Clara Lou Gould, Longtime Beacon Mayor, Dies at 97

City’s first and only female mayor credited with vision for turnaround

By the late 1990s, Beacon had begun its turnaround from years of decline brought on by the illegal drug trade and the closure of factories, but the exclamation point on the city’s resurgence was still a few years away.

It would arrive in 2003, when the Dia Art Foundation opened a 240,000-square-foot museum at the former Nabisco manufacturing plant near what is now Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park. The agreement to bring Dia to Beacon, reached in 1999, was negotiated by Mayor Clara Lou Gould, who was in office from 1990 to 2007 and is the longest-serving female mayor in New York state history.

Gould died at her home in Beacon early Monday morning (Dec. 2) from natural causes. She was 97.

Hospice aides were summoned 10 days ago to her home, where she said she wanted to die, rather than in a hospital, said Peter Forman, the city attorney for nine years while Gould was in office, who helped manage her care. Her passing was peaceful, Forman said.

Riverview Funeral Home by Halvey will host a wake from 4 to 8 p.m. on Monday (Dec. 9) and a funeral service will be at St. Joachim Church, 51 Leonard St., at 10 a.m. the next day, followed by interment at St. Joachim Cemetery.

Mayor Lee Kyriacou, who referred to Gould as “my mayor” after he joined the City Council in 1993, ordered flags in Beacon to be flown at half-mast for the week and held a moment of silence in her honor at the beginning of the council meeting on Monday.

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“It was an absolute joy working with her,” said George Pataki, a Garrison resident who was New York’s governor from 1995 to 2006. “She was a wonderful person who completely loved Beacon.”

Gould, Pataki and Leonard Riggio, the chair of Dia’s board, convinced the other Dia board members to bring the museum to Beacon rather than the Berkshires, the foundation’s original choice.

Pataki, who had been mayor of Peekskill from 1981 to 1985 and was the first New York governor in more than 150 years with mayoral experience, took a particular interest in the former industrial city on the banks of the Hudson River. He said he remembered feeling like Peekskill was on its own when it struggled in the 1980s and used the power of his office to give Beacon a boost.

“Beacon was beginning to sense that it could have a very bright future, and Dia was something I thought would be a key component to bringing it further on its way back,” he recalled.

Three years after the Dia contract was secured, Pataki marched with Gould in the 2002 Spirit of Beacon Day parade, the only governor to ever participate in the annual celebration. “I thought the idea that the governor would march with the mayor would send the right message, that we were going to work together to make Beacon a better place,” he said.

Clara Lou was born in Cold Spring in 1927, the daughter of Michael and Clara Malone. In 1954, at Our Lady of Loretto in Cold Spring, she married Robert Gould, a chemist at the Texaco Research Center in Glenham. He died in 1996. Gould’s stepdaughter, Becky McKenzie, died in 2010.

A graduate of the College of New Rochelle, Gould was employed by the publishing departments of Viking Press and Harold Ober Associates in New York City, where she met and worked with the mystery writer Agatha Christie.

In 1960, Robert and Clara Lou moved to Beacon, where both became active in the community. Clara Lou led the Highland Hospital Auxiliary for many years and the couple co-chaired several capital campaigns for the hospital. She was Beacon’s first representative on the Dutchess County Board of Health.

Gould was also president of the Tioronda Garden Club, a district director of the Federated Garden Clubs of New York State and served on Beacon’s Beautification Committee.

A Republican, she was elected Beacon’s first female mayor on the same night in 1989 that voters approved a change in the city charter to a “strong mayor” structure, with ward representatives elected to the City Council rather than commissioners in charge of specific areas, such as finance or streets. Administrative authority was given to the mayor, who appointed a city administrator to oversee day-to-day operations. Gould named Joseph Braun, and they worked together until her retirement in 2007.

The changes to the charter did not take effect until after the 1991 election, so Gould was forced to run again after two years in office, rather than four. She was re-elected and went on to serve three more terms before retiring. She remains Beacon’s longest-serving mayor.

