Beacon, New York

Towne Crier Cafe is a club and restaurant located in Beacon, NY. It was established in 1972. The restaurant offers a brunch menu, dinner menu or dessert menu, depending on the time of day. The restaurant is accompanied by live music, and seats approximately 100 guests. The intimate venue seats 170 guests. It was founded in 1972 by Phil Ciganer. After a period of decline, it has enjoyed increased popularity in recent years.

The Howland Cultural Center, formerly known as Howland Library, is located on Main Street (New York State Route 52 Business) in Beacon, New York, United States. It is an ornate brick building designed by Richard Morris Hunt in the 1870s. In 1973 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Hunt was commissioned by his brother-in-law, Joseph Howland, to design a home for a subscription library he donated to the city. The completed building has much in common with the Stick style summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island, that Hunt designed at this early stage of his career. Some of its design elements have been compared to Norwegian vernacular architecture. The interior was not complete in its current form until almost the end of the century. Except for some upgrades to its utilities, it has remained largely intact since then. Throughout the 1920s it was one of only two remaining public subscription libraries in the state. In response to a donor's bequest, the library became free at the end of that decade. Almost 50 years later, the library moved out when it outgrew the building. Since then it has been used as a cultural center, hosting various visual and performing arts events.

The U.S. Post Office in Beacon, New York, is located on Main Street (New York State Route 52 Business). It serves the ZIP Code 12508, covering the entire city of Beacon and some of the neighboring areas of the Town of Fishkill. It is a stone structure in the Dutch Colonial Revival architectural style built in the mid-1930s. In 1988 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places along with many other older post offices in the state. While its style was not uncommon for post offices of the era, its fieldstone exterior is. Only a few other New Deal post offices in the state, most of them also in Dutchess County towns along the Hudson River, used it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's preferred that new post offices in his native region echo the architectural preferences of his Dutch ancestors who had been among the earliest settlers of the Hudson Valley, and the success of the Beacon post office may have encouraged him in that respect.It was also the only federal building in New York designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who lived in Idaho and primarily worked on buildings in the national parks of the West, closer to his home. Inside the building, Charles Rosen painted a map of the Hudson Valley on the lobby walls, in addition to some murals depicting historic events in the area. Both interior and exterior remain largely as originally constructed.

The Beacon Theatre was an American Art Deco performing arts theater located in Beacon, New York, in the Hudson Valley, on Main Street in the city's downtown section (known as "Theatre Square"), across from Fishkill Creek. The theater was run by 4th Wall Productions, which has been producing live theater in the Hudson Valley since 1994, from 2010 until they sold the building in 2015. The main stage was gutted and converted into residential units, with the second floor converted into a smaller performance space. In 2011, the original Beacon Theatre was featured in a music video for the song "Walk Katie Home" by American folk singer Seth Glier, on his album The Next Right Thing.

The Springfield Baptist Church, formerly Trinity Methodist Church, is a historic church in Beacon in Dutchess County, New York. It was originally constructed about 1849 as the Associate Presbyterian Church. It was expanded and improved in 1864, 1887, 1891, and 1895. The church consists of a large nave with a steeply pitched gable roof. The main facade features an offset multi-stage bell tower with spire.It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.

The Church of St. Joachim and St. John the Evangelist is a Roman Catholic parish church under the authority of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, located in Beacon, Dutchess County, New York. It was established after a parish mergers of the Church of St. Joachim, (Beacon, New York) and St. John the Evangelist (Beacon, New York). The merged parishes share a pastor, clergy and administrative staff, and the two church buildings continued to be used for worship.

The former Lewis Tompkins Hose Company No. 1 Firehouse, sometimes known as 5/33, was the first built in what later became the city of Beacon, New York. Designed by Schuyler Tillman and Benjamin Hall in a Second Empire style, it was completed in 1893. It is located at 162 Main Street, a block away from NY 9D, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 6, 2004.

