedestrian “Main Mall” was re-opened to two-way automobile traffic. The jury is still out as to whether that was the district’s only problem, but there has been quite a bit of re-shuffling of the deck, some of which resulted in positive results like the beautiful renovation of the Luckey Platt building.

Despite the opening up of the Main Mall and the Luckey Platt success, upper Main Street still languishes. Newly shuttered facades of businesses like Muddy Cup that had hoped to cater to an influx of a young, pioneering creative class, stand in testament that things may take a bit longer. The Great Recession surely has had a role in things, reducing consumer demand, thinning the daily commuter herd, causing downtown businesses to trim staff and cut hours and so on. But putting dreams on hold doesn’t mean they’re dead, and there are still reasons for long-term optimism. New businesses are still opening here and there. The Friday farmers’ market is thriving. People haven’t taken their eyes off of the future.

Pedicabs, anyone?

The jewel in the crown, many Poughkeepsie advocates agree, will be the fabulous Walkway Over the Hudson, still on schedule to open with a grand ceremonial flourish in October in a frenzy of Quadricentennial pageantry (knock wood). Hopefully the little turf dustup between Steinhaus and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer can be worked out and they can avoid spooking CSX Railroad CEO Michael Ward into refusing to let anybody get on or off of the thing from the Poughkeepsie side. The sky-high pedestrian park is certain to be an enormous boon to local tourism (I’d love to get the pedicab concession on the bridge – can you imagine?), and has to be good news for Poughkeepsie’s North Side, including promising, on-the-edge neighborhoods like Mount Carmel. In fact, Mount Carmel has been holding its own of late thanks to the efforts of a young visionary entrepreneur named Erik Morabito, who is busily stepping out of his fine Café Bocca and into the breach, promoting a weekend farmers’ market and other initiatives to spark things.

Other facets of Poughkeepsie’s long-awaited renaissance seem to be on hold, at least for the time being. Some of the hopeful projects envisioned by planners in the late 1990s that have stalled at least temporarily include an initiative by Chris Silva, executive director of the Bardavon 1869 Opera House on Market Street, to have a permanent riverfront amphitheater built, and another intriguing proposal to resume riverboat service on the Hudson from a Poughkeepsie-based terminal. County planners are themselves mixed in their assessment of what has happened in the years since the transportation strategy was adopted. “While the pace of implementation has been unsatisfactory for some of the strongest proponents of the plan, most agree that delays resulted largely from changing directions in political leadership,” maintains the author of an updated version of the City of Poughkeepsie Transportation Strategy document currently on the county website. “The Transportation Strategy retains considerable support and momentum for moving into Phase 2 of the Plan.”

With apologies to what was certainly a brilliant planning team, I have to insert an opinion at this point. Unfortunately, in my experience, with virtually every long-term study of a problem that ends in a document being produced, as well done and valuable as that document may seem to be at the time of its creation, it quickly gathers dust on a shelf somewhere as reality shifts beneath the planners’ feet, completely changing the rules of the game. This is what the planners in this case admit happened. The political realities of successive administrations were not aligned with the findings of the transportation strategy team. Someone had other ideas. The best-laid plans – call them “transportation strategies,” “comprehensive plans,” whatever – don’t guarantee action. Still, I heartily applaud the effort, and would urge Mayor Tkazyik to take a look at the county’s old Poughkeepsie Transportation Strategy report sometime, if he hasn’t already.

Speaking of the mayor, he, the city council and other Poughkeepsie movers and shakers recently had their hands full dealing with a hot potato in the form of a proposed business improvement district (BID), centered on Main Street, which if enacted would have covered 71 acres and involved an increase in taxes on properties within the district, including the Civic Center, the Poughkeepsie Grand Hotel and One Civic Center Plaza. Those taxes, said proponents, would have financed improvements ranging from the physical enhancement of the streetscape to better security. Opponents, however, took citizen action against the council proposal, organizing a revolt among the district’s 200 property owners of record. More than half of them – a disputed 107 individuals – voted it down in March by each returning a form to City Hall stating that they were against the measure. The outcome is still in limbo, with threats of lawsuits hanging in the air.

Poughkeepsie psyche

But all of the above: the history, the land use questions, the politics and the frustrated dreams of planners, are really just stage setting for the people who call Poughkeepsie home. And the populace of any town, as a rule, has a collective point of view, no matter what the disparate views of each individual constituent might be. As a former lower Main Street resident and current part-time Poughkeepsie Farmers’ Market manager, I can say from experience that Poughkeepsie’s psyche can reliably be described as “slightly damaged, but resilient.” The damage comes from intermittent spasms of bad engineering, red-lining, racial segregation, industrial pollution and municipal corruption at the hands of incompetent and/or nefarious individuals in positions of power and influence. That sort of thing seems not to be happening now, but one never really knows until after the fact.

The damaged feeling is exacerbated more than a little by the realization that lurks in every Poughkeepsie resident’s subconscious of his or her city’s well-known and not particularly upbeat place in the popular zeitgeist. It’s no mystery as to why the Brothers Dowdle — by all accounts a pair of real smartypants film and culture students — chose the city as a backdrop and namesake of their serial slasher/killer film, The Poughkeepsie Tapes (which, by the way, has never darkened the screen of a theater, as far as I know – but that’s another story). Xenia, Ohio was already taken by Harmony Korine, for one thing. Poughkeepsie as an iconic horror locale was open and available. Parts of Nobody’s Fool were made here, but the city wasn’t featured; nor was it anything but a nameless, hyper-realistic post-apocalyptic stand-in for Tromaville when Lloyd Kaufman filmed his gag-inducing classic, Citizen Toxie: Toxic Avenger IV back in 1999, before Main Street was opened back up to car traffic.

