The web feature about Hudson
published this week at NYmag.com prompted me to dust off the print piece I wrote for New York Magazine for their “Summer Fun” issue in June 1998. Below is the text of the next-to-final draft, followed by the sidebar which accompanied the article.
Having spent a solid two weeks interviewing not just the merchants of Warren Street, but numerous politicos and random residents, the original draft of this piece was considerably more political and discursive. But to appeal to New York Magazine’s target audience of upscale (and would-be upscale) readers, the editors requested that this be larded with far more references to celebrities and glamorous-sounding stuff than I liked. Nevertheless, despite a number of things I’d like to change, overall I must say this holds up pretty well—and serves as a sort of time capsule of businesses and people who’ve either moved on, or endured the turbulent years which followed over the ensuing decade.
The article prompted an irate response from Mayor Richard Scalera (who had winked with alarming frequency at me throughout our interview in City Hall), who ran crying to Register-Star reporter Joe Brill to vent in a front page article. Scalera ranted that Hudson “wasn’t ready” for visitors; I then published a stiff response in the paper, entitled “It’s not a crime to love Hudson—yet.” And so the tone of our relations was set for years to come. I may have to dig out that one as well...
TOWN HAUL
Decorators, artists, day-trippers, and Cindy Crawford are swimming upstream to Columbia County, where scores of antiques dealers have crowded into Hudson. Some are deciding they prefer Hammock Country to the Hamptons.
by SAM PRATT
FIND A MAP of the northeast and draw a circle whose radius is a two-hour drive from Manhattan. Eventually, any town inside that circle with even an ounce of charm will be nominated as the next hot alternative to sitting in Friday traffic on the Montauk Highway. Exurbanites snap up country retreats from chary locals, gushing about how restful and “real” the getaway is compared with the Hamptons even as they remap the East End on fresh terrain.
Just on the outer rim of that imaginary circle, 120 miles up the river of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, Hudson is suddenly in everybody’s sights. But already the successors to the Dutch colonists who first settled these riverbanks are rushing to distance themselves from the crush of summer visitors.
“Don’t even think of coming up here,” growls Today show weatherman Al Roker. “There’s no good antiquing, the restaurants are horrible, and the weather stinks"—surely why he bought a center-hall Colonial on 32 acres in nearby Canaan last December.
What was founded in 1785 as a freshwater port to shelter whalers from the British fleet has made itself over as a nineties mecca for sharp-eyed collectors, decorators, stylists, and bonus babies in search of that instant patina of old money that only antiques can confer. “When I can’t get to Paris, I go to Hudson,” intones Madison Avenue decorator Victoria Hagan, who designs penthouses and beach houses for the likes of director Barry Sonnenfeld, ABC honcho Robert Iger, and Revlon president Ron Perelman. Hagan starts at the top of the main drag, Warren Street, and walks nine blocks downhill, picking up an eighteenth-century settee here, a twentieth-century lamp there. “I make a point of not missing a shop,” Hagan declares, “because I know I’m going to find pieces that I can’t find in New York.”
Ask any of the more than 60 local dealers about their famous clients, and out comes a list of boldfaceable celebrities as long as Warren Street itself. Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren have made the pilgrimage, as did Gianni Versace. Yeah, Matthew Modine comes here with his decorator, Stephen Shadley, but the women seem to be more memorably conspicuous: Kristin Scott Thomas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tatum O’Neill, Meryl Streep, and Diane Keaton, to name a few. A dressed-down Darryl Hannah was hunting Super 8 cameras. Cindy Crawford is said to have dropped $100,000 around town one recent Saturday afternoon.
They don’t organize celebrity softball games here (yet), but as in the Hamptons, artists and writers who have settled in this corner of Columbia County have paved the way for Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger to be spotted on Warren Street enjoying an incognito New Year’s Eve feast at Hudson’s swankiest restaurant, Charleston, before going back to screenwriter David Black’s house to play charades. The poet John Ashbery bought a Victorian house on the serene Courthouse Square here in 1978. The foundation of Ellsworth Kelly—who hunkers down in Spencertown—helped an avant-garde-arts complex, Time & Space Limited, to burn its mortgage last winter. The Hudson Photographic Center, a destination for vintage-camera buffs, hangs pictures behind the counter of clients like William Wegman and John Szarkowski, who live in the area.
