Maintaining the Mix: Hudson

With its long history of booms and busts, Hudson is a microcosm of America. Hudson, like the country at large, has undergone countless transitions. What was indigenous land became a whaling center, then a manufacturing hub, and later a haven for gambling and prostitution. Today, the city in miniature is a vibrant tapestry of urban revival, celebrity sightings, community fridges, regenerative farming, the projects of a mysterious billionaire, art galleries, immigration, and tourism.

Hudson is a city with an affordable housing crisis, in which there is no shortage of expensive ceramics, radicchio salads, chunky knit bath towels, and plans for the construction of boutique hotels (there are four in the works). Yet for the almost 6,000 residents who call Hudson home, it is just that, a home; a place where the frequency of belonging cuts through all other noise.

“Our residents are really the soul of this city,” says Kamal Johnson, a born-and-bred Hudsonian and the city’s first Black mayor. “Affordable housing is our number one platform item,” he says. Through the appointment of a full-time housing director, alongside the planned construction of municipal affordable housing developments—some 90 units are currently in development—solving the housing crisis, Mayor Johnson says, is something, “we’re going to make sure is going to happen.”

Common Council President Tom DiPietro mirrors the mayor’s optimism. “We’re doing everything you can possibly do in a small municipality to create affordable housing,” he says. “If there’s any nemesis to our agenda, it’s absentee landlords.”

The primary absentee landlord in Hudson is the mysterious Galvan Foundation. A February 2022 property count numbered their Hudson portfolio at 86 properties, many of them unoccupied. Most recently, they acquired the former Helsinki Hudson, a popular music venue that closed during the pandemic. Founded by the billionaire developer Eric Galloway, and his late partner Henry van Amerigan, the Galvan Foundation has contributed some improvements to the city, such as a library and the planned construction of several affordable housing units. The slow pace of development and lack of transparency, however, has left many residents feeling uneasy and ignored.

Serria McGriff grew up in Hudson, where she then raised her two children. “It’s good for the community to come together,” she says, watching her now teenaged daughters get ready to participate in the Sankofa Black Arts and Cultural Festival and Parade as members of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, which together with Operation Unite is one of nearly 25 community-based cultural programs in the city.

“I have seen a change in the community. I feel like they are trying to push us out, instead of trying to come together to see what the community really needs. Everybody sees the new businesses and all that we can bring for people outside of Hudson, but really what’s in the community for us that really live here?” she asks.

But McGriff, too, is optimistic, a trait seemingly found in many Hudsonians. “I think we need to come together as a community for the people that live here,” she says, “so that we don’t feel left out. If we all come together, for everyone, whether we live here or not, I think we can have harmony.”A harmonious Hudson is something Jill Dearman, astrologer, author, and a professor at NYU, believes is written in the stars.

Using April 22, 1785, the date of the City of Hudson’s incorporation as its birthdate, Dearman produced an astral chart for the city. “Hudson has its Sun in Taurus and moon in Libra, both ruled by Venus. Venus is the planet of love and art, and it generally chooses a peaceful path over one of conflict,” she says.

“What I find most intriguing is the placement of Hudson’s Saturn, Pluto, and North Node. They are all in the progressive sign of Aquarius. Aquarius is concerned with community and the collective good. It is the sign that shakes up the status quo and embraces rather than fears the future.”

Hudson Portrait Pop-Up 2023

A Walk Down Warren Street

Owned and operated by Charlotta Janssen and Shannon Greer, who moved from Brooklyn to Hudson in 2011, the Hudson Milliner Art Salon on Warren Street is a creative and collaborative art space featuring art, performance, and the intersection of the two. “People are still making a ton of art in Hudson,” Greer says. “And people are still coming here to buy art.”

Since 2017 the couple’s art salon regularly features exploratory, edgy, and political work, as well as an event space for both private and community gatherings such as lectures, performances, photo shoots, dinner parties, and jiu jitsu.

Reflecting on gentrification in Hudson over the last decade, Janssen says, “I think there’s a narrative that we must look at more closely. To me there’s a huge difference between comunifiers and commodifiers. A commodifier asks, ‘How little do I have to put in, and how much can I get out of you? How much can I pump up the prices without giving anything back?’ Comunifiers bring something and give back to the community, they become a part of the community, there’s a reciprocity.”

“It’s a constant challenge, but artists need to be challenged,” says Janssen. “Art is not about standing still, it’s about moving forward. But I think as the cost of living rises and rises, there’s a problem with being able to take risks” she says.

Further up Warren Street, French-American artist and designer Marine Penvern, who moved to Hudson in 2018, continues taking risks at her namesake Atelier Penvern. “There is an influx of people with no conscience,” Penvern says. “But I feel like we are living harmoniously together. People complain about everything, it doesn’t help. Instead, they should make a change.”

