Summer 2003 volume 99 issue 3 : letters
Main Street, Poughkeepsie
I was glad to read in Corinne Militello’s ’98 sidebar that Main Mall was a thing of the past, but having written my 1980 thesis on Main Mall I wanted to correct Militello’s assertion that the ill-fated pedestrian mall “seemed to knock the wind out of the downtown area.”
By the time the pedestrian mall was completed in 1974, downtown was already in an accelerating decline, having had the commercial life sucked out of it by a ring of new suburban shopping malls on the city’s perimeter. Downtown had also been devastated by massive demolition, courtesy of an “urban renewal” clearance program that took most of lower Main Street in its wake, as well as the blocks behind Main Mall, which were removed to provide suburban-style parking. The misguided closing of Main Street to automobile traffic certainly didn’t help downtown, nor did the construction of the arterial highway, which followed in the late 1970s, but they were not the undoing of Poughkeepsie’s once thriving retail district. Sadly, Poughkeepsie was an ideal place for an urban studies major to examine many of the failed ideas that guided ultimately destructive attempts to save and revive ailing cities across the country.
Eric Marcus ’80
New York, New York