Kris
May 22nd, 2004, 06:52 AM
May 21, 2004
HAVENS
A River Runs Through Them
By DENNY LEE
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/21/travel/21huds.396.jpg
Rodica Prato
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/21/travel/21huds2.583.jpg
ONE RIVER, TWO WORLDS Looking east from Newburgh, N.Y., across the Hudson to Beacon. While the east bank has been flourishing, the west bank is just starting to turn around.
ON a recent Saturday morning, as spring announced its arrival, an air of desperation seemed to hang over Broadway, the double-wide boulevard that runs through the center of Newburgh, N.Y. Broken windows were commonplace. The Ritz Theater, where Lucille Ball performed in the 1940's, was dark and forbidding, the ticket booth idle. At the corner of Johnston Street, four men were sitting on a bench rigged from cinder blocks, in the middle of a weedy lot riddled with broken bottles and small piles of burned trash.
"I hope you're not going to focus on that," said Keith Nieto, a collage artist who moved to this faded city on the west bank of the Hudson five years ago, and who was conducting a driving tour of his new hometown, 65 miles north of Manhattan. "A lot of old-timers are sick of hearing that Newburgh is coming back. But things do seem to be turning around."
To prove it, Mr. Nieto turned toward the East End section of the city, which hugs the waterfront. Somewhere past Downing Park — the 35-acre green designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects of Central Park — the streetscape changed from cracked sidewalks to cropped lawns. Rising along Montgomery, Grand and Liberty Streets, the East End is a repository of historic structures, a neighborhood of 4,000 buildings that is a showcase of American architecture. Some of the grandest houses date back to the early 19th century, designed by luminaries like Stanford White and Frederick Clark Withers. As any local preservationist will tell you, the area has the largest concentration of historic buildings in New York.
But in 1996 the East End Historic District was also named one of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Among the buildings that were nearly demolished was the Dutch Reformed Church, an 1835 Greek Revival landmark that is still in tatters, despite the attention it received after a visit in 1998 by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Newburgh can still be a little scary," said Diane Shamash, director of Minetta Brook, a public arts group in Manhattan that has worked in the Hudson Valley. "It has a long way to go."
Over the last five years, an arts boom has transformed the valley, from Beacon, where the Dia Foundation's 240,000-square-foot temple to Minimalism has turned the diminutive city into a major day-trip destination, to Annadale-on-Hudson, where a dazzling concert hall designed by the architect Frank Gehry opened last year at Bard College. They have created what some are calling a "mini-Bilbao effect," referring to the Spanish city that has been put on the tourist map by the Guggenheim Museum — also designed by Mr. Gehry. In the city of Hudson, new museums, theaters and performance halls are rising along with real estate values. The arts, some say, is the new I.B.M. of the region, as old manufacturing towns turn into cultural hubs.
But the rediscovered Hudson is creating a rift of its own. Of the $140 million invested in cultural institutions in the region in the last five years, almost every dollar was spent on the east side of the river, according to Ned Sullivan, president of Scenic Hudson, a regional conservation and arts group. And that money has rippled through the riverfront communities, resulting not only in chic cafes and pricey boutiques, but an influx of second homeowners to the east bank.
In Beacon, the boom's epicenter, the average price of a single-family house has doubled in the last three years, to $250,000. Similarly, in Hudson, where antiques dealers and artists have pried open Warren Street to reveal a Cinderella of charming row houses, three-bedroom homes sold last year for an average of $200,000, double what they went for five years ago. And in the quaint town of Rhinebeck, an influx of weekenders fleeing the Hamptons have raised average house prices to about $360,000, compared with $208,000 five years ago.
All of which has residents of the west bank asking, what about us? So far, though signs of renewal are clear in the East End, where the buzz of electric drills echoes through the tree-lined streets, the average price of a single-family house remains under $160,000. Properties in the East End tend to be higher, with the largest historic houses exceeding $600,000. But bargains remain. Last week, a five-bedroom Victorian in the East End was listed at $165,000.
It's a gap that continues up the river and, in fact, amplifies the farther north you go. In Kingston, across the river from Rhinebeck, houses bring an average of $146,000. Prices in the west bank town of Catskill, not far down river from the city of Hudson, are below $125,000 for a three-bedroom house; swaths of Main Street are boarded up.