In addition to negotiating the Dia contract, Gould is credited with implementing a vision to revitalize Main Street, which was largely boarded up by the late 1980s.

The Mayors Remember Clara Lou

We asked Beacon’s three living mayors — Steve Gold (2008-2011), Randy Casale (2012-2019) and Lee Kyriacou (2020 to present) — to share their memories.

Gold: I worked with Clara Lou on the City Council for 10 years. Her default position was to be accessible, to listen and be open-minded. When someone disagreed with her, she defined what it meant to be respectful and professional, and when it was settled, she would turn the page. I gained an insight into Clara Lou’s approach in a speech she gave in which she said she would assess conditions after every step and correspondingly adjust for the next step. That seems logical, but many people in politics are stubbornly resistant to change course.

Casale: I worked under Clara Lou as the superintendent of streets. She treated everyone with dignity. When she took office, she had a vision of rejuvenating our city, and she carried that vision through. She loved our city and, because of her vision and determination, we are the city we are today. May she rest in peace.

Kyriacou: The 1990s were a decade when Beacon needed to define a new vision for itself, when factories had shut down and malls were shuttering Main Streets. Clara Lou helped facilitate that vision by her willingness to listen to new ideas and to focus on zoning as a way to implement those ideas. She also wanted an open process and wanted to hear people out. I thought that was the right way to run a group. It was a collaborative style, which I appreciated a great deal.

Barbara Sims, the owner of BJ’s Restaurant, which opened on Main Street in 1978, recalled “drugs, fighting, breaking glass and everything.” On payday, Sims said, people in Beacon would use a bank with a drive-thru window to cash or deposit their checks because it was too dangerous to walk.

“Between Clara Lou and the Police Department, they did a beautiful job cleaning up Main Street,” she said. “She wasn’t a mayor who sat in her office; she was out walking the streets, talking to people. She stood out.”

There were plans in the early 1990s to construct Dutchess Stadium (now Heritage Financial Park) on the land now occupied by Beacon High School, and to construct the new high school, which would have been a regional facility, at the stadium site. When residents in Beacon objected because of traffic they feared the stadium would draw, Gould organized a “land swap.”

Other accomplishments included the construction of a new water filtration plant in 1996, a project made possible after Gould renegotiated contracts with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to raise water and sewer fees for the Downstate and Fishkill correctional facilities without increases for city residents. The state Department of Health also lifted a moratorium on new commercial development in Beacon after the plant opened.

Gould oversaw the construction in 1997 of the Municipal Building, bringing the Police Department, City Court and City Hall offices under one roof for the first time.

In addition to those projects, under her leadership, the city’s finances were strengthened, long-neglected building and safety codes were enforced, zoning ordinances were revised to direct more passive uses to the riverfront, architectural review standards were added to the Planning Board’s authority and first-floor apartments on Main Street — commonplace during the boarded-up era — were phased out, said Forman, who managed Gould’s 1989 campaign and was a Dutchess County judge for 21 years after his time as city attorney.

“She worked very hard for the city of Beacon, and she loved the city of Beacon,” he said during the council meeting on Monday. “The quality of her term in office is what people will remember.”

Yet Gould was never one for the spotlight, preferring to work behind the scenes. She was known to say: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t worry about who gets the credit.”

In 2019, 30 years after her first election, Mayor Randy Casale and the City Council dedicated a park bench to Gould in front of the Municipal Building to celebrate her 92nd birthday and, in 2022, at 95, wearing a sky-blue I Am Beacon shirt, she threw out the first pitch at a Hudson Valley Renegades game.

Gould maintained season tickets after the Renegades moved to the area in 1994, rarely missing a game.

She will be most remembered for kickstarting Beacon’s renaissance and, with the notoriety that Dia brought the city, helping to reinvigorate Main Street. For many, she will be remembered as a friend.

“The more you knew her, the more you admired her,” said Denise Doring VanBuren, president of the Beacon Historical Society and a City Council member from 1992 to 1993. “She was warm, genuine and thoughtful. It would be difficult not to like her.”