Poughkeepsie's Union Street (Preface: The Quixotic Plan

POUGHKEEPSIE'S UNION STREET An Historical Study of a Community

by Cornelia Brooks*

* Miss Brooks, a native of Leonx, Mass., now lives at Loudonville, N. Y. She was graduated from Vassar College in 1971, having spent her Junior year at Cambridge, England. Miss Brooks' paper, "Poughkeepsie's Union Street", was started for Landmarks submission to the New York State Historic Trust and, after rework was conplete, it was used for an Urban History Class. At present Miss Brooks is a Research Assistant with the New York State Historic Trust, Albany, N. Y.

PREFACE — THE QUIXOTIC PLAN

The Union Street area of Poughkeepsie, New York, would never have been drawn to my attention if it had not been for Mrs. Opdycke and the Dutchess County Landmarks Association. This group of concerned men and women — lawyers, architects, and city planners — are trying to rebut the plans for wide-spread demolition of old Poughkeepsie. They have a creative and more economical approach to solving the city's housing problems without obliterating the atmosphere, intimacy and characteristic architecture of 19th century Poughkeepsie. Their goal to rehabilitate the old houses will minimize the relocation of families and make improvements on salvageable residences, which have become marginal only in recent years. Their proposals would only cost a fraction of the expense of razing the old houses and building new blocks of apartments. Not every section of Poughkeepsie would be suitable for this scheme. Some areas are clearly beyond repair and would really benefit by complete rebuilding, but Union Street and its side streets — Grand, South Bridge, South Perry and South Clover — are lined predominantly with brick structures which are still structurally sound. Most of the wooden houses there would be too expensive to bring up to standard and therefore would be replaced with "in-fill housing" of modern construction but in character with the older houses.

Such a logical scheme of "renewal", in the truest sense of the word, apparently does not appeal to municipal authorities of the 1970's. The anti-historic vision of a sleek, updated city is devoid of any creative sense of the value of working with what is already there. In our wasteful age of disposable packaging and built-in obsolescence, it is more effort for the mid-20th Century mentality to repair than to replace completely. The heartening new interest in recycling of tin cans, newspapers and old cars is just gaining popularity. Perhaps it is a serious change of heart in America. In a decade, who knows, maybe the idea of recycling cities may have taken hold too. But by then it will be too late for Union Street. There will be nothing recognizable left. The whole area has been condemned. Just this week, a late Victorian corner grocery store with apartments above, abandoned but structurally sound, was reduced to a pathetic heap of brick and dust. The house-of-cards process has begun.

It has been conjectured that Poughkeepsie's unusual name is derived from the Indian word for a safe harbor, "apokeepsing." Certainly, proximity

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to the Hudson River has been one of the salient features of the city. However, surprising as it may seem, Poughkeepsie did not grow out from the river bank. Instead, in the early 18th century, the County Court House and the jail joined a small cluster of houses on a plateau about a mile away from the river at the present day intersection of Market and Main Streets, later to become the hub of Poughkeepsie's business section. This early village was located there to be along the King's Highway from New York to Albany.' Two steep, winding footpaths connected the village to the harbor. At the foot of each path was a storehouse, Richard Davis' Store established in 1761 and Union Store built a few years later.2 Here local agricultural produce waited to be carried down the river, and readymade goods in exchange same up the river from New York and beyond. As the river trade increased, the village authorities received a petition for a road to the storehouses and in 1767, Union Store Road3 was laid out with its bends, twists and drops which characterize what is left of it today.4

Main Street was not extended to the river until 1800, and thus the Union Landing took an early lead. For 47 years after the Revolution, it was the chief shipping point of Dutchess County wheat and other produce.5 As an old man, Captain Abraham Chatterton, who began his boating career in 1806, reminisced about Poughkeepsie during its shipping hey-day before the opening of the Erie Canal:

The first freighting establishment of any note was established at Union

Landing when Union Street leading into it was the principal thoroughfare in the village. In 1811, two sloops, the "Duchess" and "Anna

Maria," plied between this landing and New York . . . About the year 1816, the firm had a new vessel, the "Robt. North," built at their landing and put her on the route in place of the "Anna Maria," and a few years subsequently both the sloops were sold and an old steamer called the "Lady Richmond" bought.6 It was expensive to keep up in the latest developments of ship design. In the 1820's, barges were in use and one of the first on the river was the "Union", built at the landing. But with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1826, Dutchess County wheat and other produce came into direct competition with that of the West, and the Poughkeepsie freight business inevitably contracted. Due to their timely conversion from sloops to steamboats, the Reynolds family at the Upper Landing outdid their competitors, including Union Landing, and won the reputation of being the most reliable firm in the community.7

