Rosendale: Enchanted Playground

by Anne Pyburn and photographs by David Cunningham, June 29, 2011

There’s a deceptively sleepy feeling to Rosendale. On a weekday morning, there might be only a couple of people stirring around Main Street at any given moment, more action on the porch of the Crossroads Deli in Cottekill out in and down around Stewarts than in the center of town. Then suddenly, it’s playtime—show time, dinner time, music time, or, best of all, festival time—and Main Street rises like the Delaware and Hudson Canal where it used to flood at the center of town. Folks from the hamlets and the hills beyond pour in, locals pop out to inhabit comfy porches or are pulled into the current of the street.

Any given weekend, the action might be centered around the theater, the café, the community center, the Red Brick Tavern, or the Bywater Bistro or all of the above and more, but all of a sudden the town is visibly pulsating with sweet, quirky life.

A Dreamy Town
When the family that had run the Rosendale Theatre for three generations needed to move on after keeping a night at the movies far more affordable and intelligent in this pocket-size town than it is at your nearest multiplex, the community didn’t whine and wring its collective hands. Not this town. They organized. They fund-raised. They reached out to friends far and near and great and small, bombarded the Pepsi Refresh website with determined voters, and bought themselves their theater. Now The Rosendale Theatre Collective, it makes a splendid venue for area crews like Starling Productions, who recently had a smash hit there with “Too Much Information.” Such fun was had with “TMI,” in fact, that a Story Slam based on the concept is coming to Market Market this month.
The gray gold of Rosendale’s Natural Cement has given way to a rainbow of realized dreams, the 18 bars downtown to a wider variety of ways to have fun, but some things haven’t changed and probably won’t. Rosendale’s still welcoming vacationers—the venerable Astoria Hotel is being reborn as a B&B, christened The 1850 House. It’s still a great place to work hard and play hard, with a natural beauty that outshines artifice, far more than skin deep. And like the gray gold, the boundless creativity and sense of sheer fun that is Rosendale could well be a key ingredient in the foundations of tomorrow’s better world.

Rosendale Natural Cement