The former Innis Dye Works factory is located along North Water Street in

Poughkeepsie, New York Poughkeepsie ( ), officially the City of Poughkeepsie, separate from the Town of Poughkeepsie around it) is a city in the U.S. state of New York. It is the county seat of Dutchess County, with a 2020 census population of 31,577. Poughkeepsi ...

, United States, on a triangular lot between the street,

Fall Kill The Fall Kill is a creek in Dutchess County, New York, United States. The stream is approximately long, and joins the Hudson River in the city of Poughkeepsie. Course The creek begins in the towns of Hyde Park and Clinton, flows southward throu ...

and the railroad tracks of the

Metro-North Metro-North Railroad , trading as MTA Metro-North Railroad, is a suburban commuter rail service run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), a public authority of the U.S. state of New York and under contract with the Connecticut D ...

Hudson Line, just across from the Mid-Hudson Children's Museum. It has served a variety of industrial functions, and remains in good condition today. It is a three-story, twelve-

bay A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is usually called a Gulf (geography), gulf, sea, sound (geography), sound, or bight (geogra ...

structure with a raised

basement A basement or cellar is one or more floors of a building that are completely or partly below the ground floor. It generally is used as a utility space for a building, where such items as the furnace, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, ...

. At the roofline is a projecting

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

and

frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

with large carved

brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

. A triangular

pediment Pediments are gables, usually of a triangular shape. Pediments are placed above the horizontal structure of the lintel, or entablature, if supported by columns. Pediments can contain an overdoor and are usually topped by hood moulds. A pedimen ...

in the center gives the year of its construction, 1880. There is a wooden hoist at the center of the second story and the main entrance is a double door with vertical planking. The Innis Dye Works company dates to at least the 1830s. The first record of its existence, in 1838, is founder Aaron Innis's transfer of the company to his son George, later a three-time mayor of the city. The building itself was used for pulverizing and storage of materials to be made into dyes. It is shown on an 1887 map of the city. At the end of the century the building outlived its original purpose when the traditional dye industry gave way to

aniline Aniline is an organic compound with the formula C6 H5 NH2. Consisting of a phenyl group attached to an amino group, aniline is the simplest aromatic amine In organic chemistry, an aromatic amine is an organic compound consisting of an aroma ...

-based mixtures. By 1913 it would be reused as the David H. Schmidt Piano Hammer factory, whose name is still visible on the facade between the second and third stories. It was converted back to dyemaking again by 1934; since then it has been used as a

warehouse A warehouse is a building for storing goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial parks on the outskirts of cities ...

. It was nominated for listing on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1982, consistent with the requirements for listing described in a 1980 study of historic resources in Poughkeepsie, and it received NRHP reference number 82005072, but was not in fact listed due to owner's objection. It was converted into condominiums in 2008.

References

{{Registered Historic Places Buildings and structures in Poughkeepsie, New York Industrial buildings completed in 1880 Dyes 1880 establishments in New York (state)