Thus by the early 1830's, Union Store Road ended its first phase as a trade connection between the town and the river. In spite of its economic importance to Poughkeepsie in this period, Union Street developed least in the first thirty years of the 19th century than it would at any other time in that century. It was still just a steep, unpaved country road dotted with houses at random. A map dated 18008 shows nineteen buildings from top to bottom of Union Street, most of which were concentrated at the top near Market Street. A map made 34 years later9 only shows twenty-eight

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buildings, and yet, throughout, the holdings were always of more or less equal size. There was never one predominant landowner in the road's history, in contrast to Pine Street which began as Richard Davis' private road.

By 1830 there were already some signs of change along Union Street. The lots along the road were too small for practical farming, foreshadowing the urban future for the street. Another sign of the incorporation of this country road into the town was the addition of side streets, Perry, South Clover and Jefferson. linking Union Street with Main Street."

A map of the division of the homestead lot of the late Ebenezer Badger in 1826" introduces the new phase Union Street was to undergo in the '30's — a real estate boom. Ebenezer Badger's land was located at the top of the street. Adjacent to the heart of the business section of the town and to the courthouse and jail, it was one of the most desirable lots in Poughkeepsie, with over 100-yard frontage on both Main and Union Streets. Badger's lot was divided into ten roughly equal lots, and each of his five heirs was given one lot on Union Street and one on Main. These lots were never destined for residential use. By the end of the century, Ebenezer Badger's homestead was now the location of the new jail, the Municipal Building, the News Office, the Auction Rooms, the Hook and Ladder Co., a restaurant, a florist, and a tailor's shop.

The commercial development of the upper block and a half of Union Street was coupled with a residential building boom along the rest of the street. Practically overnight the face of Union Street was changed from the handful of homestead lots, shown on the 1834 map, to a town residential street: the address for seventy-one heads of households in the earliest available Poughkeepsie Directory, 1843. Probably most of these houses12 were built before the panic of 1837, during the active years of the Poughkeepsie Improvement Party.

The Poughkeepsie Improvement Party, an enterprising (in all senses of the word) group of local businessmen, included the newspaper editor, Paradete Potter. Obviously a shrewd real estate speculator from the start, Potter bought a lot in 1826 from Elizabeth Morgan, one of Ebenezer Badger's heirs, before the survey of the property had even been made. On that land the Press Office was built, and Potter and the other Poughkeepsie "improvers" inaugurated a systematic program for developing the town. Acres of land were sold in lots for residences, particularly around Mansion Square and south of present day Christ Church, but all areas of the town were affected.13 They undertook the paving of the central streets with cobblestones and the sidewalks with brick, without which steep winding Union Street must have been practically impassable in bad weather. Even at this early date, the Improvement Party also took an interest in encouraging industries, but probably due to the steep terrain on Union Street neither industry nor large commercial establishments have ever impringed on its residential character or that of its side streets.

The panic of 1837 ruined all the "improvers," except Vassar, who bought the others' shares. Many of the broken leaders went west, including

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Paraclete Potter, who lived out his life in Milwaukee. The collapse of the real estate boom however was only temporary, and in the next few years, building barely kept up with demand. In 1835, Poughkeepsie had forty streets, and by 1841 there were seventy-nine.14 Property values were high, and historian James Smith asserts that there was not a single unoccupied house; yet demand was only to multiply in the next decade as German, Scotch, English and Irish immigrants made their way to Poughkeepsie, first by boat and then, in even larger numbers, by the Hudson River Railroad, which was completed as far as Poughkeepsie in 1849. By 1850, Poughkeepsie's population had doubled and would double again by 1870.

Union Street's history is often told as if it had never been more than an immigrant section or ghetto of Poughkeepsie;15 however, much of the character of the street, as I hope to have shown here, predates the arrival of the immigrants. Over half the houses) the winding layout of the street, and the storehouse reflect the street's first ninety years, which should not be obscured by later developments.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the immigrant population began to outnumber the native born on Union Street. Judging by the names in the 1843 Directory, the transition occurred after this date.16 There is little material to indicate whether the newly arrived immigrants found their first dwellings in the Union Street area or whether they moved there gradually after a few years of adjustment, when they could afford to buy a house. Quite likely, single men boarded in the spare rooms of native-born families at first, and as they worked and saved, they may have decided to settle in the area permanently.

