While fitness centers and yoga studios in neighboring states are reopening with restricted capacity and mandatory mask use, New York has so far kept the doors on these businesses closed. Locally, business owners are frustrated at being left out of the state’s phased reopening plans, with some signing on to a lawsuit filed earlier this month against New York, the state Attorney General’s office, and Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Catskill Art Supply has been a hangout on Woodstock’s Mill Hill Road to several generations of artists. Its Uptown Kingston branch helped build the Ulster County seat’s reputation as an arts center for the region, while simultaneously nudging that neighborhood’s gentrified rebirth. The Kington CAS recently moved from Wall Street to the nearby Kingston Plaza.
Two of the year’s major themes, racial equity and global pandemic, resulted in the village planning board being asked to modify that approval at its July 21 meeting. The company has agreed to extend time for the construction of a traffic light, as well as time to decide how to handle a long-empty house at 5 Broadhead Avenue on the same lot that’s of historic significance because one of the village’s most prominent black builders constructed it.
Something’s brewing on Saint James Street in Kingston. Tommy Keegan, proprietor of Keegan Ales, has confirmed that he’ll be joining forces with Kenan Porter’s Middletown-based Clemson Bros. Brewery. This gives Keegan, now 49, a way to gradually exit the business he started 17 years ago. As with many business deals, this one has slowed to a crawl under the weight of the pandemic, but the deal could be sealed by fall.
The Mark Gruber Gallery has re-opened in a new location at #13 in the New Paltz Plaza — four doors up from its old spot and now next to the Royal King Dry Cleaners.
Ulster Savings Bank made a donation to offset the majority of the overhead expenses for the three months The Well was closed. The Well is once again open on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. The free store is also open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings.
If you pull up early enough in the morning outside the New Paltz Bagel Café in the Tops Plaza, you’ll see two oldtimers unpack their folding chairs from their cars, grab their coffee and fresh hot bagels, and sit outside the movie theater. Even though the booths are currently closed at the bagel shop, the culture of community and the friendships that it has helped foster are not.
County, municipal and business leaders devised strategies to get the ball rolling after the new rules went into effect last weekend. That includes creating temporary eating courts in public spaces and cutting through red tape to get temporary outdoor seating approved on a case-by-case basis.
The owner of the former Woodstock Lodge is seeking permission from the Town of Woodstock to temporarily open with limited capacity while attempting to allay fears from planning-board members that the move could set a dangerous precedent.
The environmental review for a proposed industrial plant on former quarry lands now surrounded by state forest and a growing network of popular hiking trails is set to resume with a virtual audio meeting by phone this coming Monday evening, June 15.