Casperkill Watershed Oral History Project

South Road, c. 1900

Route 9 is a major north-south highway that runs parallel to the Hudson River through the City and Town of Poughkeepsie. The section of Route 9 that goes through the Casperkill watershed and over the Creek as it flows out of the IBM Country Club is known as South Road. A major traffic artery today, South Road was once a two-lane road traveled by horses and trollies. Watershed residents Vinnie and Kathi Bihn live right on Route 9. They recall what it was like when they were young:

Kathi Bihn: I can remember as a little girl sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car driving down Route 9 and the trees on each side touched at the top.  It was only two-lanes and it was like a country road: only a farm here and there.

Vinnie Bihn: When I was about 13 I would drive hay wagons up Sheafe Road across Route 9.  Now, the older guys would actually use Route 9 to drive hay wagons.  That was even in the early ‘60s.  It wasn’t until the late ‘60s that things really took off.

The expansion of Route 9 from a tree-flanked country road to the major highway it is today was gradual. Vinnie Bihn remembers it being three lanes wide when his family moved up from New York City in 1949: “There were two lanes and what they used to call the suicide lane, which was the passing lane in the middle. And then it became four lanes.”

In addition to the increase in the number of lanes, South Road was also transformed in other ways. The Bihns recall that there used to be a pronounced slope in the road as it passed by their property:

KB: That hill was very steep at one time, and then they kind of leveled it off.

VB: That’s how I used to make a few bucks in the wintertime. In the old-days it was two-wheel drive cars and they would get stuck, so my friends and I would go out – there was no way to make money back then as a teenager. We’d say to some guy: ‘two bucks to get to the top of the hill?’ And he’d say ‘yeah.’  And so we’d push him and once we got him rolling we’d jump on his bumper to give him weight and ride him up to the top of the hill. He’d give us a couple of bucks and then we’d run back down.

As South Road expanded, a number of shopping malls were erected along it. The Poughkeepsie Plaza, the Hudson Plaza, South Hills and eventually the Poughkeepsie Galleria filled the space once occupied by farms and inns. Vinnie Bihn remembers how this changed the way people did their shopping:

VB: My mother, and almost everyone in Dutchess County, would go to the City of Poughkeepsie to shop.  Montgomery Wards, Woolworths, they were all there and the supermarket was in the city.  That’s where you went.  It wasn’t until, I’m going to say late ‘50s, that my mother started going to the Empire Market, which is in Wappingers down on Route 9 and these malls started coming up.  But before that, you went to the City of Poughkeepsie; there was nothing on this road.  There was a gas station, a restaurant here and there; there wasn’t a whole lot on Route 9.  It was all farms.

For more information on highway development and other land-use changes within the Casperkill watershed, see Harvey Flad on the history of the watershed

Image from:

Ghee, Joyce C. and Spence, Joan. Poughkeepsie, 1898-1998. A Century of Change. NY: Arcadia Publishing(Sc), 1999, p.63.