Clyde Griffen's studies of 19th Century Poughkeepsiel7 show that immigrants did not settle down to a home and job immediately. Throughout the 1850's, a transient nature still characterized the immigrant population. Some only stayed a year or two; many left when work on constructing the railroad ended and probably followed their job further up the Hudson. It was primarily those who succeeded that stayed and formed a stable core for the next decade, during which immigrant "persistence" rates equalled those of the native-born, and in 1873, after the panic, a higher percentage of immigrants than native-born retained their same jobs.

The prosperity of the Germans was noticeable in Poughkeepsie. Their comparatively easy assimilation, despite the language barrier, was not only due to their willingness to work for longer hours at lower wages, but more important due to local tolerance. Poughkeepsie already had a history of ethnic diversity, and the common origin between Dutch and German contributed to the acceptance of the latter in the mid-19th century.'8 The high esteem for the Germans in Poughkeepsie is shown in the following excerpt from an article in the Poaghkeepsie Daily Eagle in 1868:

The Germans record themselves all over the world as industrious, lawloving, and law-abiding. As a class, they are as intellectual and as wellposted in the history of foreign government as any other people who come from the other side of the Atlantic.19

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Union Street was clearly a nucleus of German immigrants by the 1850's, when German churches began to appear in the area. The German Methodist Church on South Bridge Street was built in 1853, and about that time, the St. Michael's Society collected $991.00 to buy land on Union Street for a German Catholic Church. The first building, a frame one, was already inadequate for the needs and numbers in the community in 1859, when a second, larger and more substantial church was built. Other additions made as the church prospered were a schoolhouse in the 1860's and a rectory in the '70's, and the German Catholic Church became known as "one of the most influential and attractive ecclesiastical edifices in Poughkeepsie."2° A third German church, the Lutheran Church, was built on the corner of Grand Street and Union in 1866. In all these churches, the services were said in German until the end of the century.

The '60's and '70's saw the permanent establishment of the German, Irish, Scotch and English in the Union Street area. Certain side streets may have become enclaves of one nationality or another, but a multi-national atmosphere prevailed, in contrast to the early 20th Century immigration of the Italians and Slays. Certain trades in the community were taken over by the immigrants, for instance, the Irish in construction, the Germans in apparel trades ( tailors, shoemakers, etc.), and both in trades connected to the brewing, "kegging", and selling of beer. In the 1871 Directory, on Union Street there were four coopers, all living within a block of each other on the lower end of the street, three lager beer saloons, and one brewer. This is quite a contrast to 1843, when there was not a single saloon keeper, brewer or cooper on the street.

Other comparisons can be made between the 1843 and 1871 Directories. One of the striking facts is the population concentration in the area during these thirty years. There were three times as many heads of households on Union Street listed in 1871 as in 1843. About one-eighth of those listed were boarders, but Union Street was by no means a tenement area. A closer look at the individual's name or trade shows that, in most cases, the boarders were relatives or apprentices to the family from whom they rented their room. The impulse among immigrants to own a house was just as strong in Poughkeepsie as in any other large town or city.22 Griffen's statistics record the significant rise in homeowners among the Germans and Irish as compared to the natives between 1860 and 1870.23 Natives Germans Irish 1860 43% 26% 22% 1870 45% 42% 35%

The two Directories of 1843 and 1871 illustrate the further urbanization that occurred in the Union Street area. In 1854, Poughkeepsie had been incorporated into a city. About that time, street numbers began to be used for Union Street in the directory. Gone were the days that "farmer" was listed among the occupations of Union Street inhabitants (there was still one listed in 1843). Also the range of occupations diminished by 1871. In 1843, the majority of Union Street residents may have been small tradesmen or craftsmen, but in addition, some were listed merely as "laborer" and some, in contrast, were professional people: a lawyer, a justice of

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the peace, a printer, and an educator named Lydia Booth, who ran a Seminary for Young Women. However, by 1852, Lydia Booth had moved her residence to Garden Street, and in the 1871 Directory lawyers still had their offices at the top of Union Street, but lived elsewhere. Almost every Union Street resident either worked at a local store: the candy store, one of the many groceries or bakeries, a butcher shop or variety store; or worked in a skilled job: carpentry, tailoring, shoemaking, silver-plating, or sash and blind-making. All these jobs were going to be threatened by the late 19th century industrialism and would be practically choked into obscurity in the 20th century. Some other residents had jobs connected to industry: machinists and mechanics, and probably many wives, worked at the new Whitehouse Shoe Factory established in 1870. Although no professional families still lived on Union Street, a new elite emerged among the immigrant population, and hence the multi-economic character of the cornmuity was maintained.

