Mary McTamaney

As Newburgh children walk through their schoolhouse doors this week, there is one set of doors that won’t open for them. Those doors were considered but never built. In the 1950s, as a population boom filled the desks in all area schools, planning was underway for creating new and better classrooms. Baby boomers can testify to the many short-term fixes that were employed to squeeze in some extra teaching spaces. Church basements and social halls were rented and, out on Route 52, Cacossa’s Market even converted retail space to a classroom.

Downtown Newburgh had the core group of old elementary schools, including Montgomery Street that had been built in the 1880’s as a great new high school then converted by 1930 into an additional elementary school. The Montgomery Street School was visually stunning, a brick and stone masterpiece with grand staircases, carved door trim and large and small classrooms with pocket doors that could expand or contract instruction spaces. But it was no longer considered safe and functional for its little children and so the school district planned its replacement. They hired local architect Gordon Marvel to design a new school for the old site on Montgomery Street just north of South Street. The school we know today as Horizons-On-The-Hudson is the product of that 1959 construction. In building Montgomery Street Elementary School, additional land was acquired and the school stretched out across the former property of six Montgomery Street houses that had stood south of the big old NFA and up across the land that had housed First Baptist Church that faced South Street.

At the same time, the district asked noted Newburgh architect, Gordon Marvel, to design a new school for Grand Street too. Grand Street School had been built in 1872 while there was major investment in school infrastructure during the post-Civil War population boom. This is the period when classrooms were constructed on not only Grand Street but South Street, Washington Street and West Street. While celebrated for their wonderful spaces in the nineteenth century, they were all considered inadequate for the twentieth. The Newburgh Board of Education was located at 98 Grand Street next door to the public library and right across from the old elementary school at the corner of Campbell Street. It was natural for administrators to cast their eyes on that old building too.

In Gordon Marvel’s design for a new Grand Street School, pictured here, it is easy to see how he planned to incorporate the same design features as he was using on Montgomery Street: flat brick facades interrupted by colored tile panels above doorways that provided entrance close to the sidewalk rather than up a long set of steps.

Something prevented the reconstruction of two schools in the late 1950s and only a new Montgomery Street Elementary was created. The 1872 Grand Street School continued in use for several more years and then was used as an annex for the Newburgh Free Library before being sold in the 1980’s and converted into apartments as it remains today.