After years of renovations, “Unpacked and Rediscovered: Selections from Washington’s Headquarters’ Collection” will be unveiled on December 1, 2012 at Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site’s recently renovated Museum. “Unpacked and Rediscovered” features rare, curious and important collections not seen by the public for many years. Displayed in two galleries of open storage, this selection of amazing objects was amassed over 160 years and represents the very roots of the preservation movement in American history.
On the Fourth of July 1850, the State of New York dedicated General George Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh, making it the very first publicly owned historic site in the nation. It was here that General Washington spent the final critical months of the War for Independence and molded the new republic. The headquarters immediately became a popular attraction and a shrine to the patriotic ideals associated with George Washington and the American Revolution.
Along with “Unpacked and Rediscovered”, the two first floor exhibits have been refreshed and will be open to visitors. In the east gallery, highlights include a segment of the Boom and Chevaux de Frise that was used by Washington in “Defense of the Hudson.” In the west gallery, portraits of George and Martha Washington will be featured, along with panels describing the history and importance of this site.
Although the Museum does not reopen until December 1st, tours of the Jonathan Hasbrouck House, the farmhouse that served as General Washington’s Newburgh headquarters are available. Experience the ambiance of a house rich in historic significance for this community and country.
Soaring high into the sky over the Hudson River – it won’t be Superman – but the kites at Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site, in Newburgh, during the annual “Kites Over The Hudson,” on Saturday, August 25th, 2:00 until 4:00 PM. Free kites will be given to the first 150 children, 15 and under. There will also be free balloon twisting and free refreshments.
Free tours of the historic headquarters will be given all day. Sponsors for the day are Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corporation and Friends of the State Historic Sites of the Hudson Highlands.
Bring your chairs and blankets and plan on relaxing for awhile in our park. Enjoy the view of the Hudson Highlands. Experience the breezes coming off the Hudson River. Have some refreshments. Stay for the awarding of prizes. A perfect summer afternoon is waiting for you at Washington’s Headquarters.
Call 845-562-1195 for directions and further details.
A set of stairs was provided for pedestrians with overhanging terraced gardens
The following article is by Newburgh City Historian Mary McTamaney, originally published in the Mid-Hudson Times, July 18, 2012
If you haven’t traveled on South Street this month take a walk or ride between Dubois Street and Robinson Avenue. Locals know that takes you “through the cut,” the gap made in Downing Park in 1960 in a vain attempt to encourage traffic from west to east downhill to the Water Street business district. Some civic leaders believed back then that fewer people shopped on Water Street because the car ride to Water Street was circuitous, requiring the use of North Street, Gidney Avenue or Broadway. So, the New York Department of Transportation and the city collaborated on making a “South Street Arterial.” We have since learned to put up our defense shields at the word arterial but, back in the late 1950’s, we weren’t so experienced and several arterial highways in urban settings like Newburgh were in the planning stages. Newburgh had a second one planned for a west-end loop through various properties to carry expected traffic quickly through our city.
South Street was named as the south border of our 18th century Glebe (common property for the benefit of all) lands. It ended at the big hill that we later developed as part of our central park in large part because of its magnificent view out to the Hudson and the valley. Atop the South Street Hill, a beautiful two-story observatory and pavilion was built and it was surrounded by a landscaped turn-around where the community often gathered for events like sunrise Easter services with the mountain backdrop and the glow of the river making the perfect setting.
A set of stairs was provided for pedestrians with overhanging terraced gardens
But as Newburgh grew beyond Robinson Avenue, more and more people began entering Downing Park from its western side, walking up a steep South Street sidewalk and then a switchback path to the top of the park and down to an exit path beside the Chapman Steamer central firehouse. It was always difficult, no matter whether school or errands took you there, not to linger at the top of the park and sit on a bench by the observatory at least. The beauty of the place just captured you. But a mid-century concept of progress captured the top of the park and its arterial strategy gripped the landscape with the jaws of its excavators and shook it to death. We were left with a dead-zone, one of the growing number of places developing in Newburgh at that era where you were forced to walk past nothing at all for a long stretch of time. A big ugly tunnel of concrete bones held up the hillsides (not well since one side soon collapsed and had to be done again) and a solid concrete tunnel ran under Carpenter Avenue where the switchback path once carried people up to the tree-shaded observatory.