But there are signs of change. Dick Polich, who helped start the Tallix Foundry, a fine-art fabricator in Beacon before starting his own foundry outside Newburgh, is planning to open the city's first gallery in recent memory later this year. It will occupy the first two floors of an old furniture warehouse on the waterfront, with rental lofts as large as 2,000 square feet on the top three floors. And next month, a major real estate office is migrating up river to Newburgh, when Prudential Rand Realty, based in New City opens a branch. "You have communities full of architectural gems that have fallen into disuse," said Joe Rand, the owner. "You can't find that on the east side anymore. The gaze now falls on Newburgh."
FOR a long time, I didn't know that people lived on the west side of the river," joked David Ross, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who divides his time between New York City and a 1892 Queen Anne-style home in Beacon. Mr. Ross first visited in 2001 and was instantly struck by Beacon's potential. The next year, he bought his small three-bedroom house for less than $200,000.
Across the river, Jennifer Warren-Staiger, 33, a photography agent, and her husband, Karsten Staiger, 32, a commercial photographer, paid about the same amount last year, for their weekend home, a 17-room Victorian manor on Grand Street in Newburgh that was built in the 1830's.
It wasn't exactly move-in ready; for starters, the gray-shingled house had been condemned. A fire left a huge gash in the roof. There was no electricity or running water.
The Staigers said they had considered Beacon, also because of its proximity to Manhattan (the drive to both towns is usually under an hour and a half). But they were drawn to Newburgh's architecture, as well as its urban and ethnic mix. The population of 28,000 includes nearly equal segments of Latinos, blacks and whites. "The other side lacked grit, it lacked energy," Ms. Staiger said. "We didn't want to live in a white-bread vanilla town. And we were looking for something we could afford."
Some brokers, however, aren't convinced that cheaper prices alone will lure second- home owners to the west bank. "From my perspective, there's not a lot that would attract second-home owners," said Richard Shulkin, owner of Easy Lifestyle Real Estate in Newburgh. "Newburgh is not very rustic." And: "There's no art. There's no theater."
Cheerleaders of Newburgh's revival, however, remain confident, even though the biggest art installation on the horizon involves painting a mural along the newly designed waterfront park. To them, it's only a matter of time before the revival crosses the Hudson, not only to Newburgh, but also farther north, into Kingston and Catskill. After all, they say, it was only five years ago that Beacon was similarly uninviting. And now, instead of drug dealers, that city's Main Street is filled with smartly dressed gallery hoppers, clutching shopping bags from Dia's bookstore.
But more than perception divides the two sides of the Hudson. The river towns along the west side tend to be bigger, and more industrial than their counterparts on the east. And the east side is easier to get to: Metro-North trains link the towns to New York City, whereas west siders must drive up the New York State Thruway, or hop over one of the four bridges that traverse the mid-Hudson Valley. (Starting in June, a long-awaited ferry service between Beacon and Newburgh is expected to begin.) "The thing that works for the Hudson Valley is Metro-North," Mr. Ross added.
Some say that it may have worked too well, that the pioneering spirit that led to the revival of the east-bank towns no longer applies. In Beacon, gentrification has traveled a familiar arc. A cafe with an unpronounceable name serves chai lattes along with poetry. A ratty blanket factory is being carved into 135 SoHo-style lofts, not by handy artists but by a deep-pocketed developer. Every empty storefront seems to be a gallery or is about to become one. Some artists are being priced out.
"The other side has gotten too chichi," said Barbara Green, 61, a painter from Catskill, who crossed the river for an opening of her still lifes at Deborah Davis Fine Art in Hudson. "I remember when Hudson was still very seedy. Now it's a showplace. It's gentrified and genteel. For people with weekend homes, this is what they want — for it to look pretty and feel safe. Compared to this, we're the Wild West."
Indeed, Newburgh is very much a frontier. The number of weekenders may be tiny, but locals say that the investment potential is huge. That was a selling point for Judy Johnson, 62, a mortgage banker who lives in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Three years ago, she and her partner bought a 21-room Victorian house designed by Vaux on Grand Street for $425,000. Brokers estimate that the property, which has two rental units, is worth about $600,000 today. Not that Ms. Johnson plans to sell.
"I plan to retire here," Ms. Johnson said. "I go to Beacon a lot; it's a lovely place to walk. But it's far more exciting here. I guess I have a bit of a gambling instinct. But honey, it's only a matter of time before Newburgh goes the way of Beacon. "
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/21/travel/21huds3.184.jpg
ART OF REVIVAL Keith Nieto, top, an artist, lives in Newburgh. Train service has helped the east bank, as have its many galleries like one, bottom, in Beacon owned by Carl Van Brunt.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
HAVENS
A River Runs Through Them
By DENNY LEE
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/21/travel/21huds.396.jpg
Rodica Prato
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/21/travel/21huds2.583.jpg
ONE RIVER, TWO WORLDS Looking east from Newburgh, N.Y., across the Hudson to Beacon. While the east bank has been flourishing, the west bank is just starting to turn around.
