Town of the Week: Hopewell Junction

  |  March 19, 2012

Hopewell Junction, via Wikipedia

There are two ways you can look at Hopewell Junction in Dutchess County: You can focus on the hamlet of Hopewell Junction, located in the town of East Fishkill. Or you can focus on the Hopewell Junction zip code. We are choosing to focus on the Hopewell Junction zip code, which encompasses a much larger area than the hamlet (pop. 376).

The other reason to focus on the zip code is because…well, there’s really no way to put this delicately, but there’s just not a whole lot going on in the hamlet. It’s tiny with not much of a center. At the junction of routes 82 and 376 (which is eerily the same number as the population, so go ahead and cue the Twilight Zone music) lies the gist of Hopewell Junction, which consists of a community center, a superette,  and an antique center. Just a couple of miles down the road on route 276 lies a massive recreational complex. Follow route 82 a little further south and you’re in Strip Mallville. In its past life, Hopewell Junction was the nexus of Newburgh, Dutchess and Connecticut Railroad and the New York and New England Railroad, which means that it was probably once a bustling little berg. But it seems the bustle is gone, or at least a little quieter, even if the railroad tracks remain.

The zip code of Hopewell Junction, however, has more to recommend it. It’s a good home base for a number of great locations in Dutchess County, like Rhinebeck, Red Hook, and Hyde Park. Poughkeespie is 12 miles away (and seems it’s a good place to find a job right now; did you see our recent post on it?). There are two lakes within the Hopewell Junction zip code: Sylvan Lake and Walton Lake. It’s right off the Taconic Parkway, and it’s an hour from NYC.

Real estate-wise, Hopewell Junction is comprised of lots and lots of McMansion-filled subdivisions, ranging in price from the millions on down. But if you can get through pages after page of these types of listings in the Hopewell Junction zip code, you can find interesting, unique properties, as you will see this week.

All in all, Hopewell Junction (the hamlet) is really just a piece of the whole Hopewell Junction zip code. And it’s centralized enough within Dutchess County that it’s still a junction, or sorts, regardless of its function (sorry, we couldn’t resist).

About Kandy Harris

Kandy is a writer and musician/music teacher living in Saugerties, NY.

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