Brooklyn North
Assorted thoughts on the transformation of Beacon
This is the first of a series of “profile pieces” I will be doing on key cities in the Mid-Hudson Valley. This is not to imply they will be comprehensive or even similar in structure or form to each other. With a new legislative session upcoming, a redistricting battle in the courts, pending FOIA requests, and plenty of lame ducks waiting for their terms to expire, I am concerned about writing analysis that will be made redundant in a matter of weeks. Regardless of my admission this is filler content, I hope it is at least enriching filler content.
A close friend at the university I attend grew up a few blocks from what is now the Barclays Center, the corner of Flatbush & Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn. In the 18 years she lived there from cradle to college, she quite literally watched skyscrapers go up around her. I constantly risk making this a before and after Google street view Substack, but I think it’s the best way to illustrate just how jarring that can be. At top is the intersection in 2008, and at bottom in 2022.
Chances are, these images invoke some kind of gut feeling for you that is likely tied to your personal belief of the efficacy of market-rate development generally. I’d like you to restrain that for a moment. I think there is something tied up here that is a lot baser than our opinions of public policy. What does it feel like to spend your entire life in a slowly changing place, and then to look up one day and realize the totality of it?
I experienced this firsthand with the development of Long Island City. My dad lived pretty near to the East River, so I used to look over as a kid at the cranes across the way. I saw plenty of skyscrapers go up around that time, the Freedom Tower, all of Billionaire’s Row, but tall buildings in Manhattan weren’t exactly a new phenomenon. Then came a day in high school where on my way to a Bernie Sanders rally of all things, I just looked up and realized “woah, Queens has a skyline now.” It is rather uncanny, but not quite as unsettling as the term implies. It’s not so much a desire to return to the way things once were, but astonishment at the fact they are no longer that way.
These are I would guess pretty common feelings for someone raised in a desirable major city to have. What I did not quite conceptualize simultaneous to this is that also slowly changing were the places I had assumed never would. One of the places I lived was across the street from a hospital where some of my friends’ siblings had been born. When I was to be born in 2003, the nearest one was 40 minutes away, the Butterfield Hospital had been closed for ten years. I learned to drive in the parking lot of the boarded-up Dutchess Mall, which closed two years before I was born. Both are within a 10-minute drive of Beacon.
The Mid-Hudson went from an agricultural region to a manufacturing one, and then became a minor tech hub. Both of my maternal grandparents and their two later spouses worked at IBM. When IBM began shuttering their offices in the early 90s, the economy of the region was decimated. I will have more to say when I write on Poughkeepsie and Kingston, but for now know that the closures of the hospital and mall I mentioned were not unrelated, and the Great Recession made things even worse. In my formative memories in Beacon and Kingston, storefronts that weren’t abandoned were the abnormality. That continues to this day in Poughkeepsie and Newburgh.
I already talked a fair bit about my connection to the city of Beacon and how it has changed in my introductory piece to this project, and won’t dwell on it. It is a postage stamp sized city, two miles by two miles and with 14k residents. My parents married in Beacon, my mother’s dress was bought at Lady Gray Bridal. I was raised just outside it, my first memory takes place in the Howland Library. I later properly lived in it, the basement apartment of a former hat factory. The car I shared with my mom was sold at Healey Hyundai. I spent almost every Friday waiting on the platform of the train station, and every Sunday stepping back onto it as I went between my mother’s and father’s worlds. What I’d like to talk about instead is of the moment the totality of it occurred to me.
It was with my now ex in COVID times, and we spent most of it going off trail in the riverfront park to do dumb teenage things. We got hungry at some point, so she suggested we go down Main Street to get some food. I was not entirely dense to the transformation happening, I had read about it offhandedly, and I noted the apartments being built on Wolcott next to City Hall when I drove down to the station every weekend (which it should be noted stand where once was the West End, a predominantly Black neighborhood destroyed during 1960s “urban renewal”). My best guess is the last time I was on Main Street was 2014. We went into what I recognized as an old Filipino market, next to that library I had my first memory in. It had since become a crêpe shop. The pediatrician’s office next door was replaced with a small cycling gym featuring its own smoothie bar. Monthly memberships are $175. Queens had a skyline.
