LANA BELLAMY | TIMES HERALD-RECORD
Published 5:01 a.m. EST Oct 25, 2021
CITY OF NEWBURGH - When Brian Denniston, 52, reflects on the best years of his life, he thinks about his time in elementary school at P.S. 6 on Liberty Street.
Forty years later, Denniston, now director of Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum at the corner of Liberty Street and Broadway, is happy to see ongoing development at his old school. The building is being restored to create TV film studios, soundstages and community-use space.
Those fond memories are still fresh. He can recall details from each year he was a student as P.S. 6.
In kindergarten with Ms. Maxine Rice in 1974, he said he got in trouble for talking too much. The teacher moved his desk beside hers as a punishment, but Denniston said, "It made me feel extremely important."
Second grade with Mrs. Carole Terwilliger was a "step up" for the lad because they were in second-floor classrooms. Denniston remembers playing the twelfth day of Christmas in a school play that year and lending a pail to the student who played the eighth day.
"She got stage fright, and vomited in it," he said. "I let her keep the pail."
Mrs. Pat Hopper in third grade wore a ring on her index finger. The ring was in the shape of a snake. Denniston would follow the ring, watching the snake, when she wrote on the blackboard.
On the third floor, he'd hang out of the music room window and wave to his grandmother shopping at the outdoor produce market across the street.
He walked to school at 1 Liberty St. each morning with other kids in Newburgh's southeast residential neighborhood called The Heights, or Washington Heights.
"The only time we saw a school bus was when we took field trips to Washington's Headquarters, or the bluff, or when we would go to the Catskill Game Farm," Denniston said.
After he finished fourth grade in 1980, the school was closed for good. Many of the students, including Denniston, were transferred to Temple Hill Academy in New Windsor.
Back to school
Last week, Denniston visited the site while workers were repointing bricks near one of his old classroom windows.
Though he could not go inside, Denniston peered through the open door at the top of stone steps leading to the first-floor entrance. It's where he took all of his class photos as a child.
What he saw inside stirred strong, mixed emotions. The building hasn't been occupied in 40 years and parts of it had fallen into disrepair.
About five years ago, Thomas Burr Dodd bought the building and has been working with BFP Creative, a nonprofit he founded, to turn the school into the P.S. 6 Center for Film and Television. After lengthy period in which he stabilized the structure then got funding and approval for his projects, the physical work on the old school has only recently begun.
Denniston pointed at different doors on either side of the hall inside the old school, explaining what used to lie beyond them.
Over there was the assembly room where they put on school plays. Down the hall were the boys and girls bathrooms. To the left was another hallway leading to the kindergarten rooms. To the right was the principal's office.
"It's like return to Titanic," Denniston said. "Something once so beautiful has just been... you know. But this will be saved, so that's a plus."
Gaining perspective on development
Dodd's more than $4 million redevelopment of the school includes turning some of the larger school rooms into film studios. The massive hallways may be used as galleries for art shows and exhibitions. The auxiliary space may be dedicated for job training and community use.
The Liberty Street School, Public School 6, was constructed in 1891 and served as Newburgh's sixth grammar school.
The school is located on the southern end of commercial development that has in recent years livened the Liberty Street business corridor.
Dodd is handling other large historic restoration projects in Newburgh, including the redevelopment of Weigand's Tavern, a Revolutionary War-era building farther north on Liberty Street.
He believes restorations like these are important to reconnecting and revitalizing Newburgh in an environmentally and culturally responsible way.
Meeting Brian Denniston, who is the same age as Dodd, and hearing his tales of growing up at the Liberty Street School, put things in perspective for the developer.
Dodd grew up in Brooklyn and he said he knows what it's like to watch his neighborhood completely change.
But the transformation he witnessed was toward growth, he said.
In Newburgh, for a while, it was the opposite. And that must've been hard for Newburgh natives to watch, Dodd said.
"I hope the next decade or two (in Newburgh) is about rebirth, avoiding displacement while at the same time growing in a forward direction," Dodd said.
"We have to find clever ways of restoring and rebuilding, but also sustaining this sort of microeconomy of Newburgh and bringing jobs back to the city," Dodd continued. "And those jobs, I feel lie in creativity."
lbellamy@th-record.com