Main Mall

Main Mall Row is an adjoining group of nine commercial buildings along the northeast corner of the intersection of Main and Garden streets in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. They were mostly built after a fire in 1870 destroyed the previous buildings on the site. The new structures were three-to-four story buildings in the Renaissance Revival style, many with ornamental touches such as bracketed cornices, paneled friezes, arcaded facades and molded lintels. 315 Main Mall, at the east end, has an ornate cast iron facade. They are considered among the most architecturally significant commercial buildings in the city, and are still in use as stores today. The building at 3-9 Garden Street retains its original storefronts. The row, as with many of the other buildings in downtown Poughkeepsie, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Their current name comes from Main Mall, the city's attempt to establish a pedestrian mall in the area, the two blocks of Main between Market and Academy streets, during the 1970s. With the nearby Luckey, Platt & Company Department Store, a commercial mainstay of the city, losing customers to suburban shopping malls, city planners thought they could sustain downtown by offering shoppers a similar experience. In 1973 the two blocks were closed to vehicle traffic. However, the decline of the downtown continued as most shoppers continued to choose the malls, especially after Luckey Platt closed in 1980. The city reopened the street and ended Main Mall in 2001, helping to revive commercial and residential development in the area.

The Church Building is located at the corner of Main and Market Streets in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, United States, just across Market Street from the Dutchess County Court House, and north of the Bardavon Theater. It is a complex of stores and other commercial space, so named because it is owned by the Reformed Dutch Church of Poughkeepsie, which has owned the land since 1717 and benefits from the rental income. It was the western anchor of Main Mall, the city's former pedestrian mall. It is considered the best example of Art Deco architecture in the city, where most commercial buildings predate the style's popularity in the 1930s. The two-story building has tilework designs suggesting Native American aesthetics. Other ornamental touches associated with Art Deco include, floral and patterned metalwork along the shop cornices, and polished green and black marble inside. There are also ribbed pilasters between the windows and a multicolored chevron pattern above and below the roof parapets.The interior is intact, although some of the offices and shops have been modernized. One of the former does remain in its original condition. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The Poughkeepsie Journal Building is the main office of that newspaper, in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. It is located at Civic Center Plaza, the north end of Market Street. It was built of fieldstone in a Colonial Revival style in 1941. Architects in the Hudson Valley, and particularly Dutchess County, took inspiration from then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts to revive its use in the region, following the example of the early Dutch settlers of the area, who built many stone houses for themselves. In particular, the building complements the city's main post office nearby. In 1982 it qualified for addition to the National Register of Historic Places, but it was not listed due to an objection by the owner.

Upper–Mill Street Historic District is a national historic district located at Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York. It includes 25 contributing buildings built during the mid- to late-19th century. They include a variety of brick and frame buildings, originally residential, that have been converted to office and other commercial use. They are representative of vernacular mill workers' dwellings and fashionable factory owners' residences. The district also includes two churches.It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The Luckey, Platt & Company Department Store building is located at the corner of Main and Academy streets in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. For most of the 20th century it was a major retail destination not only for the city but the entire Hudson Valley. Its closure in 1981, after years of losing customers to suburban shopping malls, was a serious blow to the city's Main Mall. The structure remained vacant until December 2008, when after several years of renovation it was reopened as a residential development with 143 rental apartments, with additional commercial space on the ground floor, as an anchor and catalyst for further downtown revitalization.