Oh dear, it’s happening again. You see what was, what is there now, and you’re projecting your complicated sociopolitical views onto it. Perhaps you’re cursing the Brooklynites who came up here and displaced these local businesses. Or maybe it’s the commercial real estate speculators who evicted them and rented these storefronts out again, newly renovated. Let’s drop it for a moment. For better or for worse, it has happened. Demand for commercial space on Main Street skyrocketed with the tourism boom, and while we often think of gentrification in terms of residents displaced, businesses are displaced too. What does a city do when demand was once in the doldrums, and suddenly the inverse is true?
It may be strange to newer residents, but Beacon was led by Republicans until very recently, to the point of practical one-party rule since the villages of Mattaewan and Fishkill Landing merged to form the city in 1913. Republican Clara Lou Gould was mayor from 1990 to 2007, and her management was vital to the city’s success. Dia:Beacon brought a lot of tourism, but Gould did much to incentivize them to actually spend time in town rather than merely visit Dia and leave, lest it be a sort of “Parasite Beacon.” A Democrat succeeded her by 152 votes, and he was unseated in 2011 by Randy Casale, who ran on the Republican line but is registered with the Independence Party. He lost by 20 points in 2019. The last Republican municipal official, a longtime city judge, lost by 24 points in 2021.
This 2023 cycle, all 7 seats for city council and the mayoralty were uncontested bar a last-minute write-in campaign for the latter. Besides a Facebook post in support of Trump from May 2022, the Beacon GOP has no online presence. While many I have talked to wave their fists in the air at the vaguely left-wing transplants and that certainly did not help their prospects, Beacon hasn’t voted for a Republican president since Bush in 1992. As I talked about briefly last time, ticket splitting is down dramatically. Politics is far more nationalized than it was even a decade ago, and merely knowing the other party’s candidate is a few doors down from you doesn’t sway as many votes as it once did.
What swept Mayor Casale and several of his allies out of office was a singular building. Around 2013 the city condemned 344 Main Street and several small homes in similar disrepair behind it on Eliza Street. The site was sold for development, and what was created in turn was 344 Main, a four-floor mixed-use building with 22 units of housing three times above market rate and two more units part of the city’s workforce housing program.
I am now in the unenviable position of having to discuss hyperlocal development issues on the internet. The short and simple is that the city was pretty objectively screwed over on this project. There was turnover in ownership as it was developed and costly litigation with the city over in particular parking that ended with residents being forced to lease spots in municipal lots and move their cars every 24 hours in accordance with said lots. Some may snark at that, but while it’s much better than it was when I was little, Beacon unfortunately remains a car-dependent place. Bus transit is incredibly limited and while there is one non-boutique supermarket, most essentials require a drive up to the stroad-y strip mall infested hell of Fishkill and Route 9 for stores like Walmart and Sam’s Club, doctor’s appointments, and much more.
It did not help things that 344 Main, the tallest building in the city at the time, was constructed on the eastern side of Main Street, an area mostly filled with squat one-story buildings which admittedly mostly replaced two to three-story buildings torn down during that same period of “urban renewal.” The argument from Casale and the developers was that this was in fact redevelopment of Main Street, that the building was built to look of that period and that it would be the first of many similar projects.
As I see it, development is going to be necessary to mitigate the present housing crisis alongside a slew of other changes to policy such as good-cause eviction and cracking down on short-term rentals. But what Beacon gained in this period that it did not have before was leverage. When you have prime real-estate such as that on Main Street, you can go to the mat with interested developers to get concessions for the community on a case-by-case basis, from more affordable units to discounts on rent for displaced longtime businesses to community spaces. What resulted from 344 Main for most Beaconites was three niche stores mostly catering to tourists and a giant brick rectangle on the horizon.
