POUGHKEEPSiE, AGAIN

TIRED OF WATCHING OTHER TOWNS HAVE THEIR MOMENT POUGHKEEPSIE IS GETTING READY FOR A REVIVAL IF EVERYTHING GOES AS PLANNED THEY WON’T HAVE TO WAIT MUCH LONGER

BY SIMON MURRAY PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIELLA MURRAY exclusively for The Mountains

don’t call it a comeback The very idea of having revitalization without gentrification is taking root in Poughkeepsie. Some examples include (from top) Brandon Walker, executive chef and owner of Essie’s Restaurant; Zeus Brewing Company overlooking the Mid-Hudson Bridge; and Charlie Webb, chef and owner of the award-winning Detroit-style pizza parlor, Hudson & Packard on Academy Street.

When my fiancée needed an externship to finish her master’s in speech language pathology, we were drawn to a small town near Poughkeepsie. Born and raised in Florida, she looked to her de facto guide to the Northeast for insight. Unfortunately, I couldn’t offer much. Besides driving up I-87 to attend a college Upstate, my only exposure to the Hudson Valley came from a visit to Beacon. Far from the tourist destination it is today, back then, gentrification’s creep from New York City had yet to claim its first footholds along the Metro-North railway. Beacon, warts and all, still retained a diverse population of residents, including good friends of mine, who had lived there for generations. Right now, it has more in common with Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, where a gourmet pizza will run you $30 and swanky cocktail bars refrain from printing drink prices on their menus. As a result, longtime Beaconites are being priced out.

But what of Poughkeepsie, its northern neighbor? Depending on who you ask, my fiancée and I had either missed its heyday by decades or it was a vague notion on the horizon. IBM’s colossal manufacturing presence—a 400-acre plant along the Hudson River that built everything from rifles to typewriters and computers up until the ’90s—was long gone as the most powerful force in town. Without its economic backbone, postindustrial decline had done a number to the “Queen City on the Hudson,” a lesser-known nickname for the seat of Dutchess County. It’s hard to feel regal when Main Street still bears the pockmarks of urban blight: boarded-up storefronts, abandoned homes with broken windows and overgrown grass, empty lots, buildings in disrepair.

A few years before we settled here in 2022, the decay became all but impossible to ignore. A powerful windstorm knocked the roof off a seven-story high-rise between Main Street

80 Railroad

Great Barrington