Discover food, entertainment, leisure, and community in Poughkeepsie and other Dutchess county towns.
Ten years ago, I sat in on a public planning meeting in the city of Beacon. Dia:Beacon had been bringing in a steady stream of tourists for a few years at that point, and the once-faded city was beginning to shine again. Politicians, business owners, artists, and citizens argued about what needed to be done next to make sure the momentum didn't stall. How could we get more people who come to Dia to visit the rest of the city? How could we make sure that the fruits of the city's newfound progress were accessible to all? How could we make sure that new development projects being proposed, while badly needed, were done in a way that benefited the long-term interests of the city and those that lived here instead of the short-term benefits of the developers? The conversation was heated and lasted for several hours. Finally, at the end, an elderly gentleman in the back who had been silent the whole night stood up.
"I'm from the City of Poughkeepsie," he announced. "And quite frankly, we would love to have your problems."
Fast forward to today, and the city of Poughkeepsie is finally in a position to enjoy having those exact problems themselves.
It wasn't an easy road to get there, and it was made harder by the giant one that the city laid down in the 1970s: the Arterial, the combination of Routes 44 and 55 that still run on either side of Main Street. Years of construction made it difficult to get to the heart of the city, and once it was completed, the new highways made it too easy to zip through Poughkeepsie without having to stop there, or even get a good look at what was going on downtown. Even the Main Mall, a project that turned the middle of Main Street into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, failed to attract a steady flow of customers. In 2001, the city conceded defeat and opened the Main Mall back up to traffic.
An Unlikely Destination
How did a free outdoor walkway succeed where so many other projects failed? For one, the Walkway isn't accessible from the Arterial. You have to actually drive into the city to get to it, through quaint and appealing neighborhoods that are a far cry from the negative stereotypes the city has endured. Once you're up on the Walkway, Poughkeepsie's long under-recognized physical charm becomes apparent. Little Italy lays in the shadow of the Walkway, and not accidentally: The bridge was originally built in the late 1800s by Italian immigrants, who decided to live in, and set up shop in, the blocks surrounding it. Even today, you can't throw a black-and-white cookie there without hitting a traditional Italian bakery (La Deliziosa has been open since 1974) making fresh cannolis and elephant ears that rival their Bronx counterparts.
Rowing Together
Poughkeepsie's new tourists and residents have a lot more to discover once the Walkway has drawn them there. The monthly First Friday celebrations that began two years ago have swelled into raucous parties that highlight the city's culinary and cultural offerings. The series began at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House, itself a longtime cultural fixture that, like the founded-in-1785 Poughkeepsie Journal, has seen the city through numerous ups and downs. And the tireless work that Hudson River Housing has done for decades to provide affordable housing and spur community development recently resulted in what is arguably Poughkeepsie's most innovative project yet: A 22,000-square-foot former underwear factory a block off of Main Street that was transformed into a mixed-use development with affordable housing, offices, and a commercial kitchen.
But the Underwear Factory project also highlights one of the city's challenges. It's hard to find fault with anything going on inside: The Art Effect, a new cultural organization created in the merger of the Spark Project and the Mill Street Lofts, provides innovative arts educational projects for children and adults alike. North River Roasters, on the bottom floor, serves as a coffee roaster, coffee shop, and shared-use commercial kitchen and hosts Earth, Wind & Fuego: a healthy, locally sourced, food-justice-minded eatery. You could happily spend an entire day there, drinking damn good coffee and eating fantastic food, as I have done in the past and will continue to do in the future. And yet at a recent community event in Poughkeepsie, a table of lifelong residents, all of whom were women of color, told me that they felt that the Underwear Factory project was "not for them."
