"I first saw Newburgh as a young man in the 1950s, when it was a pleasant, dull, middle-class town with a wide main street called Broadway that seemed shaped by an odd collaboration between Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell. I passed through every few years, usually on my way to somewhere else. On each trip, the town seemed shabbier, but compared with the dissolution of the big cities, it never struck me as sinister." (Hamill 85)

     The idyllic days of the early 1900s turned dark seemingly overnight. During the late 1950s and 1960s, the cascading effects of the freshly built New York State Thruway, Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, and regional shopping malls, along with the loss of industries and businesses such as Stewart Air Force Base, choked off Newburgh's business district from its customers. It's a brutally simple way to kill off a downtown: take people off its streets. The new roads and bridges allowed people to bypass the city entirely. The ferry service, a Newburgh institution since 1743, ensured a consistent flow of people through Broadway, but the bridge ended this. Some of the key events that choked off Newburgh included:

• New York State Thruway opens in 1954.
• The Newburgh Ferry, established in 1743, closes in 1963.
• The Newburgh-Beacon Bridge opens in 1963.
• Mid-Valley Mall, anchored by JC Penney, opens in 1964 in the outskirts.
• DuPont closes in 1967.
• Stewart Air Force Base closes in 1969, eliminating 900 civilian jobs and 2500 servicemen (Hamill). This alone cut at least $20 million from the local economy.
• Newburgh Mall opens near the I-84/I-87 interchange in 1979.
• Passenger railroad stops running on the west bank of the Hudson.

     The first image above is representative of Broadway today. The 89-foot wide thoroughfare was one of the widest main streets in America 20 years ago, built when only cattle—not cars—were being driven down the street (Sena-Stahl). The second image shows Broadway a few decades ago, in disrepair. It was finally repaved in 1997, a whole forty years after its last paving.