Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Hudson in the New York Times
There was an article about Hudson in today's New York Times, in the Home & Garden section: "Cultivating Hudson: Enter the Tastemakers." It quotes Andrew Arrick, of Finch, as saying that Hudson is "always on the verge of something," and introduces a new and apt word for life in our city, coined by Ann Marie Gardner, of Modern Farmer: "Rurbanism." (Rural + urban--get it?) The article is full of familiar names, places, and faces (there's a slide show), but it seems a tad strange that with the focus on Hudson, it includes a B&B in Tivoli and a high-end development in Kerhonkson. I guess that's the rurbanism theme.
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"Enter the Effete", I would rewrite it
ReplyDeleteAs Judy Sherman points out in her comment (attached to 'the Bridge' entry by mistake, I guess, the article covers 3 full pages in the print edition, and mentions Sam Pratt as an 'activist' who spent 7 years of his life fighting a huge cement plant on the 'waterfront'. And I would agree with her comment, that 'without Sam Pratt, Peter Jung, and us', who won the fight in 2005, none of the wonderful new happenings in Hudson would have happened. As an added note, we should not become blinded by all the new glitter and we should pay more attention to the politics, because we have to be watchdogs to ensure that nothing like the cement plant creeps in again, and this is appropos to Carol's article above on the transmission lines. Ironic.
ReplyDeleteArticles about the New Hudson appear every few years, beginning back in ancient times in the late 1990s when Hudson was also "rising again" and "betting on new arrivals." Some of them, as does this one, tend to ignore history, or are simply ignorant of it, and share the same subtext: now is new and new is better and new never happened before. The article, by condescendingly announcing that the tastemakers have only now (Ah and at last!) arrived, erases more than 30 years of the previous history of Hudson and of those who came to the city long before the latest tastemakers when Hudson was none of the things this article celebrates, and where, in a far more difficult economic and social climate, they made the road far easier for the latest arrivals and indeed made it possible for this most recent influx of new newness to thrive. There is no such thing as spontaneous generation.
ReplyDeleteWhere is this history written? I find a book about the economy of vice in Hudson ("Diamond Street") and Anna Bradbury's history from 1908. But what about the last fifty years or so? The last twenty?
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DeleteWow, it must be mind-blowing to be part of a "paradigm" shift! It inspires me to go out and buy something farm-like.
ReplyDeleteBut if it turns out there's a genuine interest in ecology among all these socially conscious people putting a lot of time and energy into this place, where are they?