Poughkeepsie, as much as we love it, is swimming in bizarre and ultra-violent lore, especially around the waterfront. There is nothing that happens in the Dowdles’ movie that can top what has already happened here. Let’s see: 6-foot, 4-inch, 300-pound Kendall Francois with his kiddie pool and garbage can in the attic filled with decomposing prostitutes.

Then we have poor Tawana Brawley crawling — or perhaps not — out of a garbage bag filled with human excrement. OK, it didn’t happen in Poughkeepsie per se, but the trial that made Al Sharpton a household word did. Another young black woman runs screaming out of the woods on the riverfront near Water Street, yelling that she’d been raped by a white cop. Within two weeks, both she and the cop wash up on shore, dead — she first, strangled; he days later, a bloated mass brimming with cocaine and alcohol. Neither crime has ever been solved.

Does anybody remember water department honcho Fred Andros, who blew his chin off in a misguided attempt to snuff himself as he was about to be arrested for conspiring in the murder of his married mistress Susan Fassett — a public employee who was also a federal witness in the widening Paroli corruption scandal? Fassett was gunned down in a church parking lot after choir practice, allegedly by a stocky, masculine-looking rube named Dawn Silvernail, another Andros sexual “conquest.” Only weeks earlier, Andros and Fassett were both happily dallying with Silvernail in an improbable menage-a-trois — one magical session of which was videotaped for posterity at the local pumphouse, a few short blocks from Water Street.

And then there’s the nearly forgotten old cannibal Albert Fentress, a Poughkeepsie high school teacher who in 1979 got lucky when Paul Masters, a recent high school graduate, wandered into his backyard. With a continuously playing highlight loop of the movie Deliverance dancing in his head, Fentress lured the kid into his basement, tied him up at gunpoint and had his way with him before mutilating him, shooting him a couple of times in the head, chopping him up and cooking and eating his genitals and other morsels. Now in his 60s, Fentress was found not guilty by reason of insanity and is living out his days at Pilgrim State mental hospital on Long Island, presumably dining on lighter fare.

G. Gordon Liddy also got his start here, along with his seriously twisted worldview from being an ADA handling the sort of cases Poughkeepsie provides when not hounding Dr. Timothy Leary and his underage minions out at the Hitchcock estate in Millbrook. Monty Python’s Eric Idle, who couldn’t think of anything to say when asked on the Daily Show what his favorite place in America was, blurted out “Poughkeepsie,” and got a big laugh.
I could go on. Suffice it to say, Poughkeepsie residents have more experience handling this sort of thing than most people do.

But the resilience I spoke of earlier comes from more than being the butt of 30 years of jokes and tabloid stories. There’s a sweetness of character here, too. Poughkeepsie people genuinely care about each other. Cultural institutions abound, many of them reaching out to children of the less fortunate to teach them skills to transcend their circumstances. No one sits around and complains; they try to figure a collective way out. I’ve had rewarding experiences with any number of organizations trying to make things better: the Chamber of Commerce, the Dutchess County Arts Council, the tourism people, the Nutrition Advisory Committee. Then you come across individuals like Nobel Johnson, who occasionally plays songs on a Casio keyboard at the farmers’ market on Fridays. Almost everyone who passes by knows him, gives him a wave and a smile. He draws people in. The poorest among them throw a coin or two in his tip bucket. When a child comes by and stares at his fingerwork, he invites him or her to sit down with him and play a few bars. It’s awesome.

Poughkeepsie party time

And that’s why I’m bullish on Poughkeepsie, and why I’ve been using my little farmers’ market platform to throw a series of parties to celebrate what’s best about the city. It’s not really about projects, shrinking budgets, open space vs. development or where this or that one-way street is going to go. It’s about heart. It’s about soul. The first installment happened on Friday, July 10, when a large, organically diverse crowd descended on the market in response to a general invitation by land, sea, air, email, newspaper (including this one), Facebook and the John Flowers Radio Show, which serves as the Internet for hundreds of inner city people. Janet Smith was there, making faces behind her scrumptious jerk chicken and "colla loo," along with the smiling crews from Molé Molé and Twisted Soul. All the quirky, twinkle-eyed farmers were there, plying the freshest and best-looking vegetables and fruits the Hudson Valley has to offer. There were breads, wines, desserts, eternal youth and beauty products, and a whole slate of great homegrown entertainment, including Quandesha, an up-and-coming R&B songstress whose flawless voice, songwriting ability and stage presence evoke memories of a young Beyoncé. Cuttz of the ReadNex Poetry Squad introduced the crowd to their better selves with a series of blisteringly relevant spoken word performances. The award-winning Poughkeepsie High School Step Team, Alpha Gamma Rho-North, stomped the park into a polyrhythmic echo chamber, nearly leveling the city's portable stage.

I was there, too, my old, jaundiced eyes misting over slightly, glad to be in Po’town, the spunky, funky heart and soul of my beloved Hudson Valley.