Mary McTamaney

The quick social media network around Newburgh often features announcements of new downtown businesses, particularly eateries. Running a restaurant is super hard work. It involves as much talent in concocting menus, venues and advertising as it does cooking and serving. It has always been that way. So many restaurants are found listed in the pages of Newburgh’s city directories each year (the public library owns a full set from the 1870s through the early 1970s. What type of food served is not always evident from the restaurant names but it is clear that some were longstanding places and some short-lived. It is interesting to watch as those food services move among neighborhoods.

The opening of new eateries followed population shifts, of course, as neighborhoods grew and immigration swelled the ranks of our citizens. It also followed the city’s busy workplaces. As factories opened and expanded, workers sought a place to grab a quick bite to eat. Work days – or nights – were long. Folks stood at machine tables or winding spools for ten or twelve hour shifts. There were few opportunities for toilet breaks and no lunchrooms or even vending machines to grab a cup of coffee. So, workers headed out into the neighborhood for their one meal break.

Newburgh became a city of taverns, delicatessens, and lunch wagons where customers could drop in and find a snack or a meal at most hours. My grandfather always described the “free lunch” counters he remembered at Newburgh bars when he was a factory worker. For the price of a beer or two, workers could come in at noontime and eat sliced meats and hard-boiled eggs and pickles (including his favorite pickled pigs’ feet) laid out on the end of the bar then head back for the afternoon shift. Night shifts were common too for the industries blessed with high production years. Many factories ran with two shifts for several seasons, keeping Newburgh laborers at full employment.

For many of the shift workers, heading out the factory gate to a lunch wagon was a good alternative to walking home or to a tavern. One such wagon was run by an enterprising man named Charles Clapper. He had been working in a Massachusetts company that made reed chairs but he decided he wanted to start an enterprise of his own (“on his own hook” as he described his ambition in 1893). He moved to Newburgh because of its many factories and set up a lunch wagon on Broadway at the corner of Johnston Street. Such an eatery on wheels was a novelty at the time and his Broadway Owl wagon was an instant hit. He added an employee and a second wagon at Broadway and Grand Street and soon opened other “Owl” mobile eateries across the river in Matteawan and one in Port Jervis. His food was fresh and delicious and he eventually brought his brother William to Newburgh to manage the wagons while he expanded the business to catering after having many requests to cook for private parties. From his livery barn at 28 Lander Street, Clapper’s horse-drawn night owl food wagons continued to roll for many years filling up the appetites of Newburgh’s hundreds of laborers.

This week, as temperatures remained fairly warm despite the intermittent rain, I passed the corner of Broadway and Liberty and saw the frozen ices wagon parked on the sidewalk of the Bank Art Gallery. OG’s Icee, a beloved Newburgh institution, for well over a decade, makes his rounds through Newburgh’s streets selling delicious frozen ices from a pushcart and has also done so for many years. Television News 12 filmed a feature on OG’s Icee that can still be found on their website.

He offers a warm weather snack just as Newburgh’s many taco trucks offer quick meals for workers on the run because the constant through our community history is hard-working folks making it through their long days with a bite to eat from a neighbor.