Rebuilding Newburgh

Annual urban design festival begins Oct. 2 With over 50 free events, including lectures, workshops, tours and parties, taking place in Newburgh during the city's fourth annual Archtober urban design festival, it can be difficult to keep track of it all. To make sure I wouldn't miss anything, I asked Naomi Hersson-Ringskog and Wendy Smith, two members of its organizing team, to walk me around. First, they pointed out a site on Chambers Street that will become a "co-housing," or cooperative, neighborhood and the subject of a talk on Oct. 24. Down the street was the site of the future Newburgh Tool Library, an idea hatched from an earlier Archtober lecture. It's being built out of invasive reeds and other natural materials, and it'll be open for tours on Oct. 4. A few blocks south is the city's defunct American Legion, YMCA and Masonic Temple, a complex that is being converted into a suite of restaurants and a hotel — something this city of nearly 30,000 people has lacked for 50 years. Its developer, the Catskills-based Foster Supply Hospitality, will offer a hard-hat tour on Oct. 3. The Grand Street project, as it's known, brings cautious optimism: It will provide local jobs and draw tourist money — Hersson-Ringskog said she hopes the project can absorb overflow from Cold Spring — but it's also moving ahead, something other ambitious projects over the past decades failed to do. "Good machine day today," Hersson-Ringskog said as we walked past the Masonic Temple while a dark orange forklift carried two workers to the engravings near the roof. "I love it when they get the forklift out," Smith said. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the downtown projects. In the past decade, the city has sold 600 of 700 vacant buildings, putting them back on the tax rolls. It seemed like Hersson-Ringskog and Smith knew something about every one of them — as well as every person in Newburgh. A man working on an orange pickup truck on Washington Street called out: "Hey Wendy, I've got something up in Open Studios this weekend!" Smith replied: "I know! I'm already coming!" A woman walking a tiny dog on Liberty Street shouted: "I've got a great idea for the parade route!" Hersson-Ringskog shouted back that she would call her later. That drew Ricardo Fuente out of his Fabhaus Warehouse. "You guys want to see something cool?" he asked. Inside the fabrication studio, he showed off a zoetrope his team built that was about to be shipped to England for a film. Fuente will be part of a panel on Oct. 24 about building Newburgh's design economy. Like many makers and designers, he moved his business from Beacon for more space and cheaper rent. (Later we passed Jessica Wickham's relocated woodworking studio and the Newburgh outposts of One Nature Studios and Big Mouth Coffee.) They've joined an ecosystem of established studios in Newburgh such as Atlas and Thornwillow Press. As Hersson-Ringskog and Smith explained while we wound through a block of houses rebuilt by Habitat for Humanity, Newburgh has the second-largest historical district in New York and the nation's first publicly owned historic site: George Washington's Headquarters on Liberty Street. Guides will lead a twilight lantern walk around the site on Oct. 25. The Archtober organizers hope to make the case that Newburgh should be considered the state's historic preservation capital, which requires a new generation of craftspeople. To that end, on Oct. 4, Archtober will host a talk on the state's new Parks Trades Corps program. Inspired by AmeriCorps, the pilot is training a crew to restore Camp Baker in Harriman State Park. "These are highly skilled, good-paying, specialized jobs that AI can't do," said Hersson-Ringskog. An Oct. 4 workshop will show off The Newburgh Project, an initiative within the Minecraft video game to reconstruct what Newburgh looked like before the Urban Renewal movement in the 1960s and 1970s demolished 1,300 buildings and displaced 800 families. Archtober is also hosting work...