The Poughkeepsie Savings Bank building is located at 21-23 Market Street in the city of that name in the U.S. state of New York. It was the third home of that bank, the first in the city, chartered in 1831 by William Davies, on that site. After 20 years on nearby Main Street, the bank bought one of its current lots and built. In 1870 the adjacent lot was purchased and the building expanded yet again, reopening anew two years later. In 1911 the bank's success led it to commission a completely new building from the firm of Mowbray and Uffinger, who had designed many bank buildings across the Eastern states.They delivered a Classical Revival building, with slightly trapezoidal walls reflecting the constraints of the site. Its front facade, made of Pennsylvania marble on a granite base, uses two Ionic order columns flanked by Doric pilasters. The deeply recessed entryway and vestibule is done in cast bronze and ornamental glass.Inside, the main banking room is a 40 by 40 foot (12 m by 12 m) with 60-foot (18 m) ceilings, with Ionic pilasters and a continuous entablature rising from a white marble floor (currently carpeted) and red marble wainscot. At the time it opened, it also had a skylight and 19 by 17½-foot (6 by 5 m) stained glass window by Philadelphia's D'Ascenzo Studios commemorating the Half Moon on Henry Hudson's journey up the river named for him and Robert Fulton's pioneering steamboat journey up the river on the Clermont. The overall effect was to cast the building as a temple of commerce.Originally the tellers' counter was a U-shaped extension from the south wall, to allow customer interaction on all three sides. In 1931, Uffinger, Foster & Bookwalter, successor firm to the original architects, was retained to modernize the floor plan, and extended the counter to enclose the building's northeast corner, but otherwise made no significant alterations. The south wall was opened in 1948 to allow the use of the adjoining building as office space. Nine years later the interior underwent renovations that blocked the skylight and obscured the stained glass. Interior lighting thereafter came from chandeliers, which were themselves replaced after two decades.At that time, the building was meant to be included in Poughkeepsie's first Multiple Property Submission (MPS) to the National Register of Historic Places, but the bank objected. Later, after it had changed its name to Bank of the Hudson and moved its headquarters elsewhere while retaining the building as a branch, it dropped the objection and the building was added in 1998 as part of a later MPS. The bank itself has since been acquired by TD Banknorth, which used it as a branch office until the early 2010s. In 2016 it was the local headquarters for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign during the weeks before the New York primary. Volunteers decorated the vault with crime scene tape, and pasted on it a quotation from the candidate: "If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist."

The Bardavon 1869 Opera House , in the downtown district of Poughkeepsie, New York, United States, is the oldest continuously operating theater in New York State. Designed by J.A. Wood, it was built in 1869 and served as a venue for various performing arts, community meetings, and celebrations until 1923; it largely resumed this heritage by becoming a general performing-arts facility in 1976. In the interlude period from 1923 to 1975, it served as a cinema, although there were some live performances, especially vaudeville, during this period. Originally called the Collingwood Opera House after its owner and operator James Collingwood, the theater featured an unusual two-stage dome. Between 1869 and 1921, many notable figures of the day graced the Bardavon's stage, including Sarah Bernhardt and John Barrymore.

The Dutchess County Courthouse is located at 10 Market Street in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. Built in 1903, it is the third county courthouse to stand on that site. The first was authorized by the provincial assembly in 1717 and built in 1720, and would host New York's debate on ratifying the U.S. Constitution during the brief period when Poughkeepsie served as the state capital in 1788. It was destroyed in an 1806 fire. Three years later the state legislature appropriated funds for a new one, which stood for almost a century. An early tenant beside the courts was brewer Matthew Vassar, later founder of Vassar College, who ran an alehouse and oyster bar in the basement. It was replaced by the current building, a four-story Classical Revival designed by local architect William J. Beardsley. Faced with red brick, the half-million dollar structure featured Palladian windows in the second and fifth-story center bays with stucco decoration above. It opened and was dedicated just before the end of 1903. Later alterations were made under the direction of Charles Cooke, who designed the nearby offices of the Poughkeepsie Journal. The building's cornice is the only element that has been significantly changed from the original design. It has also been joined to the Poughkeepsie Trust Company building to its immediate east on Main Street, which serves as the district attorney's offices. In 1982, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Today, it houses judges' chambers and clerks' offices as well as courtrooms. Most of the court's lesser functions, such as property recordkeeping, have been moved to an annex next door, built in the 1960s. In the late 1990s, it was the venue for former Dutchess assistant district attorney Stephen Pagones's defamation suit against Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox over allegations they made against him during the Tawana Brawley affair.