The artist Richard Artschwager, represented in New York by Mary Boone, keeps space in converted churches in both Hudson and Stottville. He likes to contrast Hudson with the more cultivated but cutesy Rhinebeck, to the south: “Rhinebeck is the land of antique cars and antique airplanes,” says Artschwager. “Hudson has none of those pretensions.”
Still, gossip travels at a frightening rate from dealer to dealer when, say, Meg Ryan scores a markdown on a vase at Riverhill on Warren Street or Sting buys a microphone at 9 Pieces, a few doors down. Hudson’s revival has also lured some less transient trade: Martina Arfwidson, co-owner of the trendy cosmetics line FACE Stockholm, recently moved her company’s distribution center—servicing 38 stores from Scandinavia to Saudi Arabia—to a warehouse on Hudson’s Joslen Boulevard. Arfwidson, who just signed a lease for a FACE store at Madison and 62nd Street after returning from an audience with the Dalai Lama in India last April, chose Hudson in part because “all of our stores are furnished with antiques. We send fixtures all over the world from the UPS center here.”
George Jurgsatis, owner of Townhouse, the oldest surviving antiques shop in Hudson (511 Warren Street; 518-822-8500), can finally be congratulated on his foresight. “When I came here in 1966, people were only just seeing the potential of Brooklyn townhouses,” says the goateed Jurgsatis, smiling at his youthful enthusiasm. “Instead I chose Hudson. It was a ghost town, but I was sure it would be discovered in one or two years, tops.”
THERE’S AN OLD JOKE which most antiques dealers know in one form or another:
Two friends open antiques stores directly across from each other. The first dealer puts an old rocking chair in his store window. The second dealer buys the chair and marks the price up. Soon enough, the first dealer buys it back, marking it up yet again. The chair keeps moving back and forth from window to window, and the price keeps getting higher. One day a guy in a Mercedes drives up, buys the rocking chair, takes off with it in his car. The other dealer comes running across the street:
"Hey!” he yells. “What’d you do that for? We were doing so well!”
In some ways, it’s the story of Hudson’s success. Once the number of shops feeding off one another gained critical mass, new customer traffic far outpaced the competitive disadvantages.
Not too long ago, a former mayor questioned whether Hudson needed more than one antiques store. And in the late eighties, the (not inconsiderable) group of anti-antiquers almost got their wish: Only a dozen Warren Street dealers survived the deadly combination of reckless speculation by competing real-estate investors and the Wall Street crash, which rendered the town almost desolate. But by this fall, the head count of the Hudson Antiques Dealers Association (hada) is expected to rise as high as 70, with no end in sight.
After their SoHo rent tripled to just short of five figures, John Davis and Frank Hall decided to close Sammy’s Antiques on Broome Street and open a multilevel shop, Davis & Hall, on the 300 block of Warren Street. A stone’s throw away, Gagosian alumna Bonnie Andretta has inaugurated Hudson House, focusing on early-American paintings and furniture. Another Manhattan-bred collector, Dan Burns, who exhausted his wanderlust building luxury homes and amusement parks around the world, has now settled into a Greek Revival house just north of the main square, with plans to devote one floor to a store of his own.
Alfons Sutter, whose Sutter Antiques on Warren Street is the first stop for many Manhattan buyers, bought a weekend house here ten years ago after lunching with local artist Frank Faulkner, whose house was recently “published” on the cover of Elle Decor. After specializing early on in Orientalia, Sutter now imports mostly from Austria and Germany, and is of the opinion that “you can deal in a million different ways; the only way to go wrong here is to do what your neighbors are doing.” Exactly how good is business? Sutter’s average price range used to be $2,500 to $4,500. But now it’s $6,000 to $8,000.