ON a recent Saturday morning, as spring announced its arrival, an air of desperation seemed to hang over Broadway, the double-wide boulevard that runs through the center of Newburgh, N.Y. Broken windows were commonplace. The Ritz Theater, where Lucille Ball performed in the 1940's, was dark and forbidding, the ticket booth idle. At the corner of Johnston Street, four men were sitting on a bench rigged from cinder blocks, in the middle of a weedy lot riddled with broken bottles and small piles of burned trash.
"I hope you're not going to focus on that," said Keith Nieto, a collage artist who moved to this faded city on the west bank of the Hudson five years ago, and who was conducting a driving tour of his new hometown, 65 miles north of Manhattan. "A lot of old-timers are sick of hearing that Newburgh is coming back. But things do seem to be turning around."
To prove it, Mr. Nieto turned toward the East End section of the city, which hugs the waterfront. Somewhere past Downing Park — the 35-acre green designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects of Central Park — the streetscape changed from cracked sidewalks to cropped lawns. Rising along Montgomery, Grand and Liberty Streets, the East End is a repository of historic structures, a neighborhood of 4,000 buildings that is a showcase of American architecture. Some of the grandest houses date back to the early 19th century, designed by luminaries like Stanford White and Frederick Clark Withers. As any local preservationist will tell you, the area has the largest concentration of historic buildings in New York.
But in 1996 the East End Historic District was also named one of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Among the buildings that were nearly demolished was the Dutch Reformed Church, an 1835 Greek Revival landmark that is still in tatters, despite the attention it received after a visit in 1998 by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Newburgh can still be a little scary," said Diane Shamash, director of Minetta Brook, a public arts group in Manhattan that has worked in the Hudson Valley. "It has a long way to go."
Over the last five years, an arts boom has transformed the valley, from Beacon, where the Dia Foundation's 240,000-square-foot temple to Minimalism has turned the diminutive city into a major day-trip destination, to Annadale-on-Hudson, where a dazzling concert hall designed by the architect Frank Gehry opened last year at Bard College. They have created what some are calling a "mini-Bilbao effect," referring to the Spanish city that has been put on the tourist map by the Guggenheim Museum — also designed by Mr. Gehry. In the city of Hudson, new museums, theaters and performance halls are rising along with real estate values. The arts, some say, is the new I.B.M. of the region, as old manufacturing towns turn into cultural hubs.
But the rediscovered Hudson is creating a rift of its own. Of the $140 million invested in cultural institutions in the region in the last five years, almost every dollar was spent on the east side of the river, according to Ned Sullivan, president of Scenic Hudson, a regional conservation and arts group. And that money has rippled through the riverfront communities, resulting not only in chic cafes and pricey boutiques, but an influx of second homeowners to the east bank.
In Beacon, the boom's epicenter, the average price of a single-family house has doubled in the last three years, to $250,000. Similarly, in Hudson, where antiques dealers and artists have pried open Warren Street to reveal a Cinderella of charming row houses, three-bedroom homes sold last year for an average of $200,000, double what they went for five years ago. And in the quaint town of Rhinebeck, an influx of weekenders fleeing the Hamptons have raised average house prices to about $360,000, compared with $208,000 five years ago.
All of which has residents of the west bank asking, what about us? So far, though signs of renewal are clear in the East End, where the buzz of electric drills echoes through the tree-lined streets, the average price of a single-family house remains under $160,000. Properties in the East End tend to be higher, with the largest historic houses exceeding $600,000. But bargains remain. Last week, a five-bedroom Victorian in the East End was listed at $165,000.
It's a gap that continues up the river and, in fact, amplifies the farther north you go. In Kingston, across the river from Rhinebeck, houses bring an average of $146,000. Prices in the west bank town of Catskill, not far down river from the city of Hudson, are below $125,000 for a three-bedroom house; swaths of Main Street are boarded up.
