Uptown is also the site of yearly Wall Street Jazz Festival and the Hudson Valley Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Community Center, and is a prime barhopping destination thanks to happening hostelries like tapas and wine bar Elephant, the newly opened Stockade Tavern, and performance space 323 Wall Street (formerly Backstage Studio Productions). “[323 Wall Street] is working with several programmers to host live music, theatrical productions, a dance school for children and adults, even yoga classes,” says Sevan Melikyan, who assumed control of the venue in August. “We have an upstairs dance studio, the smaller Wall Space room and bar up front, and a huge 1872 vaudeville theater in the back, which always blows people away when they first see it.” Melikyan is excited about the club’s upcoming events, which include the Halloween Zombie Bash on October 30. (One can’t help but wonder what ghosts may be lurking in the tunnels beneath the building, supposedly a stop on the Underground Railroad, that night.) On nearby Front Street is Snapper Magee’s, an alternative music haunt and favorite hub of punk bicycle club the Dusty Spokes.
Midtown Makeover
On warmer nights the Dusty Spokes pedal over to Midtown to hit the city’s other main punk rock club, the Basement, and, just around the corner on St. James Street, microbrewery Keegan Ales, which books a broader range of live music (jazz, blues, Americana, and classic rock) and dispenses and exports three award-winning beers from within its 1830s brick walls. “The City of Kingston has been very helpful to us,” says Tommy Keegan, who co-owns the operation with his father. “Mayor Sottile and the other government people really wanted us here, they held the land for us and did a lot to help with tax credits and other economic aid. I love being in Midtown, I actually live right next door [to the brewery]. It’s one of the last affordable places in the region.”
What’s keeping Midtown real estate inexpensive for the present are the aftereffects of its 1970s urban business exodus. While the area has admittedly struggled with crime and vice for decades—reportedly, it was a center for brewing of the, shall we say, less legal variety during Prohibition—Midtown’s streetscape of one-time factory and department store buildings offers the perfect stage for the space-seeking artists and businesses now formulating its renaissance. Examples include tech-media complex the Seven21 Media Center, the tellingly named multi-arts Shirt Factory, which houses composer Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Space, and several small galleries. But when it comes to (literally) perfect stages, the prize goes to Midtown’s anchor of renewal, the Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC). Situated at 601 Broadway, the historic movie and vaudeville house opened as the Broadway Theater in 1927. Saved from demolition in 1977, it was taken over by the directors of Poughkeepsie’s Bardavon Theater in 2006 and presents top acts in the fields of music, dance, comedy, and other entertainment; everything from the Pixies to “The Nutcracker” to Garrison Keillor. “The [theater’s] acoustics are really good because of the rounded walls—there’s not a bad seat in the house,” says UPAC/Bardavon’s director, Chris Silva. “We’ve done $2 million worth of renovation and we’re working to raise the $3 million needed for completion. The theater’s definitely had a great impact here, and our membership is soaring. It really feels like Midtown is coming back, especially when we have shows and you see all of the restaurants packed.” The projected redevelopment of the neighboring King’s Inn property into a multiple-use community space promises further rebirth for Midtown.
Down in the Rondout
We now follow Broadway south to Kingston’s remaining district, the Rondout, another neighborhood with a historic—and salty—past. Lying along the shore of the Rondout Creek, a Hudson River estuary, the settlement began as a village named for its nearby Dutch fort, or “redoubt,” and is rich with striking brick buildings constructed during its 19th-century heyday as a key shipping center. Once the tough realm of canal diggers, ice cutters, dockworkers, brick makers, and brewers, the area was a city unto itself before being incorporated with Kingston proper in 1872. By the 1960s and ’70s blight had set in, but in the ’90s urban pioneers and restaurateurs began arriving to revitalize the neighborhood’s West Strand block, making the Rondout into the buzzing nightlife zone it is today. In addition to many fine eateries, the Trolley Museum of New York, and the Hudson River Maritime Museum, the area features an array of inns and antique stores and the nearby Rondout Lighthouse. Being a waterfront, the locality naturally boasts several marinas. “[The Rondout] is located halfway between New York and the locks leading into the Erie and Champlain canals,” says Kingston City Marina Dock Master and Harbor Master Scott Herrington. “Kingston City Marina alone has 70 slips, and a lot of our patrons are boat owners who summer in the Great Lakes region and winter in the Caribbean.”