Mary McTamaney

Newburgh’s long empty and broken spaces are beginning to attract attention. Preliminary rough designs for a large apartment complex on Liberty Street beside Washington’s Headquarters were shown to the City Council last week.

The lot, just south of the old Hasbrouck House, has been empty since a spectacular fire burned out the 19th century factory that stood there. When it burned in 1981, the big empty brick complex was known as Fancy Industries and it had once been full of sewing machines that had manufactured handbags – a central product of mid-20th century Newburgh. Before handbags, it had made work clothes for the Cleveland Whitehill Company that built the factory in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The Cleveland Whitehill building facing Lafayette Street, with its keystone brand logo at the roofline, is depicted in the 1906 photo shown here. It was constructed close beside a slightly earlier big factory, the 1891 Chadborn and Coldwell Company on Johnes Street that soon transitioned to housing the George Lackey Lace Manufacturing Company.

Its tall cupola provided needed ventilation and also held the bell that announced the start of each shift. The Lackey lace works made thousands of yards of net curtains on their looms in the years when simple lace curtains dressed most American windows.

Chadborn and Coldwell had quickly moved on, building bigger, manufacturing space at Lander and South William Street as their business of lawnmower manufacturing started to boom. By 1900, they were turning out 200 mowers a day as the nation, and then the international public, recognized the labor-saving value of the new American lawnmower. But fire, the scourge of the last century, consumed the Coldwell Lawnmower plant too and it moved to the waterfront into the former giant six-story cotton mill on North Water Street (today still called the Regal Bag Building).

South Newburgh was the city’s industrial core for decades and the massive brick factories like the old Delany Boiler Works on South Colden and Renwick and the old Granite City Soap Works between Benkard and South William Streets filled with hundreds of workers each day. But those workers walked to their jobs, sometimes carrying their own tool boxes.

Modern development is hoping to attract residents and help alleviate the housing crisis, but today’s renters usually come with cars as their main living tool. It will be a challenge to integrate parking spaces below and around the apartments so desperately needed to bring Newburgh to its old levels of productivity.