Her paintings of prominent local figures were recently on display at Hudson Hall, and her Warren Street storefront sells everything she makes, including latex condom purses, paintings, and silk kaftans. “I am here, I love culture, I bring culture here. This is why people are coming here, because there is culture. We must be nurtured by our city, because if the city nurtures us, people will come, because people come for culture. If there is no culture here, what are those people going to do? Keep buying properties, talk about the properties they’re buying, and buy candles and shit?”

Hudson Farmers’ Market

Perhaps one of the strongest community pillars in Hudson is the farmers’ market. Now in its 26th year of operation, the Hudson Farmers’ Market is located centrally in Hudson’s municipal parking lot on Columbia Street. Together with live music, cute dogs, and Al Roker sightings, about 40 vendors sell their own goods, everything from local fresh produce, bread, wine, meats, and more. The market is year-round, outdoors from April to November, and during winter months, in the Elks Lodge on Harry Howard Avenue.

“Everyone is warm and friendly here” says Monica Jerminario, the market’s administrator, who has lived in Hudson for 14 years and has managed the Hudson market with her husband for over three. “I have a wild spirit, and I don’t want to be chained to a store,” she says. “The strength of the vendor community is not something you get if you’re isolated in a storefront. We’re all this interconnected web of businesses trying to keep each other thriving.”

Sue Decker, a vendor from Blue Star Farm, has been selling fresh produce at the market for 14 years. “It’s a fantastic market” she says, “There’s a great community with super loyal customers, we love being here and we’re here to serve the entire community.”

Rich Volo, aka Trixie, who runs the popular blog Trixie’s List, moved to Hudson in 2006. He sells his baked goods at the market. “Hudson changed a lot,” he says. “Every new wave of people that moves up here changes it. Everything changes. It’s constant, just like everywhere else.”

Wandering Off Warren

Through all the strange changes, commitment to craftsmanship remains central to Hudson’s creative core. “Good craftsmanship is very important to us, we want to create beers that you want to return to again and again,” says Bob Wise, one of four cofounders of Return Brewing. The brewery, now in its second year of operation, opened a tasting house on State Street in May. Together with Upper Depot and Union Street Brewing, it’s one of three breweries to open doors in Hudson in just the last year.“We’ve only gotten support. We’re friends with the other breweries,” says Wise. “It’s an amazing community with a great mix of locals who come in frequently and people from out of town, so it’s a good mix of people.”

Return Brewing has brought life back to what was once a desolate corner of town. “We’re happy to see that more people are moving off Warren Street and recognizing that there’s other stuff in Hudson, off the beaten track, if you will.”

In 2014, Layla Kalin, a local businesswoman turned farmer started Kasuri, a boutique clothing store. Shortly thereafter she met Jonathan Osofsky, who became Kasuri’s creative director. Together they turned Kasuri into what it is today. “We are a post-avant-garde fashion boutique and a space where we cultivate queer community and community across all the divisive lines that exist here in Hudson,” says Osofsky.

After a catastrophic flood at their previous location on Warren Street, Kasuri, which sells clothing by designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Bernhard Willhelm, and Vivienne Westwood, moved into the 6,000-square-foot warehouse, a former Etsy office, on Columbia Street in October. “There’s no reason for us to be in this space if we can’t use it to build something in the community that’s meaningful, and not about commerce,” Osofsky says. “I have many friends in Hudson from different communities that have told me about their experience in different boutiques and even asked what they were doing there. I want Kasuri to not be like that at all.”

In the expansive new space, Kasuri aims to build queer community through programs such as the newly formed Queer Ass Film Club, monthly queer figure drawing, readings, and celebrations of art. “We’re trying to do as much as we can in a kind of DIY way,” he says. “Not to make more money, but to make more things happen.”

The most recent addition to Kasuri is the Backroom, a queer bookstore operated by Nathan Rapport. After his Los Angeles-based Dream Brother Gallery, which highlighted working queer artists, fell victim to the pandemic, opening the Backroom was a natural progression for Rapport, who turned much of his former gallery’s art into a printed publication. “There isn’t even a queer bar in town, so having a physical space like this is important,” Rapport says.

A short walk up Columbia Street, Time & Space Limited (TSL), a community art space rooted in experimental theater, celebrates its 50th anniversary. “We hold a belief in art as having the potential to change lives and add to a community by standing for real things,” says Linda Mussman, who operates TSL with Claudia Bruce, her wife and collaborator.

“We’ve spent 50 years creating a cultural space. In the next century, there won’t be many spaces like this, because now, it’s all about real estate. It’s very difficult to be creative in a city like Hudson. It’s a tremendous sadness,” says Mussman.

“When Claudia and I first moved here 30 years ago, we hoped there would be a much more vibrant artistic community, based on sweat equity, cheap real estate, and creative energy. That is always the thing that people chase. So now that that chase is at an end, Hudson is at a crossroads,” says Mussman. What is it going to be? Is it going to be a destination for tourists, just a pass through, or can it support a vibrant community by investing in the people who can make this creative place continue?”

This article appears in September 2023.