A Newburgh rooftop. I am being given a tour of the former Newburgh Savings Bank, built in 1852, by Rosanna Scimeca, an artist who’s been given use of the building by its owner, the Gerald A. Doering Foundation (which owns a number of properties in the city, like the Motorcyclepedia Museum). Scimeca is curating the cavernous lobby as an exhibition space under the moniker Savaggi Gallery, and that is where our Newburgh pop-up portrait shoot is taking place amongst the monumental sculptures of Kate Raudenbush, a Burning Man veteran. I’m told that the coffered ceiling depicts scenes from Hudson Valley history, but it’s so high it could be scenes from “Beavis and Butthead.”
The bank housed an outpost of the Karpeles Manuscript Museum until 2021 (did anyone actually go there?), but was mostly vacant since the bank shut down decades ago. The basement vault is still there, its three-foot-thick door open to the safe deposit box room, the boxes all open, gold keys attached and dangling, a mad banker’s art installation. On the third floor, the conference room—complete with stained glass windows—looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1975, the long wood table and leather chairs covered in dust, just waiting for a forceful application of Pledge before the board meeting starts. The law reference books on the bookshelves are older than I am. It feels like the bankers just got up and never came back—like time stopped and nobody came back around to restart it. Scimeca tells me that there are plans to turn the whole of the bank building into an arts education center.
The highest point in the neighborhood, the roof is an incredible vantage point from which to view the city in all directions from the corner of Liberty Street and Broadway. The afternoon is windy and wet, gray and gloomy. The streetlights reflect off rain-slicked sidewalks. Cars are driving slower than usual. People huddle under a bus shelter. It’s unclear whether or not they’re waiting for a bus. A dog could run all day long in weather like this.
I can see the angel wings painted on the side of the Wherehouse and Dmitri Kasterine’s sepia-toned portraits of Newburghers on the side of the Ritz Theater to the south. (Kasterine is 92 and still posting photos on Instagram.) The wide and empty expanse of Broadway stretches uphill to the west, past the payday loan shop and toward the casino, way out of sight.
To the east, the Tower of Victory at Washington’s Headquarters peeks above the rooftops; across the river, the Hudson Highlands wear a shroud of clouds like a wet sweater. Church spires and the post office are visible as Liberty Street winds north toward the cobblestone streets below Mount Saint Mary College.
It’s a lot to take in. A lot of rainy day Newburgh. And then I notice something. The next block over, on Grand Street, a building with multiple stories of new Andersen windows, the decals still stuck to the glass panes. And then I notice a building with new Andersen windows on Liberty, and one on Chambers, and a couple buildings on Broadway as well. From this great height, it seems that something is shifting in the city. Ryan Keegan tells the tale, “Newburgh: Renaissance and Revitalization.”
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This article appears in April 2024.