Coxsackie resident Benjamin Izett is closing his SoHo store to focus on his ongoing Manhattan partnership with Jonathan Burden and his own Portobello store at 441 Warren. Though a wave of publicity and excellent word of mouth have brought many more casual browsers to the strip, Izett, who specializes in early-English furniture, notes that “80 percent of my business is still to the trade,” with sales of single objects as high as $55,000, for a table.
“That was lucky,” grumbles one green-eyed competitor.
“It would be an understatement to say this is a wasp’s nest,” notes another.
SINCE PETER ROST reopened the St. Charles Hotel two years ago on the July 4th weekend on Park Place, he’s watched its occupancy rates climb. About a third of the hotel’s summer weekends are already booked solid, drawing fashion shoots such as a recent 25-person crew for TSE Cashmere along with the usual summer weddings and weekenders.
Longtime residents may affect to resist it, but this new population of second-home owners is staking out its own circuit of benefits, garden tours, arts walks, and lawn parties. From May to October, the area jumps in rhythm with the shad that spawn each spring in the Hudson. June 27 brings the Columbia Memorial Hospital dinner-dance and auction to the estate of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, over the line in Claverack. This year, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the featured speaker, with tickets running from $125 a person up to $10,000 for an “Angel’s table.” The September 12 outdoor auction for Olana—the magnificently restored Persian-style home that Church designed with a little help from Calvert Vaux—and the Columbia County Historical Society is a major see-and-be-seen event.
“We chose Columbia County because it still has acres and acres of farmland, not a lot of hideous new houses,” says Merchant, who, along with Ivory in the late seventies, bought an 1805 Greek Revival house built by the politician Jacob Rutsen Van Rensselaer, and later acquired the landmarked 1767 Red Mills to house their foundation. Merchant-Ivory’s clout is making the Mills a significant destination for the legitimate arts; on June 21, Vanessa Redgrave and her mother, Rachel, performed a recital of newly translated Chekhov stories, with some locals paying $200 for the privilege of dining with them afterward.
Event planner Chas Miller of Forward Miller on East 66th Street—a veteran of similar bashes for the Frick, the Guggenheim, and the New York Botanical Gardens -- is helping to manage the September 19 Harvest Ball on a 170-acre farm in Stuyvesant for the Hudson Opera House, an art and performance center in the renovation stages on Warren Street. The ghost of Ward McAllister, many of whose excruciatingly social “400” had homes along the Hudson, seems to be supplanting the Headless Horseman creation of area author Washington Irving. Especially when Miller chirps that “we’re doing all the same things we do in the city.”
Others beg to differ: “I’m not interested in going somewhere and replicating what happens in New York -- the wholesale transplant of Manhattan nightclubs, restaurants, and gossip columns,” says Alexandra Anderson-Spivy of Interactive Bureau, the former editor of Art & Antiques magazine who has owned a house in nearby Kinderhook for fourteen years with her husband, Jock Spivy. (He co-founded the web consulting business with Roger Black.) The couple came here “because this is genuinely a land that time forgot—the birthplace of American art, with unbelievable architectural riches,” says Anderson-Spivy. The National Register lists 1,350 historic “resources” in the county, including houses, barns, landscapes, and assorted structures. Specimens of every major period style from Federal onward bring annual visits of architecture students who survey the renovation work in this city formerly better known for its history of drug rings, gambling, and prostitution.
According to Bruce Edward Hall’s Diamond Street: The Story of the Little Town With the Big Red Light District (Black Dome Press, 1994), local shenanigans even raised the eyebrows of Walter Winchell, who pegged it as “a little Vegas” on his radio show. Hall chronicles the city’s sex trade but sketches a brief history of Hudson along the way. Bizarre anecdotes like this abound: A small scandal erupted in 1807 when some strangers charged a fee to see a mysterious animal called an “East Indian Nondescript.” Hundreds paid to look at the exotic creature, until it was discovered that it was merely a bear with its fur shaved off.
Hall builds his tale methodically to the climactic 1950 brothel raids by state police, who were no longer willing to tolerate what was long considered a preferable, “supervised” way to supply demand. One madam testified that her girls “embroidered, crocheted -- they sold things,” while taxi drivers recalled “picking up police officers and prostitutes at whorehouses and taking them to dance halls.”
