Making Magic
Why Beacon? Is it magic? The natural setting is certainly spectacular, with Mount Beacon towering majestically above the city and the energy of the Hudson River rushing by. Whatever it is, it has allowed Beacon to develop into a quirky, charming ecosystem of businesses, where you can find a world-class doughnut shop (Glazed Over) sandwiched between two used bookstores (Beacon Reads and Binnacle Books); where, in a few short years, the Hudson Valley Brewery has turned into a nonstop Coachella for craft beer lovers and the imminent arrival of a new brewery and taproom run by Garnerville's Industrial Arts Brewing looks to keep the good vibes flowing. Where local businesses like the kitchenware store Utensil and the Middle Eastern restaurant Ziatun can establish and expand; and where longtime fixtures like BJ's Restaurant are still frying up the best chicken and fish in town. It is a place where people like 84-year-old barber Alvin Bell, who spent 27 years working at the Nabisco factory before it was transformed into Dia:Beacon, can open up a business that survives for 30 years and counting.
Perhaps it's magic. But magic is what the magician does just out of sight while you're distracted by the waving handkerchief. Magic is what happens unheralded and unseen, just beyond the spotlight. You want magic? Show up and do the work.
In the 12 years I've been living in, and writing about, Beacon, the biggest groundswell hasn't been the amount of restaurants and coffee shops that have opened up, but the amount of people who have dedicated themselves to reviving the civic life of the city. Both lifelong residents and recent transplants have picked up trash, weeded, formed committees, staged bake sales, painted murals, thrown cookouts, and traded childcare so that they could attend endless school board meetings. And then they ran for school board, the city council, the county legislature—and won—all while also having jobs, families, and art to make, or some combination of all three.
These are the people who have transformed the city, and these are the ones joining together to shepherd the city through what happens next. Because other forces have been at work transforming Beacon, and in the past year they've become impossible to miss. They're the three new apartment buildings on Main Street, which are taller than any other buildings around. They're the new condos by City Hall and the train station. These projects were drawn up and granted variances for height, parking, and other things years ago, when Beacon was still trying to attract developers and happy to let projects sail through with minimal attention. People are paying attention now.
Beacon's rents have skyrocketed in the past few years, forcing many longtime residents to move away and deterring new businesses from setting up shop in the area in the first place. There's hope that at least the new housing will help take some pressure off the market, but many of the apartments are being listed at prices comparable to Brooklyn. Will Greenpoint residents pay the same amount of money to live in Beacon? What happens if rents get so high that Main Street is once again as desolate as it was 20 years ago, only this time around the storefronts won't all be empty from lack of interest but because no one can afford them? And what's going to happen when all these new residents link up to the ticking time bomb that is the city's 100-plus-year-old sewage system?
