Funny what interesting information you can unearth quite by accident. Do you know what Main Mall Row is in Poughkeepsie? I discovered this while looking up some general information on the history of the “Queen City on the Hudson” and found it intriguing because I’ve photographed this area many times before. Wikipedia describes Main Mall Row as “an adjoining group of nine commercial buildings along the northeast corner of the intersection of Main and Garden streets in downtown Poughkeepsie.”

These Victorian Renaissance buildings arose from the ashes of a fire that destroyed the earlier buildings on this site in 1870. The name Main Mall Row originated during the 1970s, when the city attempted to establish a pedestrian mall in the two blocks of Main between Market and Academy Streets. The idea was to offer an alternative to the shopping malls to which downtown businesses were losing customers. As is too often the case, the malls won out in the end, but Poughkeepsie still boasts these architecturally significant buildings, which are still in use and were added to the National Register of Historic  Places in 1982.

Here are pictures from my recent visit, when I went to attend the superb concert of Handel’s Messiah at the Bardavon with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. The HVP continues to offer topnotch musical events in the mid Hudson Valley, and now with the renovations of Kingston’s UPAC completed, some of these concerts will be held there once again.

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To purchase the above pictures, click on the picture you’re interested in and you’ll be taken to my web page for that picture.

A reminder! If you’re in the Saugerties area and haven’t yet visited the current exhibition at the Emerge Gallery on Main Street, now is the time to do so. The “Primar(il)y Red” show closes on January 8. My popular photograph of the historic red Adirondack barn (now, alas, demolished) is in the show.