Hall concludes his narrative with more recent scandals, including the 1991 prosecution of the Hudson police chief on charges of obstruction of state drug investigations; Mayor Richard Scalera recently appointed the same deposed chief—a high-school buddy—as head of the city development corporation over vehement taxpayer objections. (The chief’s nickname is Fingers.)
ON A CLEAR DAY , the view from the porches of Olana can extend some 60 miles southward. Onsite, it dawns on you that the paintings of the Hudson River School, which would appear to exaggerate those monumental landscapes with their craggy peaks and verdant valleys and burbling streams, are actually documentary. Then again, Frederic Church, a control freak if there ever was one, went so far as to build a lake at Olana whose contours would echo the shape of the Hudson in the distance.
Not surprisingly, real-estate values have shot up as fast as the poison ivy that grows in vines up the garages in picturesque alleys like Partition Street. One local agent has been heard to boast that’s he’s sold $1 million worth of buildings on Warren Street in the past three months. But even in Kinderhook (site of President Martin Van Buren’s Lindenwald home, and something like the county’s East Hampton), high-riding Manhattanites looking to become instant aristocrats can pick up mansions for the same price as a decent two-bedroom near Lincoln Center. A shout-out to all hotshot attorneys: The asking price on the Peter Van Schaak House—a 10-bedroom, 22-room, 7,000-square-foot Victorianized 1785 Georgian manor on Route 9 with five marble fireplaces that is the original home of New York State’s first law school—is $495,000.
Naturally, the arrival of new faces with real financial clout is also the source of real friction in what remains for some a down-and-out small city. Hudson’s police blotters overflow with burglaries, domestic violence, and drug arrests. While neighboring towns log mostly traffic accidents, the city has seen two murders in six months, one on Christmas Eve. A neighborhood watch instituted by Time & Space Limited keeps an eye on the heroin and crack trade operating out of derelict homes on side streets with front doors permanently propped open and poorly stocked bodegas—Hudson’s other dealers. Still, Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of the recently released Cities Back From the Edge: New Life for Downtown, is hopeful that Hudson will shed its history as the dumping ground for Columbia County’s social services.
Dealer Kim Arenskjold doesn’t mince words: When he came to Hudson in the eighties, “it was all run down. Every single storefront was for sale. Old-timers like to say how nice it used to be, but by the time we got here it looked like shit. They also say we pushed people out—but nobody wanted to be here. Now at least other types of business have a shot, because of the traffic the antiques dealers have brought.”
“In our first year,” says Byrne Fone, co-owner of the haute bazaar Hudson Antique Center (536 Warren Street; 518-828-9920), where many of the city’s dealers first got their start, “we’d be lucky if three people came in on a weekend. Last year, about 20,000 people came through our store alone.”
The antiques scene is thriving on what local activist Dan Region (day job: voice-overs for the soap As the World Turns) calls Hudson’s “permanent Wild West vibe.” And anyway, the truly apolitical can always just retreat to the backyard and pass the summer in the preferred style of Al Roker—“with much sacrificing of small farm animals on the altar of Weber.”
SIDEBAR #1 (BROWSING AROUND)
Uptown decorator Mario Buatta likens looking down the slope of Warren Street to “being on a roller coaster.” Buatta picked up some coral-and-gold 1850s tea caddies recently at Abyssinia (524 Warren Street; 518-828-5163).
“My fave is Joel Hulsey and Jamie Kelter of Hulsey-Kelter (421 Warren Street; 518-822-1927),” raves DD Allen of Pierce Allen. “They’re in their Chinese period now.” Other top-shelf dealers such as Tim Doyle (711 Warren Street; 518-828-3929), Tom Noonan (551 Warren Street; 518-828-5779), Vincent Mulford (711 Mulford Street; 518-828-5489), and Jennifer and Kim Arenskjold at Arenskjold Antiques Art (537 Warren Street; 518-828-2800) are conspicuous less for their high prices than for their contacts at top auction houses and a stable of clients including major collectors and decorators like Buatta, Bunny Williams, Jeffrey Bilhuber, Stephen Sills, and James Huniford. David Kermani, former director of Manhattan’s Tibor de Nagy gallery, offers eclectic wares at Kermani Oriental Rugs (348 Warren Street; 518-828-4804).
