Each of the Dozen Strip Malls

The Hudson Valley is a lovely part of the country.  Like the strata of the Grand Canyon I can scrape down and down further to the earliest memories of my mind’s archeology.  Route 9 is still here.  We go down Beechwood Avenue and make a left and we’re on to it.  It was at this corner where a young friend had made precisely the same turn only to have a driver, busy fiddling with his radio ignore the light and plough straight into his driver’s side seat, killing this young man whom I recall may have been named Ralph.  I had bought a handsome fifty-gallon fish tank from Ralph not long before.

My maternal grandmother, who grew up in Poughkeepsie always suggested that Route 9 had been beautiful once upon a time.  It isn’t hard to imagine.  Consider the dense forest there sloping down to the Hudson from the Samuel Morse estate and extend it down to Putnam County, consider the sort of woods that Ichabod Crain would have trotted pensively through, note the flash of overlooked forest that remains between The Bonefish Grill chain restaurant parking lot and the turn off to the Galleria Mall.  If Dutchess County woodlands were all you wound your way through as you went down river on Route 9, it would have been majestic. 

Rather, we have testimony to indulgence.   Every man with capital, every planner with mandate who raised their hand was seemingly awarded permission to build whatever they fancied here.  I will resist the numbing exercise required to look up and name each of the dozen strip malls that were thrown up here, likely in the sixties and seventies.  Each has an anchor supermarket, and a dozen other shops thrown together.  The first two we pass on the left have oozed into one unerring expanse of concrete since the days when I worked within them. 

The ride from Poughkeepsie to Fishkill on Route 9 yields one tired, failed mall like this after another.  Restaurant chains come and go, replaced by newer versions of the earlier compromise.  I remember when the South Hills Mall had opened, only to be outdone by the larger Galleria Mall, which seems to remain the largest of the bunch.  And every strip mall that wasn’t, now limps along, sorrily, its composition of stores in regular flux, adding to the sense of excess and tastelessness.  Exceptions abound: I appreciate Barnes and Noble, that strip has a not-so-bad dumpling place.  This one now has a wonderful Italian restaurant.  But the redeemable bits could all be fit into a two or three locations.  The rest should return like the jungle around the Baphuon to its natural state.  Someone should have the courage to rezone this road that is so pointlessly overbuilt.