SamPratt.com

Swan seeks to erase black mark

In December, Tivoli’s Black Swan Pub lost its liquor license after an undercover sting “resulted in documentation of 13 underage purchases,” according to The Kingston Freeman.

Writing in Chronogram, music critic Peter Aaron characterized this as “a dubious bust” which requires the popular pub to lay its hands on $30,000 “to regain its license and get right with the authorities.” Owner Mike Nickerson writes:

“[O]ur license to serve you was suspended by the State Liquor Authority for a number of reasons - underage drinkers got in (the ID’s we were shown seemed to disappear as soon as the cops showed up), an unlicensed bouncer (Licensed bouncers? In Tivoli? Well it’s the Law for the whole state, not just the big cities), and storing liquor and records “off premises” (on the second floor of the Swan, upstairs in a locked office, but considered “off premise” because there is no indoor staircase).

So now the Swan (which does have many fans besides Bard students running up a tab on a parent’s credit card) has launched an online fundraising campaign to try to get those funds together.

The money will go, per Nickerson, to paying a $15,000 fine plus “the purchase of an ID scanner at $2,000, moving the liquor to a new location on the first floor, and registering with the State Department as a Security Company.”

With 11 days left in the campaign, $13,390 has been raised. Donations of $20 or more earn the donor a number of perks. $50 gets the donor a limited edition t-shrit, some partyinvites and a draft beer once the Swan reopens; for $250, you can have a brass plaque with your name on it mounted on the bar for $250. (Less than $20 earns you a “warm fuzzy feeling.”)

Where the wild things are—or aren’t

This photo of a mountain lion, found at a hunters’ discussion site, purports to have been taken in June of this year in Hillsdale; however, its authenticity can’t be verified. UPDATE: Thanks to web research by Alan Coon, it now appears that as suspected, the photo above is from another area—Michigan.

Several years ago, another photo said to be of a mountain lion dragging a deer past a local video camera circulated on Facebook, but that appears to have been a hoax using footage from a a faraway game preserve. 

Anecdotally, this site has heard many accounts from residents of seeing both mountain lions and bobcats in the area—and I’ve seen what looked like one of the latter bound across 9G in Livingston earlier this year.

An acquaintance has also claimed to have seen a very large-tusked wild boar on her property in Hillsdale. About a decade ago, newspapers were awash with humorous stories about a Vietnamese pig that was running wild around Tivoli for much of one summer.

Certainly, there are black bear all over the County. And I’ve seen them twice in a dozen years right in downtown Hudson: once in the churchyard of the First Presbyterian Church sometime around 2004, and once in a neighbor’s garden in the 100 block of Warren Street in 1998. (In the latter case, law enforcement officers were actually seen tossing donuts over the fence to the bear until the game warden could show up with a tranquilizer.)

A 2008 About Town article by Arlene Wege discusses the range of possible or mythical sitings of various large beasts in the region. As she notes, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation does not acknowledge mountain lions’ presence here, but some hunters at the site above note that DEC is often slow to make major changes in their inventories.