Philip Alvaré and Edwin Geissler restored a crumbling Federal townhouse to open Botanicus (446 Warren Street; 518-828-0520), an elegant horticulture-themed store. The pair moved from Boston to escape the “parochial, white-bread atmosphere” of the Back Bay. “Hudson feels more like an expatriate community to me,” says Alvaré, who concentrates on Continental eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture and decorative objects.
Salvage specialists have clustered near the town square. This is the macho set of dealers, responsible for many of the new pieces that arrive in town daily. With excellent sources in the region for demolitions and estate sales, quick-in-quick-out stores like Mark Wasserbach’s Mark’s Antiques (612 Warren Street; 518-766-3937), Ecclectables (2 Park Place; 518-822-1286), and 707 (707 Warren Street; 518-766-4475) are often the first stop in Hudson for pieces that make their way down-street until an out-of-towner releases them from local limbo.
“The merch itself comes from wreckers, recycling yards, estates, garage sales, and personal contacts," says Mark Wasserbach, who estimates 50% of his sales at Mark's are with decorators, 30% with dealers, and 20% retail. "The mixture of stores is the key element in Hudson. Without that, it’s boring.” Wasserbach is bullish on the antiques business, even in relation to the long-booming Dow: "If you'd invested everything in antiques over the past 20 years, the stock market would look silly. You'd be a very happy man.”
Jim Godman’s Keystone store, at 746 Warren (518-822-1019), is an essential stop in summertime, when you can enjoy his new rock garden full of stone lions, egret urns, a cherub-encrusted fountain, and outdoor furniture.
Years working in costume and scenic design (and possibly his eighties stint at Dean & DeLuca, too) are reflected in Bob Graham’s stagy store windows at Riverhill (610 Warren Street; 518-828-2823), featuring original and refurbished lamps. A headlight from a French locomotive currently sits in the window, modified by Graham for home use, while his artiest fixtures were part of a recent group show of lighting across the street at Kendall Art & Design (609 Warren Street; 518-822-9909).
Restoring rickety cabinets and dressers to their former sturdiness, Jackie Thomas at 9 Pieces (621 Warren Street; 518-822-8131) does a clever job of layering light shades of crackle paint over darker undertones, creating a weathered look that might finally help suppress the still-sizable appetite for stainless steel -- which also turns up here from time to time.
Midrange dealers are as likely to carry museum pieces as their top-shelf peers but can afford to stir more offbeat and personal selections into their mix. At the playful Fern (554 Warren Street; 518-828-2286), a maroon psychiatrist’s couch ($950) shares a nook with a hand-cranked subway sign, offering choices of stops between Brooklyn Bridge and East 177th Street in bold white Helvetica characters on a black scroll.
Many first-time shoppers hesitate on the corner of 5th Street and Warren, and not just because the densest concentration of shops ends at that intersection: They’re usually arrested first by the ever-changing tableaux set up by Dan Turk in the uptown half of Northstar Antiques (502 Warren Street; 518-822-1563). One week, the spotlit hull of a boat becomes a bookshelf flanked by rowing sculls and a porcelain crow. The next, a pitted bust looks heavenward from the headrest of a barber’s chair.
The former creative director of Jockey underwear, Turk abandoned a Washington Square penthouse after “reading the body language of the people here.” Later this summer, he plans to open a second outlet, in a former bodega, calling it Governor Turk (307 Warren Street; 518-828-6722), with his Tammany-faced pug, Bubby, serving as the politician.
Tchotchke marts like PJ’s Flea Market (348 Warren Street; 518-828-2271), Misc. (119 Warren Street; 518-828-9426), and the riotous Watnot Shop (525 Warren Street; 518-828-1081) never seem to present the same set of goodies twice -- it depends what’s surfaced on the top of the pile that day. Bargain hunters will be rewarded with finds like a Knapp Monarch stainless Therm-A-Jug ($2) or a pair of gold-painted lampshades ($15).
