If you spend much time on Main Street in Beacon, you’re probably familiar with Carmen Johnson.
The city resident, a retired Social Security Administration claims representative turned crossing guard, helps pedestrians navigate the tricky west end of Main, near the Bank Square Coffeehouse, on weekday mornings and afternoons. Now, she’s adding weekend hours.
Johnson is among a handful of volunteers who will assist Dutchess Tourism as it reopens the Beacon Welcome Center, a small building at Polhill Park that will be more visible when construction is complete at the consolidated fire station next door. She will be there from 9 to 10:30 a.m. on Saturdays doing what comes naturally — talking to people about Beacon.
“I love telling people about the city — the age of it, the history of it,” said Johnson, who volunteered and later managed the Welcome Center over a 14-year period while it was operated by the Beacon Chamber of Commerce. “It’s an honor.”
She noted that the building is well-situated. “As people come up that hill” from the Metro-North station, it is “the first face of Beacon,” she said. “There we are with our ‘open’ sign.”
The center is located in Polhill Park at the foot of Main Street. (Dutchess Tourism)
The Welcome Center closed after the pandemic shutdown in 2020 and, with the Beacon Chamber in flux, struggled to reopen. Earlier this year, Dutchess Tourism, a nonprofit agency funded primarily by the county government, contacted city officials to discuss a relaunch.
What Happened to the Beacon Chamber?
The once-vibrant Beacon Chamber of Commerce has become a bit of a mystery.
Patrick Moroney, a Cold Spring native who was elected president in February 2022, said last year that the organization would “re-engage in 2023” but that he would step away after he finished his two-year term. He said elections were scheduled for early 2024.
Moroney said the group held monthly meetings, hosted free trainings and re-formed its board of directors. In August, the City Council gave the chamber a one-year, $10 lease for the Welcome Center, with options for four renewals. In 2022 and 2023, the chamber and real-estate agent Charlotte Guernsey organized the Hocus Pocus Halloween parade, which had been suspended during the pandemic.
Patrick Moroney, then president of the chamber, at an event (Photo provided)
However, on Wednesday (May 22), Moroney said that the chamber has paused operations. He cited a lack of support and said it no longer made sense to keep the organization going.
Ron Donofrio, a Beacon real estate agent who runs MainStreetBeacon.com, said he agreed last year to convert his website into the official chamber site, “but next thing I knew,” Moroney and his partners had “disappeared.”
“I give him an A for effort,” Donofrio said. “But you can’t do a chamber with four people.” Donofrio said he hopes to soon relaunch Main Street Beacon, which now states it is not affiliated with the chamber.
Moroney said in an interview last year that he visited local merchants to introduce his vision but missteps from the past kept resurfacing.
“People would say, ‘Well, here’s what happened a few years ago,’ but I told them, ‘Leave it there; it didn’t involve me,’” he said. “This old baggage makes things challenging.”
One of Moroney’s initiatives was to give Beacon business owners access to Locally, an app he developed. But in December, James Murphy III, one of his partners, sued Moroney in state court, alleging that Moroney “improperly and illegally utilized” more than $120,000 that Murphy had invested in the project.
Moroney filed a response in January, denying the claims. He countered by saying that Murphy was guilty of “egregious acts of tortious interference, defamation, libel, intent to inflict emotional distress, fraudulent misrepresentation and breach of contract” and asked for a $137,000 judgment. The case is pending.
With the chamber inactive at times over the last decade, the Beacon Arts Community Organization, or BeaconArts, has tried to fill the gap, stating on its website that after the introduction of the after-hours Second Saturday concept it became “a sort of de facto chamber of commerce when one did not exist.”
Marc Ferris contributed reporting.
An organizational meeting at City Hall last month drew about a dozen volunteers. The center’s anticipated hours are Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Dutchess Tourism also hopes to staff the Welcome Center on Friday afternoons, depending on foot traffic. All hours will depend on staff availability.
What’s in a Name?
The Beacon Chamber of Commerce was founded soon after the city was created in 1913 from the villages of Fishkill Landing and Matteawan but went dormant before being revived in 1945. Over the next 65 years, it cycled through five names — the Beacon Area Chamber of Commerce (1963), Beacon-Fishkill Area Chamber of Commerce (1970), Southern Dutchess Chamber of Commerce (1976), Greater Southern Dutchess Chamber of Commerce (1986) and Beacon Business Association (1994) — before returning to the original in 2009.
“So many people come to the city, but they don’t necessarily have a plan,” said Melaine Rottkamp, the president and CEO of Dutchess Tourism. “Sometimes they just want to explore.” Greeting them with a map of Main Street or Free Loop bus schedule is “really, really valuable.”
Rottkamp and members of her staff spent Wednesday (May 22) on a “Beacon tourism blitz,” walking Main Street to spread word about the center and its potential impact on local businesses. According to Dutchess Tourism, visitors in 2022 spent nearly $2 million per day in the county.
Jeff Simms has covered Beacon for The Current since 2015. He studied journalism at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. From there he worked as a reporter for the tri-weekly Watauga Democrat in Boone and the daily Carroll County Times in Westminster, Maryland, before transitioning into nonprofit communications in Washington, D.C., and New York City. He can be reached at [email protected].