The First Baptist Church is an historic American Baptist church located at 164 South Cherry Street in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York. It was built between 1875 and 1877, and consists of a rectangular main church section, front entry pavilion, and tall rectangular bell tower. The brick building features Gothic arched openings and stone tracery.It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.The architectural design of the Baptist Church erected on the former site of the Temperance Hall on Mill Street was placed in the hands of the committee by Mr. James Strang Post, Architect, in July 1874. The edifice built has a frontage of seventy feet and a depth of one hundred and sixty feet; tower one hundred and eighty feet in height. The materials used are pressed brick, with Ohio and blue stone trimmings. The seating capacity was estimated to be about one thousand. The whole cost in 1874 was to be in the neighborhood of $55,000. The work commenced 1 August 1874.The Corner Stone ceremony was reported in the Poughkeepsie Eagle News 11 Aug 1875, page 3. Many documents and articles of the time were deposited in the Corner Stone and listed in the newspaper article. The Corner Stone is made of brown stone and cut in relief on its outside was the year 1875. Inside the Corner Stone included the name of the architect James Strang Post, the many church officials, those present at the ceremony as well as a Honor Roll of those persons donating $1 or more to the building project fund. The church was organized in 1800. Its first church building was built in 1808 and removed in 1874 to prepare for the new structure in 1875. A larger house of worship was utilized in 1839 in Lafayette Place. The building of the 1875 structure allowed the two smaller houses of worship a facility large enough for all to attend.

The main U.S. Post Office, Poughkeepsie, New York, is located at the intersection of Market and Mansion Streets downtown; the address is 55 Mansion Street. The New Deal post office serves the 12601 ZIP Code, which covers the city of Poughkeepsie, New York and portions of the Town of Poughkeepsie adjacent to the city. It employs a hundred people and handles 300,000 pieces of mail a day and 10 million a year.

The Lady Washington Hose Company building is located on Academy Street in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. It was once home to one of the city's volunteer companies of the same name and subsequently housed the Children's Media Project. It is currently owned by two Poughkeepsie artists. . It is an unusual combination of different architectural styles.The company was created in 1863 when the city bought new fire engines for the Niagara and Cataract companies. This forced the Neptune Company out of business, and it was accordingly reorganized as the Lady Washington. The firehouse was built in 1908.Local architect Percival M. Lloyd was hired to design the building, and he in turn subcontracted the construction to the O'Donnell Construction Company, another local firm. The resulting structure has a yellow brick facade. A corbelled soffit holds the Japanese-style tiled roof. A small wing shows signs of a Gothic Revival influence with its castellated roofline. The facade's second story is dominated by a hanging bay window. The soffit, bay window and single garage door at street level are currently painted a bright green in contrast with the facade.The interior is largely intact. The Japanese influence on the roof continues with its supporting rafters visible.After the city's fire department absorbed the company, the building was reused as a warehouse by the Southeastern New York Library Council. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, one of three of the city's former firehouses so listed (the other two are the O. H. Booth Hose Company and the Niagara Engine House).

The New York State Armory is in Poughkeepsie, New York. Built in 1891, it is a Romanesque building designed by Isaac G. Perry, then the New York State Architect, who also designed the state capitol and 26 other armories. In 1982 the Armory was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2012 it was sold to the Greater New York Seventh-Day Adventists Church in a public auction and is planned for community programs and recreation.Located at the junction of Church (eastbound US 44/NY 55) and Market streets downtown, it is across from the Old YMCA. It is a two-and-a-half-story structure made of brick and rusticated sandstone, visible to traffic entering Poughkeepsie from the west via the Mid-Hudson Bridge. Its interior features, such as oak lockers, staircases and floors, are well-preserved. It also retains the original pressed metal ceilings and light fixtures.Governor David Hill attended the cornerstone laying on Memorial Day (then called Decoration Day) in 1891, and spoke of the importance of maintaining state-level military facilities and the respectability conferred by service in the Guard. The armory was completed the following year.Troops were later deployed from here to the Spanish–American War and both 20th-century world wars. It has been host to a variety of events from basketball tournaments to birthday parties for Franklin D. Roosevelt, a resident of nearby Hyde Park. The Company A, 101st Signal Battalion of the New York Army National Guard were stationed in the Armory, however, in 2011 the National Guard moved the remaining 200 soldiers stationed there to Camp Smith down the Hudson River near Peekskill.