The Sutcliffe family is illustrative of this new Union Street elite. Eli Sutcliffe emigrated from England and came to Poughkeepsie in 1840 with his family, including his three-year-old son, John. Sutcliffe's first purchase on Union Street was in 1848, when he bought a lot at the Clover Street corner and built a grocery store which became a family enterprise. Residents of South Clover Street to this day talk about Sutty's grocery store.24 In 1850, Eli Sutcliffe bought the adjacent lot and built a brick butcher shop: in 1854, he bought the lot next to that for his own house, and the following year he built a barbershop on the next lot up the street.25 In seven years he had bought almost the whole block, and later he embarked on a soap-manufacturing business. Meanwhile his son, John, attended the local schools and went on to the Dutchess Academy. His talents and interests in iron manufacturing temporarily led him away from Union Street and Poughkeepsie. In 1861, he was assistant manager of a Peekskill blast furnace and, soon after, he designed a new furnace in Cold Spring, New York. Although at this point John returned to his birthplace, England, to learn more about latest techniques in iron manufacture, in 1865 he was back in Poughkeepsie with his family on Union Street to start a woolen business with his uncle. But John Sutcliffe was by no means provincial in his middle age. He spent ten years as the director of some silver mines in Mexico. He always, however, returned to Poughkeepsie and the family. block on Union Street.26 A map dated 192027 tells of another family enterprise there: a block of Sutcliffe apartments behind the grocery store.

The Sutcliffes were unusual but not unique. Other immigrant families acquired more than one lot in the area: the Krieger brothers, the Gillens, and Mrs. Eggensperger. Nevertheless the majority of buildings were oneor-two family houses which were privately owned. Those houses or apartments which were rented belonged to people in the neighborhood. Absentee landlords were a 20th century development.

The gradual decline of Union Street in the 20th century occurred at two levels: locally, with the break-up of ethnic communities, and nationally, with changing life styles throughout America.

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Throughout this country the insularity of communities was shattered with the introduction of automobiles at popular prices. Cars first became a family item and then became the possession of an individual within the family, thereby weakening old ties of interdependence. The car extended the radius of accessible institutions immeasurably. Formerly one's everyday world had been defined by the shops, churches, clubs, and schools located within a convenient walking distance. Now local shops came into competition with big, centrally located department stores, and groceries with supermarkets. Industries threatened craftsmen. One of the first trades to suffer was shoemaking. At the turn of the century many of the Union Street shoemakers had to give up their business, while others specialized in shoe repairs, being unable to compete with the prices of ready-made shoes. New jobs located in remote parts of the city or the suburbs took people for work out of their community in the old part of Poughkeepsie. Some naturally began to move out nearer their jobs.

The churches, too, suffered from new 20th century trends. The German Lutheran Church stopped celebrating the services in German, when it began to lose second generation members of its congregation to other English-speaking churches. As early as 1903, the Grand Street Church was given up entirely, and the English Lutheran Church superseded it on Church Street. The German Methodist and the Nativity Church kept on despite dwindling congregations, as the old people died and their children went to the bigger, central churches. In an effort to centralize the Roman Catholic Church in Poughkeepsie, Mt. Carmel, the Italian Catholic Church, is now a gymnasium., and the Nativity was torn down a few years ago.28 Parish priests, formerly strong community figures, are now rotated after a fixed number of years. Never again will there be another Rev. Asfalg, who came to the Nativity Church in 1917 and stayed there until the day he died at the age of 85, just before they tore down the church!

As work, shopping, church and social activities drew the second and third generation, fully assimilated, and in many cases prosperous, Scotch, Irish, German, and English away from a community-centered life, still another blow came to Union Street. With the completion of the MidHudson Bridge in 1930, this street and Church Street became the two most convenient approaches to the bridge. Heavy through-traffic made Union Street noisy, dirty and dangerous for families with small children. The North-South Arterial completed in 1965, has now alleviated much of this traffic, but at the same time, took with it the lower half of Union Street. Old residents have moved away, or, if they resolutely stayed on to die in their own homes, their children have retreated to the suburbs. They may keep the family house but only to rent it or sell it to a real estate speculator who rents apartments all over the city.29 Meanwhile the treelined side streets remain attractive as ever and have tended to retain their more stable home-owning character of the previous century.