The observatory circle and flagpole at the top of the park
It didn’t have to be so. Most of us don’t know that there had been a previous plan for South Street in 1936. It would have been a project of the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) and it would have tunneled under Carpenter Avenue but left the landscape above intact. WPA projects were meant to put the unemployed back to work and there were many such large-scale projects in our area. North and South Junior High Schools were the largest but the construction of a terminal and runway for a municipal airport at Stewart, park facilities at Algonquin Park, and the beautiful stone Downing Park bandstand were others. A tunnel through the park at South Street was one more that was designed but never executed. It is likely that, as the Great Depression was gearing down and the world situation was leading us toward war, less money was flowing to municipalities for public works. In city files, I can only find design drawings for the South Street tunnel but not any engineered drawings so it wasn’t a project completely ready for a federal application. I can only find $500 appropriated during city council discussions, just enough to pay landscape architects T. Graham Stewart of Jackson Heights and, perhaps, architect Gordon Marvel of Newburgh who was also discussed. The drawings here show what the landscape around South Street might have looked like had the project been carried forward. If it had been overseen and executed like the other local WPA projects, it would still be standing strong.
Image from Newburgh Mural Twitter ?@Newburghmural
Yet, after 52 years of living with the South Street dead zone created by the unkind cut of 1960, it is about to come to life. Internationally known muralist Dasic Fernandez is up on his work platform each day in this month’s broiling heat creating the largest and grandest of his Newburgh mural series in the South Street tunnel. Watch it take shape. More than any of the locations Dasic will beautify for us this year, this is the one that most deserves salvation.
The following article is by Newburgh historian Mary McTamaney, published originally in 2005 regarding the Clinton Hotel. It is referencing 102-104 Washington Street recently cleaned up by the Newburgh Community Clean Up Mob.
Buildings Lost and Won
Sunset in Newburgh is best viewed, I believe, facing the opposite way. Don’t look west where the setting sun flashes and you squint to see it. Face east and watch the glow of its reflection. Our city is never so lovely as during the last half hour of daylight here when everything in view is blessed by the hyper-clarity of last light.
This evening, I sat at the new Café Macchiato on Liberty Street and, while the food was delicious and well-prepared, even it couldn’t keep my attention away from the glorious light that spread across Washington’s Headquarters lawn and the mountains beyond. I could imagine people strolling in the headquarters park last century and listening to the warm-up notes of the Alsdorf orchestra a few doors away practicing for a concert. Down the hillside of Washington Street, the last workers would have been exiting from Delaney Boilers and Kempler Metal, and Palatine Silk, and Newburgh Planing Mill carrying their lunch boxes back home and enjoying the freedom of their coming day or day and a half off.
Clinton Hotel 2005
From our little table in the Café Macchiato, I looked out a window at 102-104 Washington Street. The setting sun shone through its windows too but instead of glass windows they were loosening boards that allowed a view of the collapsed walls and missing roof within. There was a typical slice of our Newburgh: the cared for and the neglected. The café at 99 Liberty had known lives as a bakery and a market for produce, groceries and meats. It survived a bad fire and has been brought back again as a neighborhood restaurant where people come and go and greet each other by name. Just around the corner, 102-04 Washington Street has not been so lucky. It hasn’t seen life in many years. But research shows it was once as bustling a place as the corner café is now. The Washington Street building was The Clinton Hotel in the first half of the last century. That was an era when Newburgh had many small hotels and rooming houses too – places where visiting salesmen and performers could stay, places where the young could live as they got a start in their first full-time jobs.
