Permanent efforts to transform Midtown are complemented by major names in the arts passing through the area, including world-renowned acts at the Ulster Performing Arts Center. This spring, UPAC hosts Kathy Griffin and Lewis Black as the comic headliners of Serious Laughs: Art, Politics, Humor, part of a year-long festival sponsored by the Bardavon. The three-week celebration of comedy also features two visual arts exhibitions as well as comedy performances at smaller venues throughout Kingston, like BSP, Keegan Ales, and the Rondout Music Lounge.
Stone Ridge
Neighboring Stone Ridge mirrors Kingston's rebirth of culture and community. A desire to return to the hamlet's anticommercial historic roots fueled the Route 209 sidewalk project—an effort completed in 2009 to resurrect the hamlet's 19th-century bluestone walkways that were displaced to make room for automobile traffic. The reinstallation project is representative of a larger movement within the community. "Over the last couple of years, there's a new energy of wanting [Stone Ridge] to be more of a town than a throughway," says Tanya Robie, assistant director of Marbletown Multi-Arts (MaMa). "With new renovations at MaMa, we're really trying to facilitate a space where people want to pause and be here." MaMa, a multipurpose community center and organic juice bar, hosts a variety of programs geared toward a healthy mind, body, and spirit—a business model that is cropping up elsewhere in town. Besides organically developed community hubs, like the family-owned Davenport's Farm, new establishments are focused on fostering such a culture. Family Traditions, a multipurpose center that opened in March 2012, offers spaces for selling locally crafted items, exhibiting art, and conducting workshops and classes. Proprietor of Family Traditions Peri Rainbow, a psychotherapist and SUNY New Paltz professor, says that the concept for Family Traditions came from a desire to honor cultural diversity in the area. "We brought the center and retail gallery space here so that people can find a place where their values can be mirrored or [they're] supported in creating new ones," says Rainbow.
Bridging education and community is an important component of Stone Ridge's collaborative ethos. In addition to its new performing arts center, which hosts events and performances open to the community, the High Meadow School in Stone Ridge encourages older students to use the town's new bluestone sidewalks to walk to the library, where many students volunteer, or to Bodacious Bagels for lunch. "The students are using the sidewalks and starting to feel there's a flow between the school and the town," says Head of School Michelle Hughes. The school, founded by a group of volunteer parents in 1984 on a farm in New Paltz, emphasizes the importance of community service: Students are expected to participate in a variety of local and global community service, and parents also contribute by volunteering 25 hours of service per school year as a way of keeping tuition costs reasonably low.
At Marbletown Elementary School, parent involvement has resulted in major changes to the curriculum. Nicci Cagan, parent and founding member of From the Ground Up, shifted her focus to school lunch after helping to start the school's community gardens. With a grant that she received from the New World Foundation to study the viability of a farm-to-school curriculum in Stone Ridge, Cagan helped implement food and farm-related educational programming, partnerships with organizations like the Hudson Valley Seed Library, and the School Food Summit held in February, which featured some of the country's most renowned food experts, including "Renegade Lunch Lady" Ann Cooper. "We're working toward education in the community, the classroom, and in the cafeteria so that you really connect all of the dots to our food system," says Cagan.
Hurley
Kingston and Stone Ridge, working to reconnect with their roots, have a kindred spirit in Hurley, the town that makes up the mesmerizing stretch of farmland along Route 209. Its fertile flatlands, enriched by thousands of years of flooding by the lower Esopus Creek, are what attracted the Dutch to the area nearly 400 years ago. The settlers left a lasting mark in the form of Hurley's 10 stone houses, preserved examples of Dutch Colonial architecture along three streets in the village's historic district. Hurley's annual Stone House Day, held every July, features tours of these private homes with guides dressed in colonial attire. Whether resurrecting history or working to preserve it, Ulster County's Route 209 communities offer a reassuring binary: The only thing commensurate to the area's past is the promise of its future.
