As an aesthetic experience, traveling the Hudson River Brickyard Trail is a time-trip through two centuries of the valley’s industrial past, rather than a sojourn in pristine wilderness. As long as you don’t expect manicured parkland, you’ll have a fine time.
Toni Benevento is a new Parks & Recreation Committee member in Gardiner. She’s relatively new to the community and has a background working for state and national parks in Utah.
It may come as a surprise to some Anglo folks who are used to thinking of Latin American food as “too spicy” that this slow-simmering style is the essence of Dominican cuisine. And you can get the real thing in New Paltz these days: at New Nelly’s II, which last year took over the little shop at 235 Main Street that formerly housed Amazin’ Melts, directly across from Ulster Savings Bank.
Daniel Getman and Janice Pickering have gifted 9 Paradies Lane in New Paltz to Unison, allowing Unison to have a second campus that is dedicated to following the Unison tradition of art offerings and also addressing current and vital issues of social and environmental change through the arts.
Widely known in Ulster County and beyond as the prime pioneer of the Repair Café movement in the Hudson Valley, Wackman, age 69, died suddenly on Friday at his home in Kingston of an apparent heart attack.
Native to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Criswell first came to live in the Hudson Valley in the late 1980s, when he was studying theater and anthropology at Bard College, pursuing a fascination with “ritual theater.” He credits his liberal-arts education at Bard with providing him a toolbox for “problem-solving and figuring out how to make things happen.
The theater has been closed since the pandemic came crashing down last spring, with no plans to reopen for the foreseeable future, leaving a big hole in many a mid-Hudson film buff’s heart. That makes it an auspicious time for a changing of the guard. Steve and DeDe Leiber – who founded Upstate Films as a not-for-profit in 1972 with a third partner, Susan Goldman, and have been running the operation in a very hands-on way ever since – have decided to retire and pass the torch to a new director whose identity they say they are not yet ready to announce.
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic caught Gardiner in the midst of an ambitious multiyear initiative to bring the zoning code, comprehensive plan and other planning documents into better alignment, and to hone their language to be more reflective of development and land-use issues that confront rural municipalities. Despite the necessity of conducting meetings virtually, work on those fronts has not abated. And Town Supervisor Marybeth Majestic says that recent experience has reinforced her belief that volunteerism and hands-on citizenship are key to the success of the process as it continues post-Covid.
When the pandemic struck, the Reverend Doctor Allison Moore had just been installed as pastor at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in New Paltz. She wanted to help her parishioners to weather the crisis, but had barely gotten to know her new neighbors, and faced the same constraints against public gatherings that have affected us all in 2020.
New Paltz’s River-to-Ridge (R2R) Trail, whose popularity surged with the pandemic and is expected to top 200,000 visitors this year, has now become much more accessible for a particular subset of seasonal users: cross-country skiers.