The one exception to this disintegration of community in the 20th century is found on the side streets where later immigrant groups have

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settled: the Poles and the Italians, particularly on Clover Street and up Mill Street. But their story is just one of a later postponement of the same process.

The arrival of the Italians and Slays in Poughkeepsie in the 1920's was more than a generation later than the Germans, Irish, Scotch and English. In the face of a greater language barrier, and perhaps with less tolerance than the 19th century immigrants met, the Italians and Poles lived in very tightly knit groups. The Italians have shown tenacious persistence in living out their lives in the same house or at least on the same street. On South Clover, the majority of owners have lived there for at least thirty to forty years. They came from the same area in Southern Italy, Calabria, and still speak Italian among themselves. Italian activities have petered out in recent years, but celebrations, such as Carnival, a four-day fiesta before Lent, and Passion Plays, used to be the highpoints of the year for the Italian population. The significant fact is, however, that the strong impetus to continue the Italian tradition comes from a dying generation. They still feel they are part of a special enclave in Poughkeepsie, but readily admit that the community sense is only a shadow of what it was in the past. Those who came to this country as young men and women are now in their seventies and eighties. They are grandparents now and have seen their children and, even more, their grandchildren intermingle and shed, consciously or unconsciously, their Italian identity and familycentered values. The recurrent pattern of children failing to maintain the family home, as most of their poorer parents had, and often renting it or selling it, alarms the surviving old-timers. It is the same basic sequence that happened to the Germans fifty years before.

One pauses here to wonder: is a community possible in 1971? Today's cosmopolitan attitudes are based largely on technological changes: cars, washing-machines, T.V., all of which make domestic work and entertainment available to the individual in his own home, thus severing ties of interdependence with his neighbors. Our attitudes are also based on economic developments — supermarkets instead of local stores of the past, industries rather than crafts or local employment, centralized schools with expanded curriculum rather than smaller community schools. These are forces against which the human desire for community must combat. Within a city a community once was naturally or spontaneously created, not manipulated. The bond between ethnic minorities held the Union Street area together in the past. Now can some artificial single-mindedness unite the residents there today? A negative reference group, such as the Poughkeepsie Urban Renewal Agency, is undoubtedly a unifying force among homeowners, but these are primarily older people remembering the past. In ten years' time, their houses, if still standing, will be rented or sold. For the commusity to live and grow, younger families must be encouraged to stay and attract their friends. With a loan system these young families could buy houses and improve them. But Urban Renewal is consciously trying to prevent people from moving into the area. There are stipulations on the relocation compensations given to families, whose homes have been

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demolished elsewhere in the city, that they cannot be spent on a house in the neighborhood of Union Street. On the one hand, new families are not moving in as permanent homeowners and, on the other, the morale among residents is understandably low. The spectre of demolition hangs over the area. It takes grim determination for a homeowner to spend hundreds of dollars painting his house this spring if he has no guarantee it will be standing next spring. The forces of Urban Renewal are achieving their own goals by creating an aura of uncertainty which is giving the area its coup de grace. But the problem is much larger than Poughkeepsie, and its battle over what kind of renewal is most beneficial; The Union Street situation embodies a basic conflict in 20th century values and dreams.

FOOTNOTES 1. Dutchess County, American Guide Series, sponsored by Women's City and

County Club of Dutchess County, William Penn Association, 1937, P. 31. 2. Frank Hasbrouck, ed., The History of Dutchess County, Poughkeepsie, 1909, 2 vols., Vol. 1, p. 203. 3. The other approach to the river made at this time, Richard Davis' road (later

Pine Street) was a private road. By 1799 Upper Landing Road appears on maps. 4. In 1971 only the upper half of the original Union Street is recognizable, since the lower half was razed for the construction of the North-South Arterial in the early 1960's. 5. Dutchess County, American Guide Series, P. 44. 6. The Sunday Courier of Poughkeepsie, March 29, 1874, as cited in James H.

Smith, The History of Dutchess County, Syracuse, 1882, p. 385. 7. Ibid., p. 386. 8. "Survey of Balthus Van Kleeck's Farm" by Henry Livingston, 1800." Hanging on the wall outside the County Clerk's Record Room, County Building, 22

Market Street, Poughkeepsie, New York. 9. "Map of the Incorporated Village of Poughkeepsie by Henry Whinfield, 1834."