But there are signs of change. Dick Polich, who helped start the Tallix Foundry, a fine-art fabricator in Beacon before starting his own foundry outside Newburgh, is planning to open the city's first gallery in recent memory later this year. It will occupy the first two floors of an old furniture warehouse on the waterfront, with rental lofts as large as 2,000 square feet on the top three floors. And next month, a major real estate office is migrating up river to Newburgh, when Prudential Rand Realty, based in New City opens a branch. "You have communities full of architectural gems that have fallen into disuse," said Joe Rand, the owner. "You can't find that on the east side anymore. The gaze now falls on Newburgh."
FOR a long time, I didn't know that people lived on the west side of the river," joked David Ross, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who divides his time between New York City and a 1892 Queen Anne-style home in Beacon. Mr. Ross first visited in 2001 and was instantly struck by Beacon's potential. The next year, he bought his small three-bedroom house for less than $200,000.
Across the river, Jennifer Warren-Staiger, 33, a photography agent, and her husband, Karsten Staiger, 32, a commercial photographer, paid about the same amount last year, for their weekend home, a 17-room Victorian manor on Grand Street in Newburgh that was built in the 1830's.
It wasn't exactly move-in ready; for starters, the gray-shingled house had been condemned. A fire left a huge gash in the roof. There was no electricity or running water.
The Staigers said they had considered Beacon, also because of its proximity to Manhattan (the drive to both towns is usually under an hour and a half). But they were drawn to Newburgh's architecture, as well as its urban and ethnic mix. The population of 28,000 includes nearly equal segments of Latinos, blacks and whites. "The other side lacked grit, it lacked energy," Ms. Staiger said. "We didn't want to live in a white-bread vanilla town. And we were looking for something we could afford."
Some brokers, however, aren't convinced that cheaper prices alone will lure second- home owners to the west bank. "From my perspective, there's not a lot that would attract second-home owners," said Richard Shulkin, owner of Easy Lifestyle Real Estate in Newburgh. "Newburgh is not very rustic." And: "There's no art. There's no theater."
Cheerleaders of Newburgh's revival, however, remain confident, even though the biggest art installation on the horizon involves painting a mural along the newly designed waterfront park. To them, it's only a matter of time before the revival crosses the Hudson, not only to Newburgh, but also farther north, into Kingston and Catskill. After all, they say, it was only five years ago that Beacon was similarly uninviting. And now, instead of drug dealers, that city's Main Street is filled with smartly dressed gallery hoppers, clutching shopping bags from Dia's bookstore.
But more than perception divides the two sides of the Hudson. The river towns along the west side tend to be bigger, and more industrial than their counterparts on the east. And the east side is easier to get to: Metro-North trains link the towns to New York City, whereas west siders must drive up the New York State Thruway, or hop over one of the four bridges that traverse the mid-Hudson Valley. (Starting in June, a long-awaited ferry service between Beacon and Newburgh is expected to begin.) "The thing that works for the Hudson Valley is Metro-North," Mr. Ross added.
Some say that it may have worked too well, that the pioneering spirit that led to the revival of the east-bank towns no longer applies. In Beacon, gentrification has traveled a familiar arc. A cafe with an unpronounceable name serves chai lattes along with poetry. A ratty blanket factory is being carved into 135 SoHo-style lofts, not by handy artists but by a deep-pocketed developer. Every empty storefront seems to be a gallery or is about to become one. Some artists are being priced out.
"The other side has gotten too chichi," said Barbara Green, 61, a painter from Catskill, who crossed the river for an opening of her still lifes at Deborah Davis Fine Art in Hudson. "I remember when Hudson was still very seedy. Now it's a showplace. It's gentrified and genteel. For people with weekend homes, this is what they want — for it to look pretty and feel safe. Compared to this, we're the Wild West."
Indeed, Newburgh is very much a frontier. The number of weekenders may be tiny, but locals say that the investment potential is huge. That was a selling point for Judy Johnson, 62, a mortgage banker who lives in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Three years ago, she and her partner bought a 21-room Victorian house designed by Vaux on Grand Street for $425,000. Brokers estimate that the property, which has two rental units, is worth about $600,000 today. Not that Ms. Johnson plans to sell.
"I plan to retire here," Ms. Johnson said. "I go to Beacon a lot; it's a lovely place to walk. But it's far more exciting here. I guess I have a bit of a gambling instinct. But honey, it's only a matter of time before Newburgh goes the way of Beacon. "
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/21/travel/21huds3.184.jpg
ART OF REVIVAL Keith Nieto, top, an artist, lives in Newburgh. Train service has helped the east bank, as have its many galleries like one, bottom, in Beacon owned by Carl Van Brunt.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company