Kimmel Awning Surpasses a Century
There are still a few places in Nyack where time doesn’t so much stand still as it layers itself—canvas over canvas, stitch over stitch—until a century passes almost without announcement. Kimmel Awning is one of those places.
Founded in 1925 on South Broadway, the business began with a four-digit telephone number and a simple proposition: make things that last, and stand behind them. By the mid-1940s, the shop had moved to Main Street, where it would become part of the everyday architecture of the village—not just in what it made, but in how it lived. Upstairs apartments, downstairs workrooms. Family at the table, family on the job.
“I always use the word inevitable,” says Ken Kimmel, who took over the business in 1990, the third generation to do so. “The firstborn son—it’s inevitable, he’s going into the business.”
But inevitability, it turns out, looks a lot like devotion. Ken remembers being picked up after school, wedged between two workers in the truck, heading out on installations. “It was a big deal,” he says. “Even after school, I’d walk down to the shop… there was a magnetic draw.”
The Kimmels didn’t just make awnings. In the early years, there was upholstery and Venetian blinds—work that reflected a different kind of economy, one built on repair rather than replacement. “Furniture back then was built solidly,” Ken recalls. “There was love and appreciation in a piece. You’d hand it down.” Today, he notes with a shrug, “there’s no upholstering going on here.”
What remains is the awning trade, still part craft, part utility, part quiet branding. The Kimmels fabricated, sewed, installed—everything but the lettering, which was once hand-painted by a local sign maker, a World War II veteran with a wooden leg and a steady hand. “There’s no one around that does that anymore,” Ken says. “That was one of those irreplaceable experiences.”
Like the work itself, Nyack changed around them. Ken remembers a more economically “diversified” village, Liberty Street School before it closed, and—most vividly—a train turntable near where the community garden now sits. “When you’re five years old,” he says, “seeing an engine sitting there—it sticks with you.”
He also remembers the so-called “Musical Blue Strip,” a continuous awning that once ran along Main Street, shading pedestrians and piping in music from hidden speakers. The Kimmels maintained it for years. “We were the only ones changing out the fabric,” he says. “It took a beating.”
There were larger jobs, too—work at the power plants along the Hudson, projects tied to the Rockland County landscape, and stories passed down of earlier generations doing upholstery for Helen Hayes. But just as often, the work was local and unglamorous: storefronts, homes, the steady business of keeping a village functioning.
“We were part of the backbone,” Ken says simply. “We added to its diversity.”
In the 1970s, even that role expanded. During an enlargement of Nyack Hospital (now Montefiore Nyack), Ken and his father helped coordinate the moving of three houses across town—an operation equal parts engineering and patience. “Slow and steady,” he says. “That’s how that works.”
It’s also how a hundred years works.
Businesses don’t last that long by accident. “We earned a reputation,” Ken says. “Good service, good products, being responsible. It’s as simple as that.”
Simple, maybe. But it’s not easy. And increasingly, not common.
An activist, artist and writer, Bill Batson lives in Nyack, NY. Nyack Sketch Log: “Kimmel Awning” © 2026 Bill Batson. Visit billbatsonarts.com to see more.
Sketchmob 250
On May 16th, join my sketch mob of 250 artists of all ages and skill levels to create a crowd-sourced landscape of the GARNER Historic District in celebration of GARNER Arts Festival’s 25th anniversary and America 250.
A Sketch Mob is a mass plein air event, with the goal of documenting and commemorating the built and natural environment. Over the last 14 years, I have organized dozens of public art events with over 1,000 Sketch Mob participants.
Batson conceived of the sketch mob in an essay Nyack Sketch Log Vs. Google Maps in Oct. 2011. You can see the art work of the 100 participants of the first sketch mob on June 16, 2012 here.
$25 per person (children 12 and under FREE)
$20 Students
$15 Residents of Haverstraw
Inquire about group rates at info@sketchmob.org