Old Water Street is revealed on a cell phone using the UrbanArchive–Newburgh app.

No matter the weather or the season, it is becoming possible to tour the streets of old Newburgh with an electronic window to the past. Urban Archive is a remarkable new technology platform that connects people and history through the digital devices (cell phones and tablets) that so many folks now routinely carry. By downloading the free Urban Archive app, one can open a map of this city and find scores of locations where history is revealed.

Led by Naomi Hersson-Ringskog and her Department of Small Interventions, a local non-profit, Urban Archive – Newburgh debuted during the Newburgh Illuminated Festival, being demonstrated at the booths of the Newburgh Historical Society and the Newburgh Free Library. This Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m., project members will explain their work and the current and potential features of Urban Archive -Newburgh at The Newburgh Heritage Center at 123 Grand Street. It will be a chance to learn what goes into researching and sharing fascinating old scenes and the stories behind them.

Urban Archive – Newburgh has so far loaded over 150 images and is working on more each month. Partners are The Newburgh Historical Society, the Newburgh Free Library, NY Heritage, The Southeastern NY Library Resources Council and the City Historian. Each image is geolocated to a current street map by the technology team at Urban Archive’s New York City headquarters down on the Lower East Side. Local historians and librarians research each old photo and contribute the descriptive information that appears when a place is selected by a user from the accompanying map.

Visiting Urban Archive – NYC, which has been online and active for two years – gives a sense of the site’s potential to bring archives out beyond the walls of institutions and make them available 24/7. UA-NYC shares over 80,000 digital images from 40 city institutions and, in only two years, has inserted extra features such as thematic “exhibits,” biographical profiles and walking tours.

Among the first selections the Newburgh team chose were old photos that highlight the architecture and streetscape along Broadway and Liberty Streets and other downtown neighborhoods where the Newburgh Illuminated Festival was held. Beautiful and expansive Saint John’s Methodist Church once anchored the eastern block of Broadway and was the favored place to stand and watch events happening out on the river. Acres of lawns surrounded St Luke’s Hospital when it opened on Dubois Street, lawns that would soon be needed to host a tent hospital to shelter patients of the great influenza epidemic. Butchers and barbers and tobacconists shared retail space along streets that were still dirt roads with stone pedestrian crossings. Handcarts and delivery bicycles stood in front of many groceries since most of Newburgh walked to and from their errands.

So much local history is stored in the files of libraries and archives waiting for more meaningful interpretation! An online platform like Urban Archive allows details to be shared and added to over time as more Newburghers near and far contribute their knowledge of what is revealed when we zoom into a scene and catch details that even the photographers may not have noticed.

Just one caution: although the development team for UA is working toward having an Android version in the coming year, currently the app is only available for Apple devices – iPhones and iPads. If you are not a mobile device user, you will find most of Newburgh’s recently digitized photos on the archival website NYHeritage.org. Just search under “contributors” and the Newburgh collections will be listed.