Their wariness is understandable. It might be a new day in Poughkeepsie, but it comes at the end of a long night for the locals, who have withstood decades of redlining, misguided urban renewal projects, reductions in public bus service, and public housing being put in areas that cut them off from the rest of the city. With new development projects being planned, including one for the city's waterfront, Poughkeepsie finds itself trying to make sure that its newfound momentum includes everyone. Fortunately, activists who have been speaking out for years find themselves now joined by like-minded citizens who are responding to the current political climate by becoming aware and engaged, as well as a city government who is now willing to listen.
"Everyone is rowing together so that we can create a more equitable approach to what we'd like to see," said City Councilmember Sarah Salem. "We have more people involved now, in every facet of the community. That's what's going to make the change."
A Change is Gonna Come
The change is building, and it's spilling over to the towns just outside of Poughkeepsie, sometimes in surprising ways. Consider that for Record Store Day this year, legendary New York City DJs Large Professor and Rob Swift led a crew up to the Hudson Valley to rip a set in...not Beacon, or Newburgh, or Kingston. But the tiny, storybook village of Wappingers Falls, at a new record store/craft beer pub/community gathering spot called the Vinyl Room,
which opened in the city's miniscule downtown last year.
Wappingers Falls has always been beautiful, with its namesake waterfall, exquisite park in the center of town, and its library that looks like it sprang from the pages of a Grimm Brothers' fairy tale. But it's never been hip. It's never tried to be hip. It's been where people who happily stopped caring about the whole idea of hip go to proudly eat unfussy yet profoundly satisfying pizzas at the Wagon Wheel, or enjoy a rosé on the patio of the di'Vine Wine Bar at sunset.
And yet here was Rob Swift, breaking mikes and wrecking turntables. Here is County Fare, an artisanal gastropub with fancy cocktails and a brunch menu that single-handedly redeems the entire concept of brunch. And in the forever empty storefronts on West Main Street between the County Players at the Falls Theater (in its 60th season of presenting community theater,) and the Ground Hog coffee shop (one of the few places in the Hudson Valley where Southern expats can find Cheerwine,) brown paper is finally up in the windows, logos are being stenciled on doors, and a new row of boutique shops and eateries are on the way.
Chicken Wings and Sake
Head north of Poughkeepsie to Hyde Park, long known for its historic mansions, its legacies of Roosevelts and Vanderbilts and its drive-in movies every summer at the Overlook. It's long been gleefully stuck in the past, and yet in a collaboration with the nearby Culinary Institute of America, a shuttered Stop & Shop in Hyde Park is about to become the first sake factory on the East Coast, opened by the Asahi Shuzo Company. When the factory opens next year, it will not only be capable of brewing over 330,000 gallons of sake a year, but will also be open to the public for tastings and Japanese food as well, continuing Hyde Park's transformation into a culinary destination for curious gourmands.
An abandoned grocery store becoming an oasis of authentic Japanese culture may seem like an unlikely transformation. But then again so does an old railway trestle igniting a city's cultural renaissance, or Mista Sinista dropping breakbeats into Black Sheep joints on a Saturday night in Wappingers Falls. Or a pub in a nondescript shopping plaza occasionally putting alligator or kangaroo on the menu.
The latter can be found in the aptly named hamlet of Pleasant Valley, located to the east of Poughkeepsie (population barely over a thousand), whose "downtown" features a graveyard, a place to get horse feed, and a few mini-malls. One of those mini-malls contains Publick House 23, an adventurous eatery where Bronx-style chopped cheese sandwiches share tables with red wine burgers, char-grilled heads of romaine lettuce, and possibly the best chicken wings in the Hudson Valley. You could drive by it a thousand times without noticing it. But if the lessons of Poughkeepsie's Arterial have taught us anything, it's that sometimes the most innovative and vital things being done in the Hudson Valley happen just beyond the viewshed of the major roads, out of reach of the town centers, or in the warren of streets below an old railroad trestle, where freshly made cannolis and biscotti are laid out in display cases as a city wakes from a long slumber.
The Poughkeepsie food scene is just heating up, here is a roundup of new bars and taprooms.
