Built in the 1920s, the Poughkeepsie Cistern sat hidden beneath College Hill Park for nearly a century. MASS Design Group is testing its potential as a public arts venue—starting with a May 9 open house and performance series.
Performers inside the Cistern in 2024. Photo: MASS Design Group
In Poughkeepsie’s College Hill Park, beneath the lawns and dog walkers and the long civic memory of the place, there is a room you wouldn’t expect—a vast, columned chamber built to hold water and nothing else. For nearly a century, it did exactly that. It stored millions of gallons of drinking water, regulating supply for a city that depended on it, unseen and unremarked upon.
Now it’s empty. And that emptiness is the point.
The Poughkeepsie Cistern, constructed in the early 1920s as part of the city’s municipal water system, is a piece of infrastructure that outlived its purpose. By the 2010s, it was leaking and aging out. Engineers sent divers down to patch joints and keep it functional, but the fixes were temporary. The system had reached the end of its useful life. In 2017, the city installed two above-ground tanks—each capable of supplying a day’s worth of water—and began the process of phasing the cistern out. By September 2021, it was drained and officially decommissioned.
What remained was a 36,000-square-foot void—a relic of a time when infrastructure was built with a kind of monumental pragmatism. Thick concrete columns. A ceiling engineered to hold the weight of the earth above it. A space designed not for people, but for pressure.
Christopher Kroner of Poughkeepsie-based MASS Design Group first encountered the cistern before it was emptied, when it was still filled to the brim. “We got to see it from the top when it was still full of water,” he says. “And then the deactivation of the cistern didn’t actually get completed until 2021, and they could pump all the water out and let it all go.”
Once drained, the space revealed itself. Not as a piece of equipment, but as architecture.
The comparison that comes up most often is a cathedral—not for its ornament, but for its effect. The repetition of columns. The cool, stable air. The acoustics, which stretch a single note into something communal. Kroner describes it in terms that border on the mystical: “You can throw a note out and sing with yourself if you wish.”
That quality has become the basis for everything that’s followed.
There’s a temptation to romanticize spaces like this—to treat them as ruins, stripped of their original function and therefore newly poetic. Kroner pushes against that a bit. For him, the cistern isn’t a ruin so much as a continuation of a local tradition: Poughkeepsie’s habit of repurposing infrastructure into civic space.
“A mile away is the Walkway Over the Hudson,” he says, referring to the former railroad bridge turned linear park. “At one point it had a fire, and then they converted it over a series of decades into a pedestrian bridge, a piece of infrastructure to celebrate the region.”
The cistern, in that sense, is part of the same lineage. Not preservation for its own sake, but transformation—taking something engineered for one purpose and allowing it to serve another.
There’s also a practical dimension. The Walkway draws visitors who often arrive, take in the view, and leave. The cistern, just a short walk away, offers the possibility of extending that visit—creating what Kroner calls an “economic loop” that keeps people in the city longer.
But first, people have to know it exists.
Since the cistern was drained in 2021, MASS Design has been running what Kroner calls “test activations”—small-scale events designed to understand how the space behaves and what it might become.
The most recent of those took place in November 2024, a performance that helped unlock a modest seed grant and set the stage for the next phase: bringing the public in.
“What we need to do at this moment,” Kroner says, “is get the public to understand that this is an asset that they actually have, and get some public support for future programming activity, refurbishment of the facility, and a consistent operation.”
That effort takes a step forward on May 9, when the cistern opens for a day-long public event—part open house, part performance series, part proof of concept.
The format is deliberately modest. Only about 40 visitors can enter at a time. Performances cycle throughout the afternoon and evening. The lineup leans experimental: solo cellists, percussionists, acoustic duos, a baritone saxophonist. Members of the Deep Listening Institute will anchor some of the hour marks.
It’s not a festival so much as a series of encounters—short sets designed to let the space do its work.
Inside, it will be cool, dim, a little damp. “It’s never meant to have people in it,” Kroner says plainly.
Which is part of the appeal.
As MASS has studied the cistern, they’ve found it’s not alolne. Similar structures exist across the country, though many have been lost or altered. The closest analogue is the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston, which has been successfully converted into a public space for art and performance.
“We’ve visited that cistern multiple times,” Kroner says. “City officials have gone with us to see it.”
Houston’s model—timed entry, small audiences, light-touch programming—has informed the thinking in Poughkeepsie. Not as a template to replicate, but as a proof that this kind of transformation can work.
At the same time, Kroner is careful to frame the Poughkeepsie project as its own thing—shaped by its context, its community, and the particular qualities of the space.
If the cistern’s future were purely a matter of imagination, it would be easy. The harder question is what it takes to make that imagination durable. Even a relatively restrained version of the project—limited capacity, minimal intervention—comes with a price tag. “We’re still talking about a $6 million or so investment,” Kroner says.
That funding would go toward basic infrastructure: ventilation, safety systems, accessibility. More ambitious uses—a larger performance venue, for instance—would require significant alterations to the structure itself.
For now, the strategy is restraint. Preserve the qualities that make the cistern compelling—its acoustics, its scale, its atmosphere—and build a program around them. “The acoustics are so special,” Kroner says. “You see things maybe in cathedrals that are similar.”
The goal is not to overwrite the space, but to let it dictate the terms.
Ultimately, the cistern’s future hinges less on design than on ownership—not legal ownership, which rests with the city, but a broader sense of collective investment.
MASS is not positioning itself as the long-term operator. Instead, the group is trying to catalyze interest—to prove that something is possible and then hand it off.
“We’re really hoping that we can think through this with performance at the forefront,” Kroner says, “but what else could be happening in this space is probably best steered by people who are also thinking about performance, acoustics, and unique opportunities.”
To that end, the May 9 event doubles as a recruitment drive. Visitors will be invited to join a “friends group,” a loose network that could evolve into a more formal stewardship body—helping shape programming, advocate for funding, and push the project forward. It’s a familiar model, but one that depends on momentum. The cistern has spent a century out of sight. Bringing it into public consciousness is the first step in making it matter.
For Kroner, the cistern is less an isolated project than a reflection of a broader moment in the city. “Poughkeepsie is so full of incredible resources, experiences, and infrastructure,” he says. “And that is being—it should be—celebrated by the people around it.”
He describes a convergence of planning efforts, investments, and civic energy in the city—a “once-in-a-generation moment where people are singing from the same hymnal.”
The cistern slots into that chorus. Not as a headline-grabbing development, but as something more elemental: a rethinking of what already exists. A space built to hold water now holds something else—sound, bodies, attention. The question is whether that shift can be sustained. On May 9, for a few hours at least, the answer will be yes.