Local History Room, Adriance Memorial Library, 93 Market Street, Poughkeepsie,

New York. 10. Ibid. 11. "Homestead lot of the late Ebenezer Badger, Surveyed by Henry Livingston,

June 23, 1826." Map #59, County Clerk's Record Room. 12. Looking at the houses on Union Street, it is conjectured that many of the wooden two-story dwellings were put up during this boom, since wood is more suitable for quick construction than brick. (Talk with Mrs. Albert Mauri of Dutchess

County Landmarks Association.) 13. Hasbrouck, p. 220. 14. Smith, p. 378. 15. See Poughkeepsie Journal, Sunday, February 28, 1971, p. 191. 16. C. P. Luyster's Directory, July 1843, Adriance Memorial Library, Local History

Room. 17. Clyde Griffen, "The Effect of Craft and Ethnic Differences in Poughkeepsie 1850-1800" in Stephen Thernstrom, 19th Century Cities, Yale, 1969, pp. 53-92. 18. Ibid., p. 57. 19. Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle, July 27, 1868, as cited in Griffen article, p. 57. 20. Hasbrouck, Vol. II, p. 632. The original name of this Roman Catholic Church is a bit obscure. An 1887 map calls it St. Michael's Church, presumably after the society that financed it. On an 1891 map, however, it is marked St. Joseph's.

In the memory of most local residents, it was always called the Church of the

Nativity.

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21. This tripling of the number of heads of families in Union Street should not be interpreted necessarily as a sign that former one-family houses were being subdivided and over-crowded with swarming immigrant families. There was another burst of building and rebuilding at this time. Here I am indebted to Mrs. Mauri, who pointed out to me a rough guideline for dating the buildings by construction of their lintels:

Before 1840's, simple stone slab over window.

Civil War Period, brick arch, more complicated building technique.

Late Victorian, cast iron with flower motif, typical of the architectural embellishments of the period. 22. Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a 19th Century

City, Harvard, 1964, Chapter 5. 23. Griffen, p. 58. 24. Talk with Mrs. Joseph Massa and Mrs. Philip Cavalier, her mother who came to this country at the age of seventeen. They both live at 14 South Clover Street. 25. "Map of the Estate of Eli Sutcliffe, September 1, 1904," County Clerk's Record

Room, Map #1/106. 26. Edmund Platt, History of Poughkeepsie, Poughkeepsie, p. 293. 27. Map 1/356, County Clerk's Record Room. 28. The Church of the Nativity was torn down for several reasons. Basically it was an anachronism for the Diocess. The congregation, still of German extraction, was mostly old people and dwindling in numbers. Another Catholic Church, St.

John the Baptist, was only two blocks away at Three Grand Street (the old

German Lutheran Church), and finally due to population shifts, the demand for a new church was in the suburbs at Red Oaks Mills. (Father Fred Rothlauf at the Union Street Community Center.) 29. Lower Union is almost completely owned by the absentee landlords now, but most of the upper street and the side streets have privately owned houses. (Mrs.

Leonard Opdycke of Landmarks.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY American Guide Series, Dutchess County, sponsored by the Women's City and County

Club of Dutchess County, William Penn Association, 1937. Griffen, Clyde, "The Effect of Craft and Ethnic Differences in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., 1850-1880", Stephen Thernstrom, ed., 19th Century Cities, Yale, 1969. Having now made this meager attempt into Poughkeepsie's urban history, I now fully appreciate the depth of research that has gone into Dr. Griffen's very helpful article. Hasbrouck, Frank, ed., The History of Dutchess County, S. A. Mattiev, Poughkeepsie,

N. Y., 1909. 2 Vols. Both Hasbrouck and his predecessor, Smith, go into meticulous detail in their studies of the city and provided me with most of the material for the early history of Union Street. Platt, Edmund, History of Poughkeepsie, Platt and Platt, Poughkeepsie, 1905. Poughkeepsie City Directories. The earliest directory in the Vassar Library is 1871, and the earliest one I could find anywhere was the 1843, C. P. Luyster's Directory of the Village of Poughkeepsie in the Local History Room at the Adriance Memorial Library. These directories are organized alphabetically, and thus it takes an incredible amount of sorting out of names to get a profile of a single street to work from. There is a lot of potential material in them about persistence and occupation, but the process of bringing it to the surface is painful! Smith, James H., History of Dutchess County, D. Mason and Company, Syracuse, 1882. Thernstrom, Stephen, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a 19th Century City,

Harvard University Press, 1964.

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