Wide Angle: Urban Orphans

My latest column from the Highlands Current.

In Urban Orphans at The Highland Current, I write about the history of urban renewal in Rust Belt cities — yes, Beacon is in the Rust Belt — with special attention to primary and secondary main streets.

Main Street Beacon

Our primary main street in Beacon is, er, Main Street, and we still suffer from the razing that we suffered in the late 20th century:

In many cities such as Beacon, Main Streets often were similarly disrupted by this wave of razing. This is why Main Street in Beacon to this day has vast parking lots, holdovers from three-story, largely brick-fronted “shophouses” with retail below and apartments above that are now gone. 

In Beacon, the plan was to build wider streets parallel to Main Street — such as Henry Street — to turn the thoroughfare into a pedestrian mall. The failure of a similar project in Poughkeepsie averted that initiative but Main Street, despite its rebound as a tourist destination, retains the scars of urban renewal in the form of an extended middle section with architecturally undistinguished one-story retail buildings that are out of character with the historic east and west ends. 

The city’s Comprehensive Plan is channeling development toward the historic and denser form of shophouses, but at the current pace, it will take decades to realize that vision.

We think less about secondary main streets, which in Beacon’s case is Rte 52/Fishkill Ave:

These thoroughfares will be familiar to the small-city resident, notes Reif Larsen, the founder of The Future of Small Cities Institute, based in Troy. “They are a byproduct of the automobile — often they can be found on feeder state roads that lead into cities and are marked by absence — a series of gas stations, underpasses, condemned factories and vacant lots eviscerate any kind of box-like containment.”

Here’s an annotated copy of Reif Larsen’s article on the subject.