Next door to the Watnot Shop, Americana Collectibles (527 Warren Street; 518-822-9026) displays a placard that bears what could be the unofficial city motto: we charge $1 for you to tell us about the antiques your grandmother had.
SIDEBAR #2 (DON’T BE A STRANGER)
Best way to get there: Take the gorgeous Amtrak train ride up the riverbank; fares vary from $27 to $32 one-way. Sit on the left side facing forward to make the most of the views; conductors will tell you can’t sit in the comfy café cars for the whole trip, but this just isn’t the case once the train gets under way.
Have wheels, too: Enterprise Rent-A-Car (518-828-5492) offers insanely cheap weekend specials, starting at $19.99 a day for a teeny Metro, up to $59.99 a day for a Cadillac if you stay under 300 miles. The company will even pick you up at the station.
Worst weekday to visit: Wednesday—all of the antiques stores are closed.
Most common mistake made by out-of-towners: Parking meters on Warren Street don’t have to be fed on Saturday and Sunday.
Best way to obscure your weekender status: Pronounce names of the surrounding towns correctly: Claverack is “clawv-rick,” Cairo is “kay-roh,” Valatie is “vuh-lay-shuh,” and Coxsackie is “cuh-sack-ee.” Those who lean leftward can also pronounce Philmont -- hometown of Oliver North -- “filthmont” for good measure.
Best hotel: Across the Rip Van Winkle bridge, where Meryl Streep died in Ironweed, the Stewart House in Athens is one of the liveliest dinner spots in the area. Sit on the bar side rather than in the stuffier dining room (2 North Water Street, Athens; 518-945-1357).
Best local auctions: At the Watnot Auction Barn. Previews usually start at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoons (Route 9 in Columbiaville; call 518-822-1413 to check dates and times).
Most essential antiques destination off Warren Street: The Armory Art & Antique Gallery (State Street near 5th Street; 518-822-1477).
Antiques store most likely to have a salon breakout at any second: The very Left Bankish Hannah Williamson Antiques (4381/2;2 Warren Street; 518-822-8512).
Best time-warp restaurant: Kozel’s—“It’s like the perfect fifties roadhouse, with relish trays and everything,” enthuses one fan (Route 9H in Ghent; 518-828-3326).
Best fast food to eat on the hood of your car: Fried clams and chocolate-dipped soft-ice-cream cones at Keeler’s Eskimo Bar (just off the intersection of routes 9H and 23 in Claverack; 518-851-7520). Ask for extra napkins.
Straightest-shooting real-estate agent: Marcy Heintz of Caroline Daniel Realty (518-828-2131).
Best novel for reading in the hammock: The Illusionist, by Dinitia Smith, is set in fictional Sparta, a Yankee garden of good and evil that’s a thinly veiled version of Hudson: “Paved in cobblestone, lined with false-fronted buildings of red brick and frame . . . these days Washington Street was mostly antique stores, run by gay people who’d moved up from New York City. The city government had gotten federal loans, put up fake gas lamps to attract tourists. . . . It was as if drugs had replaced whaling and manufacturing."
Best apple-picking, late in the season: Love Apple Farm, on Route 9 in Ghent.
Best historical site to take small children: The American Museum of Firefighting may sound like a yawn, but it’s full of surprises like a bright-red Cadillac ambulance (125 Harry Howard Avenue; 518-828-7695).
Best beef satay: The Paramount Grill (225 Warren Street; 518-828-4548).
Best view not of the Hudson River: East from the scenic overlook at the cement quarries on Newman Road. Take your first right after the cemetery heading west on Route 23, and resist the temptation to dive in the reservoir—it’s dangerous and carries a $50 fine.
Best weekend-yard-sale route: Honestly, you can’t lose if you head any direction besides into the drink. Especially on holiday weekends, they’re everywhere. Savvy organizers sometimes post directions on the telephone pole in front of the diner on Park Square.
