Back in 2020, Tori Messner told her mom that she and her friends—fellow urban creatives who’d taken refuge from the pandemic in Ellenville—intended to revitalize the community, the response was approving but a bit skeptical. “She said, ‘Get back to me in 10 years,’” says Messner. “Well, it’s been five, and things have changed a lot.”
Messner, a creative director, and her partner Natalie Moena, a photographer, opened Reservoir Studios when they moved from New York City to offer the growing population of local creatives state-of-the-art branding, production, and content creation services. And as cofounders of COFFE—Coalition of Forward Facing Ellenville—they hit the ground running with Market on Market, a farmer’s market that’s been going strong since 2021.
COFFE now has 150 members and holds monthly meetings, with business, political, and civic leaders as guest speakers. They’ve inherited management of an Instagram account with over 3,700 followers, Destination Ellenville, which has produced tourism and hiking maps for local businesses to distribute. And to Messner’s delight, COFFE has drawn in longtime local business folk and artists to the original group that started scheming over pandemic-era Zoom calls.
“People who moved up here during the pandemic found they truly loved living with nature, which hadn’t really been an option for many of them before remote work,” Messner says. “But they knew the remote situation wouldn’t last forever, so the question became, ‘How do we build opportunities up here?’ You have to make sure you’re building quality of life for everyone, and it’s hard work. Alongside specialty businesses downtown, you have to continue to lift up useful things that are accessible for everyday needs, for the average person.”
Along with newly opened restaurants and cafes, downtown Ellenville now offers The Common Good, a bookstore/bar/community event space; Everything Nice, a record store that serves up a broad selection of new and used vinyl, and Vintage Modern, a furniture emporium. Legacy bakery Cohen’s has changed hands, but continues to thrive; Matthews Pharmacy, a fixture since 1858, is serving new customers since Walgreens pulled out. And Tops Friendly Markets, a regional supermarket chain, has just opened a store, hired 120 people, and welcomed hungry locals to its new store in what had been a ShopRite that closed amid great trepidation in August of last year.
Lifelong local Elliot Auerbach is celebrating all of it, but especially that last one. “I cook a lot, so I was feeling that lack of food options perhaps more than some,” he says. “Tops is just what we needed. And I’m excited by what I’m seeing right now—a great synergy between the pandemic-era newcomers and the legacy people who’ve been invested for decades. People have bought homes and they’re fixing them up, which is bringing fresh joy and wonderment to everyone here.”
Auerbach is well-positioned to know. His family ran Ace Hardware (still thriving under the ownership of a former employee) for over half a century; he worked alongside his father there for 20 years, and served the village as mayor for three terms in the 1990s and as manager for seven years. The Ellenville of his youth was a bustling place. “There was a bank on every corner, there were five pharmacies and all kinds of bars and restaurants,” he says. “I’m seeing that coming back, and I’m excited.”
After retiring from his last public service position as deputy state comptroller, Auerbach put his shoulder to the wheel once again on the home front, stepping up to help new mayor Evan Trent get the books sorted out. “The finances were a mess, and he was short-staffed. It was one of those situations where everything that could go wrong did,” he says. “So he inherited a huge financial challenge. He’s a young guy, very smart, very good heart; I love his energy and commitment. I had had the advantage of being mentored by four mayors over the years, so I stepped in and helped sort it out from February to October of 2024.” For his six months of effort, Auerbach was paid one dollar.
Larger projects that may appear stalled, Auerbach believes, are still viable—just complicated. Nobody’s giving up. Cresco Labs, which purchased a 50,000-square-foot warehouse to great fanfare in 2022 in hopes of employing 375 in the growing, manufacturing and distribution of cannabis, is stalled by federal banking constraints but still hopeful. The new owner of the once-grand Nevele Hotel property remains optimistic about drawing in a new luxury brand. “He’s working hard to get permitting in place and get that off the ground,” Auerbach says. “And the Terrace Motel was just purchased by a group that wants to put a new motel there.”
