Upstate New Brooklyn

A little over a year ago there was an article in The Times making the case that the upstate town of Rosendale was the new Brooklyn, but now a new story casts a wider net over the greater Hudson Valley region, claiming the area is in the midst of a “Brooklynization” involving “the steady hipness creep with its locavore cuisine, its Williamsburgian bars, its Gyrotonic exercise, feng shui consultants and deep clay art therapy and, most of all, its recent arrivals from New York City.” (Aside from Rosendale, places like Beacon, Cold Spring, Hudson, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Tivoli, Red Hook, Accord and High Falls are also name-checked in the article.) Examples of transplants include 43-year-old David Clark, who moved to Beacon after feeling like he’d outgrown the Williamsburg scene, and 28-year-old Amber Rubarth, who “figured she could make music and live a creative life just as easily in Rosendale as in Brooklyn, and more sanely.” And, hey, upstate even has a real estate blog now! Still, even as the area gets hipper, there’s still the fact that much of it is profoundly economically depressed. Here’s the opinion of a gallery owner in Beacon: “So many people have moved to Beacon from Brooklyn that people now call it NoBro, he said. He would like to buy into the hype, but he doesn’t see it. The economy is dead. The Internet has killed downtown commerce. He has seen well over a dozen businesses come and go in the five years he has been in business.” Do you believe the hype?
Williamsburg on the Hudson [NY Times]
Photo by joseph a