City Club, 1960s
By Mary McTamaney
August, 2021 is offering a rare opportunity. Strongroom, a non-profit arts organization, is hosting a unique exhibition inside 120 Grand Street, the building long known to Newburghers as The City Club.
The old building on the northeast corner of Grand and Second Streets has stood at that spot since 1856 when it was built as the home and office of homeopathic physician, William Culbert. The doctor’s family sold their home to a business association, Newburgh City Club, at the dawn of the 20th century and that businessmen’s club enlarged the house by tripling its depth along Second Street. It served as a clubhouse and private restaurant through the 1960’s until the City Club closed its doors and its mission. The building was restored in the 1970’s but was devastated by a suspicious fire in 1981. Since then, it has been a sad emblem of downtown loss.
This summer, the classic brick ruin will “come to life” each weekend. The life inside its walls will be the plants that nature has blown into the ruin to thrive in its basement soil and also hundreds more planted by the artists of Strongroom to fulfill the vision of designer, Martin Roth. With careful weeding, pruning and planting by the Strongroom team, what was a wild basement has been transformed into a botanical garden blooming with imagination as well as color. Paths have been laid out through the greenery and blossoms just as they are through any botanical garden. The difference is the giant brick and steel skeleton that surrounds the relatively small garden. Look down and admire a palm or hibiscus; look up and imagine the rooms and activities that once thrived inside that building as the plants do now. Structural steel beams, put there in 1909 by Newburgh architect Frank Estabrook, still hold the walls upright and give hints of the layout of the many rooms and staircases that filled the place. That skeletal steel framework has kept the building with us when so much neglect and abuse might have felled it a generation ago.
Frank Estabrook, the architect who created the space we still see at 120 Grand Street was born in Newburgh just as the Culbert family moved into their beautiful home, designed by A.J. Downing and Calvert Vaux. After graduating from NFA and pursuing his studies in New York City and Boston, Frank came home in 1891 and opened an office on Third Street. Newburgh was experiencing a building boom and lots were filling with structures of varied styles. Frank designed many for his hometown (Liberty Street, Broadway and New Windsor Schools, Columbus Hall, the YWCA, the Downing Park pergola, Columbian Hose firehouse, and dozens of private homes north and south of Broadway). He was reaching the height of his profession when the last Culberts moved away and the local businessmen’s club bought that Grand Street house to be their new headquarters. The City Club asked Estabrook to redesign the house and doctor’s office into a center for meetings, dining, recreation and fellowship. It would need a commercial kitchen, an elegant dining room, a large meeting room, a library/reading room and recreation rooms for pool and bowling. Mr. Estabrook did a masterful job of accommodating all those needs and more while matching the brick and sandstone exterior and tying in an expanded mansard roof and dormers.
Articles written about Frank Estabrook during his career praise the “stability and elegance” of his designs and talk of customer satisfaction with his unfailing reliability and attention to every stage of design and construction. Sadly, Frank Estabrook did not live to contribute more to this and other communities.
The story of his untimely death makes an eerie and emotional connection to the Strongroom exhibition this August. In 1918, Estabrook took a train down to Brooklyn to visit his son Harry at college. He was early and Harry was still in class so the designer in Frank set off exploring buildings on the campus of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Frank opened a basement door and, in an unlighted room which housed the swimming pool, he fell to his death.
This month, in the basement of one of his cleverest redesigns at 120 Grand Street, his spirit still speaks to us as sun glints through the canopy of trees and shrubs that now envelop his creation.
Weather permitting (there is no roof over 120 Grand Street), the pop-up exhibit designed by Martin Roth and Strongroom will be open to the public from noon to 5 on Saturdays and Sundays in August.