That is not to excuse all of it, no doubt there are some currents of the more noxious nothing-shall-ever-change NIMBYism quite ironically mostly from transplant homeowners in Beacon, but I would be cautious haphazardly applying that binary to this city or ones like it (*cough* Ithaca). The dispute was more of intentionality with limited space than to build or not to build. But how it ended was Casale’s 2019 ouster in favor of self-professed “zoning geek” Lee Kyriacou.
Kyriacou’s tenure has seen tweaking of the zoning code to incentivize these kinds of concessions. For example, four-story buildings can still be built so long as they include some kind of “public benefit,” a community garden on a roof for example. Mixed-use development isn’t just prioritized along the Hudson River and the Fishkill Creek, it is an explicit requirement. A number of older buildings on and around Main Street from prior to the city’s consolidation have been landmarked, both to prevent their total destruction and to permit buildings zoned as single-family to have other uses. I mentioned the building I lived in as a teenager, the reason it could be converted to an apartment building in a single-family neighborhood is such an exemption.
That’s not to say there are no tensions. Mayor Kyriacou, who is a landlord, was the only member of the City Council to vote against good-cause eviction. There remain disputes in the community but specifically in regard to development things have simmered down a great deal since the 2019 election. On Main Street, two new large brick buildings were constructed, one of which is in part modeled after a building that once stood nearby and was destroyed during urban renewal.
While public-facing tension has simmered down, much boils beneath the surface. Earlier this year while facing eviction, a tenant burned down his apartment building, like a considerable amount of Beacon’s housing stock including where I lived a mansion that predated the existence of the city converted to individual apartments. Prior to 249 Main Street opening, someone tagged it with the words “go home.” Amongst the people I keep in touch with from my time in Beacon be they natives or newcomers, there remains a hint of bitterness about how the past few years have gone and the direction of the city.
Back to the topic of development, I’d like to challenge some assumptions. This kind of development isn’t the “Brooklyn-ification” of the city as many like to argue, at least not in the way people think. Rather, it is parallel to a similar phenomenon downstate. Urban renewal occured in Brooklyn too, and while the character of Brooklyn has and remains quite different, this aesthetic of mixed-use luxury projects are also a relatively new phenomenon in the city. Take a look at the development below, constructed in Brooklyn in the past 10 years. Does it look more similar to the neighborhood around it, or to the previously mentioned development in Beacon? Feel free to toy around on the street view itself.
What is happening in Beacon is more or less unique in the Hudson Valley (though Kingston is getting to this point and Hudson is even further along), but not at all unique in New York. While talk of the vague other of “Brooklyn” up here invokes thoughts of the new Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront, the mostly white upper middle class hipsters, and the neighborhoods aforementioned that have nearly completely changed, the phenomenon is in fact ongoing down there with just as much if not more resistance than in Beacon. Beacon may not be Bed-Stuy or Bushwick, but I’d argue there’s a lot more in common than we think.
The Butterfield Hospital was converted to a senior’s condominium and three single-family homes. Most of the Dutchess Mall proved unsalvageable and was recently demolished, but part of it was converted to a community college. A house in my neighborhood abandoned since the Great Recession was bought by a family from the Bronx for $6,870. They made it habitable, and to my knowledge live in it to this day. I still miss Pete Seeger. People still crash their cars into the dummy light on Main & East Main, and presumably will until the end of time. Queens may have a skyline now, but some things never change.
Next week, we’ll be learning how you kill a city. It involves malls.
Further reading: I found no good point to plug this, but I recently came across Viviana Podhaiski’s photography and notes on Beacon. If you made it through this you should take some time to look at her work, which is of great relevance. I also would like to mention Stowe Boyd’s writing on Beacon, particularly regarding remote work and its effect here. I’ve linked to him before and have been reading his articles since middle school.