Mary McTamaney

Development plans are being showcased all around Newburgh. It seems to be a time when possibilities and profit have reappeared for many of Newburgh’s empty lots.

One such parcel is the acres that sit along Liberty Street beside Washington’s Headquarters. That southeast corner of Liberty and Lafayette Streets has been vacant so long that few can recall its last use. On that big lot was a massive brick building that had housed a number of enterprises. The last one was called Fancy Industries. It went up in flames in September 1981.

Inside Fancy Industries, workers once sat at heavy-duty sewing machines making handbags for a national market. Pocketbook factories, as we knew them in post-WWII Newburgh, were a widespread local industry.

They were established inside dozens of earlier manufacturing buildings continuing this city’s saga of factory work. Before pocketbooks, the block-long three-story factory had made work clothes with the local Keystone and Never-Rip brands, and earlier it had made thousands of yards of curtain lace. It started its big brick life as a lawnmower factory. But in the middle of the night on September 28, 1981 the factory’s life ended without options for any further businesses. It truly burned to the ground with only the steel fire stairs remaining upright in place the next day. Its loss was a lesson in the word ‘fireproof.” That’s what successive manufacturers who occupied it called it. It did seem massive with brick and steel too thick to burn down when workers walked in each morning from the 1910’s through the 1970’s to begin their shifts. Yet, inside factories are materials for manufactured goods and equipment like wooden workbenches and they do burn – often at high temperatures. It took a total of 200 firefighters from 19 mutual aid companies to join the Newburgh Fire Department in the work of extinguishing hot spots that remained through the second day after the flames were beaten back. That firefighting involved 3,000 gallons per minute of Hudson River water pumped through jumbo sized hose up to the scene from the location of today’s public boat launch.

Miraculously, although all paint was singed off its windows, shutters and doors, the Washington Headquarters Museum building close by on Lafayette Street was saved that September night by the brave work of the firemen -- a couple of whom had to be hosed off continuously themselves in order to stand so close.

As I looked down the long- empty lot this week wondering what would rise in place of the old factory, I remembered a different scene once captured at that spot. My favorite Newburgh artist is Clarence Chatterton (1880 -1973). He loved to paint the busy streets of his hometown showing neighbors out walking, playing, working, doing errands. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mr. Chatterton, who lived up on Washington Heights, captured a calmer moment on Liberty Street where the heavy cast iron fences of Washington’s Headquarters meet Lafayette Street under the shade of tall trees.