On the Cusp
Sue Trager, who led the Ellenville-Wawarsing Chamber of Commerce in 2023 and most of ‘24, says a midrange affordable hotel is what the community could really use right now. “That would be a good step in the right direction, to keep the tourism flowing and give more people an opportunity to discover this place,” she says. “I mean, there’s so much here to find. Shadowland [where Judd Hirsch recently starred in “I’m Not Rappaport”], great restaurants, the Borscht Belt Museum, the festivals—there’s a lot to discover here.”
Trager’s own family business, Northeast Off-Road Adventures, is emblematic of the community’s tendency toward new ideas and good fun. Besides offering off-roading instruction, tours, and ride-alongs, the company’s nonprofit side, SOAR Experiences, offers adaptive off-roading hiking and air gun marksmanship to people with mobility issues, serving clients from rehab hospitals, universities, and veterans’ organizations. They’re also an authorized dealership for Action Trackchairs, offering free demos on their 75 acres of wilderness to people who thought they’d never hike again. “One more new business coming in and hiring 50, 75 people would be a tipping point,” Trager says. “It can be tough—we faced opposition at first. But now we’re bringing in around 30 to 50 people a month, and we send them to Gaby’s Cafe and Aroma Thyme, to all the restaurants, to see a show or check out the museum.”
At the three-year-old Borscht Belt Museum, director Andrew Jacobs is excited about this summer’s Borscht Belt Festival, happening July 26-27, which will feature Josh Gondelman headlining a tribute to comedy legend Robert Klein along with over 30 other comedians. A street fair on Sunday will fill downtown with klezmer music, workshops, artisanal vendors, and the enticing aromas of Jewish food.
The museum, meanwhile, is open six days a week with “And Such Small Portions!” an exhibit exploring the intersection of comedy and food in the Catskills of yore. “New Arrivals,” beginning this summer, will showcase selected items that have been recently donated to the museum’s archives. “We’ve gotten a deluge, and this will be a curated glimpse of the tip of the iceberg,” says Jacobs. “And we got a federal grant for our oral history project, so we’re working with an animator who’s going to make a film from six of them. We have collected 120 so far.”
Diverse and Happy
Alongside an award-winning rural hospital, top-flight library, and live theater, Ellenville has also retained another asset that many a community lacks these days: in-depth local news served weekly, both digitally and on paper, from the Shawangunk Journal. Alex Schiffer bought the Ellenville Journal in 2006 and has been striving to bring the good news and the bad without fear or favor. “The community’s still struggling a bit,” he says. “The village finances, the budget, there’s just not enough money there. And big projects like the Nevele and Cresco are delayed; something might be going on in the background, but it’s hard to know.”
Nevertheless, he agrees there’s hope in the air. “There are six places to get coffee right now, which may be a little crazy, but good places. And Tops is great—nice supermarket, community-minded people who do a lot of advertising, which we love. The people who came up during the pandemic are sincerely invested: they’re getting on volunteer boards, they’re running for office. By and large, the people here are really good people. And even though the school district and the paper have had issues, I’d send my kids there all over again—it’s a diverse place and a happy one.”
Before Ellenville’s struggles with deindustrialization, it was an innovative boomtown. Businesses here didn’t just make things, they originated them—the modular electric TV antenna, the switchblade knife, and the pogo stick all have Ellenville in their DNA—and brought prosperity and renown. Now, at Flowering Sun Ecology Center, permaculturists have pivoted to growing gourmet mushrooms and are experiencing the fruits of their communal labor with sales to farmers’ markets, stores, and restaurants across the tri-state area.
“We’re very vertically integrated—the only thing we don’t do here is produce the spawn, although we’re getting into that,” says Sam Newman, Flowering Sun’s product developer. “We see ourselves as educators more than anything, and we’re slowly rolling out classes and workshops. We have a CSA, or people can just reach out to us if they want mushrooms. There’s a lot of value-added potential with mushrooms, and we’ve gotten a FuzeHub manufacturing grant from the state to scale up our value-added facility and develop all sorts of products, drinks, and cosmetics and infused honeys.”
While challenges still lie ahead for the village, Ellenville’s mycorrhizal network hums with potential all over town. The picturesque spot nestled between the mountain ranges may have been down for a minute, but has moved far beyond the grasp of cynics who’d have counted it out—and they’re hoping you’ll stop over for a show, a festival or a good meal, and check out the good news.
This article appears in July 2025.
