Phil Warish became a local business owner. In 2007 he hauled his 19th-century floorstanding Chandler Price platen press out of storage, where it had been for fifteen years. He arranged an eclectic collection of vintage items, put up a sign, and opened Blue Farm Antiques and Letterpress Printing. He’s been in his current location for six years.
Work patterns have changed. Huge numbers of jobs have been rendered virtual, shifted commutes from hours and minutes to the seconds it takes to get from one’s kitchen to whatever you’re calling an office.
The Hudson Valley in general, and recently Ulster County in particular, have gotten national attention for the precipitous rise of the cost of housing. But the mass exodus of buyers from the New York City area to upstate covers a lot more ground than that. Delaware County, the forgotten, sleepy area the size of Rhode Island, has been white-hot, too.
After being dominant from Georgia to Maine for thousands of years, this “keynote species” of the Catskills in particular had succumbed to Asian blight in the first decades of the twentieth century. (Asian chestnuts were imported because they produce fatter nuts. These brought blight to which the older, squatter Asian species was – and is – immune.)
What I want is a New Paltz of diversity, a New Paltz with room for the down-on-their-luck, where people can still discover themselves in shambolic, affordable and undistinguished ways, a SUNY where a kid can act the dilettante without accruing a prison of debt, a New Paltz where doing nothing — big nothing, like what Marriott and Con Ed got done here — really means something.
In the past seven months, the landscape of our daily lives has changed in ways we could have never imagined, unless we dwelled in the minds of fiction writers like Margaret Atwood or George Orwell. We’ve been transformed into a mask-wearing, hand-sanitizing, plexiglass-shielding, remote-almost-everything state of existence.
Eels born in the Sargasso Sea south and east of Bermuda are living in a creek just off Route 9G south of Rhinebeck. In fact, eels are living in streams up and down both banks of the Hudson River. How did they get here from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?
My family had a soft spot for trains. It started in Ulster County.
It’s a flirtation of wild asters and jewelweed and bawdy goldenrod. The sky is as blue as the Madonna’s robe and the sun is hot, but wake up early the next morning, and dew has dampened that tablecloth you left on the patio table. The cicadas still thrum in late afternoon, but you notice the songbirds are silent. Silent and gone.
A planned bike lane on Henry W. DuBois Ave. would mainly serve out-of-towners passing through on the Empire State Trail and cause increased traffic, say critics. But supporters, including the town supervisor, say locals would be the main users. The plan would require widening the road and the removal of trees, which has also been a focus of opposition for property owners who feel encroached upon. Town officials say the trees would all be replaced.