Beacon, New York: Signal Fires and the Factory That Became a Cathedral

Beacon takes its name from the signal fires that burned on the ridge above the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War. When British troops moved out of New York City, sentinels on the Fishkill Mountains lit bonfires that could be seen by Continental Army commanders miles away. The city was incorporated in nineteen thirteen by merging two older villages, Matteawan and Fishkill Landing, which had shared the riverbank since the early seventeen hundreds.

During the war the area served as a major supply hub. On orders from George Washington, the Continental Army established the Fishkill Supply Depot in seventeen seventy-five at what is now the Van Wyck Homestead just to the east. The depot warehoused artillery, food, and clothing for roughly four thousand troops and functioned as a logistical nerve center for the northern theater until the British evacuation in seventeen eighty-three.

Two centuries later Beacon became something else entirely. In nineteen twenty-nine the National Biscuit Company, better known as Nabisco, built a sprawling printing factory on the waterfront to manufacture the boxes their crackers and cookies shipped in. Steel frame, concrete floors, more than thirty-four thousand square feet of skylights flooding the interior with natural light. The factory ran until the nineteen nineties, then sat idle as the old industrial Hudson Valley tried to figure out what came next.

The Dia Art Foundation had a collection of large-scale minimalist and conceptual works from the nineteen sixties onward, pieces too vast to show in a conventional gallery: Richard Serra's massive steel torques, Walter De Maria's earth-sculpture photographs, Dan Flavin's corridor-filling light installations. The old Nabisco box factory, repurposed with almost no alteration, turned out to be exactly the right container. Dia Beacon opened in May two thousand three and almost immediately transformed the city. The waterfront filled with studios, restaurants, and weekend visitors from New York City, two hours down the Hudson. A community that had been quietly fading became, somewhat unexpectedly, a destination.