Gaining Momentum: Hyde Park, Poughkeepsie, and Pleasant Valley

by Anne Pyburn , December 29, 2011

Approaching Poughkeepsie from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Bridge and turning left onto Market Street, you’re confronted with a gleaming and eclectic display of architecture and culture. There’s the glittering marquee of the 1869 Bardavon Opera House. Across the street are the grand facades of the 1903 courthouse and the 1908 YMCA, now an office building. With the Civic Center Plaza and a couple of high-rise hotels as a backdrop, the overall effect is one of the most impressive urban viewsheds of the Hudson Valley, its sparkle promising good times and big doings.

That promise is no lie. The Bardavon is one of several stellar arts organizations based in Poughkeepsie. The Barrett Arts Center, no toddler itself at 76, offers a banquet of classes, exhibitions, and events. The Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center, housed in landmark Victorian buildings created by the Vassar brothers in the 1880s, roves from Shakespeare to poetry slams to Salsa classes, hosting performances and visual arts exhibitions with equal fervor.

On the Cunneen-Hackett’s front lawn stands a metal sculpture created by Michael Ciccone from metals repurposed when the Poughkeepsie railroad bridge was itself being transformed into the Walkway over the Hudson. The sculpture is emblematically titled Momentum and, it could be fairly said, Poughkeepsie’s got plenty.

These venerable institutions are likely to have ardent audiences among new generations for a long while to come, because Poughkeepsie takes care to imbue the area’s young with an appetite for culture. The Children’s Media Project takes a high-tech approach, providing workshops on TV, radio, and film production to young people. Like many Poughkeepsie organizations, the CMP ventures forth to offer its goodies at a variety of Hudson Valley locations. The Mill Street Loft is a multi-arts center for the young, its offerings including an award-winning summer arts camp and programs aimed specifically at empowerment and life skills training through the arts. Poughkeepsie also offers kids the Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum, complete with a planetarium, a giant bubble machine, a climbing wall, and a 12-foot mastodon skeleton, to name but a few of the attractions in a welcoming, hands-on world of wonders.