The Lower Main Street Historic District is a historic district comprising the first several blocks of Main Street (NY 52 Business) in Beacon, east of its intersection with South Street, the end of its concurrency with NY 9D. The District covers about 50 acres (20 ha.) and includes 32 buildings, most of them in the late 19th-century Italianate style.Many of these buildings have been extensively renovated and are now used for businesses such as boutiques and art galleries. The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries currently has its home in one of the buildings. The District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

The Bogardus-DeWindt House is located on Tompkins Avenue, a short distance west of NY 9D, in Beacon, New York, United States. It typifies the houses built in the region between 1750 and 1830, and has largely remained in its original form even as newer housing has been built in the neighborhood.During that time, the Hudson Valley was experiencing a new wave of settlement by New Englanders moving west. Their houses in the region combined their English-derived building traditions with Dutch ones dating to the late 17th century to create a new vernacular architecture unique to the place and time. The Bogardus-DeWindt house, a 1+1⁄2-story, five-by-two-bay rectangular building with heavy timber framing, epitomizes this style.It was originally built on a four-acre (1.6 ha) parcel for Elizabeth Bogardus, widow of Peter, an early landowner whose estate had to be subdivided and sold to settle debts. She died a few years later and John Peter DeWindt bought the land and house as part of his Cedar Grove estate. In 1825 his mother moved into what the family called "the cottage". It remained in the family, undergoing the addition of a bay wing, and a barn and wood shed, in the 1880s.The DeWindts sold it in 1920. Those owners added dormer windows upstairs and the columns on the front porch shortly after taking possession. Two decades later, the most recent addition, a small rear kitchen wing, was built.

The Reformed Church of Beacon, originally the Reformed Dutch Church of Fishkill Landing, is a historic and architecturally-significant church in Beacon, New York. The congregation, who no longer occupies the building, claims it is the oldest church in Beacon. It is located on NY 9D about 0.5 miles (1 km) south of Beacon's municipal complex and downtown area and overlooks the Hudson River from a bluff. It was designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and built in 1860 using the High Victorian Gothic style, one of its earliest uses in the United States. The church and its cemetery were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. It is one of three Withers buildings in the city on the Register and a rare example of his church architecture in this style.

Beacon Correctional Facility was a female minimum security state prison, located in Beacon, New York, and operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. .Despite community opposition, Beacon Correctional Facility closed in September 2013 as a result of NYS Assembly budget cuts. It was the state's only minimum security facility for women.

The Mount Beacon Incline Railway was a narrow gauge incline railway up Beacon Mountain near Beacon, New York. A popular local tourist attraction, it operated for much of the 20th century, providing sweeping views of the Hudson River Valley. Efforts to restore it continue today. The Otis Elevator Company and Mohawk Construction opened the 2,200' 3 ft (914 mm) gauge railway on Memorial Day, 1902. Sixty thousand fares were sold in its first year; two decades later that had almost doubled. Riders were often day visitors from New York City who came up the Hudson River by steamboat to Newburgh and then took the Newburgh-Beacon Ferry across the river. After a trolley trip to the base station on Wolcott Avenue (today NY 9D), the railway would take them up to the 1,540-foot (469 m) northern summit via an average gradient of 65% (33°) and a maximum gradient of 74% (36.5°), the steepest in existence while the railroad operated.As was the case of so many other period incline railways, the Beacon funicular was in reality a means to a larger end. The 75-mile (121 km) panoramic views from the summit of Beacon Mountain and natural setting would be the lures to get tourists to the doorstep of several profitable attractions the railway's backers built atop the mountain, including the Beaconcrest Hotel, a Casino, and a private cottage community following land sales. The hotel and casino were in place by 1926, which proved a banner year, with 110,000 passengers riding to the top. Tragedy struck the next year, with fire consuming both the hotel and casino. Though they were rebuilt within a year, this proved the turning point in the rail's history, with the tourism-dampening Great Depression and World War II to follow.Thanks to the automobile replacing historic mass transit to the area - which had brought passengers en masse up the river in excursion boats, via the railroad, and thence trolley right to the base of the lift - recreational patterns changed and the Beacon attraction never regained its popularity. Financial problems and more fires plagued the concern, which was unable to maintain necessary maintenance on either the railway or the summit attractions. In 1978 the railway ceased operations. In 1982 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. A fire attributed to vandalism the next year completely destroyed the trackway and consumed the lower station, following which the only remaining structure at the top, the powerhouse, was raised. The route still remains and is visible from much of the city. The Mount Beacon Incline Railway Restoration Society is working to rebuild the railroad and restore service.