The Clinton Hotel was run by Hugh McGuigan when this picture was taken of it 100 years ago. All but two rooms have their shutters closed so it may have also been a sunset or sunrise moment when the picture was taken. The two little strollers out front have such still and formal toddlers aboard, they may just be doll carriages with the kind of big china dolls my mother told me she once wheeled along South Street. A review of this hotel in 1906 described The Clinton as one of the most popular hotels in the city, “efficiently managed and thoroughly equiped with a genial and solicitous host.” No laughter comes from the bar behind its doors any longer and the granite stepping stone and iron hitching post out front are long gone, replaced by toppled trash cans and an old mattress. Why do we accept this? We can do better. We know many Newburgh people still need rooms in clean safe places.
Clinton Hotel 2012 with art work
Daylight savings time has just begun for 2005. Lots of long evenings to look over our city and see clearly what can change for the better. For all of us who live here and who own buildings here, it’s time to take another broad view of our properties. Holding and neglecting homes and businesses is not OK. It insults the neighbors who live around the mess and try to make a nice place for their families. The city’s code compliance team can work hard and fast but the numbers and the time to take citations and seizures through court will always thwart their best efforts. Maybe a strong public will and a spreading sense of “investor” embarrassment can ignite our landscape with the same energy as tonight’s beautiful sunset.
What do a canteen, 6 pound bar shot, and haversack have in common? First, they are 18th century artifacts from the Revolutionary War. Second, they are part of Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site’s permanent collection. The best part – , they can all be seen at the New York State Capitol in Albany during a July 4th Independence Day special exhibit, “New York During The Revolution”. The exhibition brings together Revolutionary War era artifacts from a variety of state historical associations, sites, and museums to help commemorate our state’s essential role in our nation’s founding.
AND – they will also be part of the new exhibit, “Unpacked and Rediscovered: Selections from Washington’s Headquarters’ Collection”. This exhibit will be unveiled on December 1, 2012 at Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site’s recently renovated Museum. “Unpacked and Rediscovered” features rare, curious, and important collections not seen by the public for many years. Displayed in two galleries of open storage, the trustees of Washington’s Headquarters amassed this selection of amazing objects over 160 years. They represent the very roots of the preservation movement in American history.
On the Fourth of July, 1850 the State of New York dedicated General George Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh, making it the very first publicly owned historic site in the nation. It was here that General Washington spent the final critical months of the War for Independence and molded the new republic. The headquarters immediately became a popular attraction and a shrine to the patriotic ideals associated with George Washington and the American Revolution.
Although the exhibit at Washington’s Headquarters-Newburgh doesn’t open until December, Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site is now open for tours of the Jonathan Hasbrouck House, the farmhouse that served as General Washington’s Newburgh headquarters. Experience the ambiance of a house rich in historic significance for this community and country.
Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site is a registered national historic landmark. It is located at the corner of Liberty and Washington Streets within the city of Newburgh’s East End Historic District. The site is one of 35 historic sites within the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and is one of 29 facilities administered by the Palisades Interstate Park Commission in New York and New Jersey. For further information contact: (845) 562-1195. The GPS address is 84 Liberty Street.
On Sunday, July 15, the Newburgh Historical Society will be presenting a lecture by the nationally renowned scholar and Newburgh native, David Schuyler, who will be talking about his latest book Sanctified Landscapes: Writers, Artists and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909. Schuyler, who has been the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities as well as Professor of American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College since 1979, stresses the idea of a sense of place and the importance of historic memory which becomes the binding twine of any community. It is through such actions in Newburgh which brought about the preservation of the Hasbrouck House—now designated as Washington’s Headquarters—which became the first building to be recognized by a state government as a landmark building because of its historic significance.
Schuyler has also written about another Newburgh native, the architect and landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing—Apostle of Taste, Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852—which has altered our recognition of the importance of America’s homes and surrounding lawns and gardens. Another important book by Schuyler is A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race and Suburbanization in Lancaster, PA, 1940-1980, a book that seems to parallel the transformation of Newburgh itself.
The talk will be held at the Newburgh Heritage Center, 123 Grand St., across from the Newburgh Library at 3PM. Members of the Historical Society will be admitted for free, a suggested donation of $5.00 is asked of non-members. Refreshments will be served and copies of Schuyler’s books will be available for purchase and signing.
