It’s not at all unusual for people to be charmed by Rosendale. Whether they’re just driving through “downtown,” catching an indie movie or live performance at the Rosendale Theatre, or attending the bustling annual Rosendale Street Festival—the 32nd edition of which takes place July 24 and 25—many are instantly enchanted the first time they pass through this simultaneously quaint and progressive town.
The first time I visited, on a July night in 2000, I fell head over heels. After an uphill walk to the former train trestle overlooking the town, dinner and music at the Rosendale Café, a walk past the Rosendale Theatre and the town’s assorted shops, I was struck. What a beguiling combination of small-town charm, cultural sophistication, and a gritty lack of pretension, I thought. It was as if I’d just met the country cousin to my own stomping grounds at the time, the East Village. I felt strangely at home.
Five years later, my husband and I would get kicked out of our large but disheveled Avenue B loft and find ourselves unable to afford even a studio in New York City for the same low rent we’d been paying. And so, now, for the past five and a half years, we’ve been stationed right on Rosendale’s Main Street.
It’s been the perfect perch for observing this remarkable place. It’s an unbelievably colorful town, marked by so many diverse characteristics: a rich history; a spectacular natural landscape replete with mountains to climb and a river to kayak; a fertile arts scene; a variety of good restaurants; and quirky rural characters many liken to those on the ‘90s television show “Northern Exposure.” Above all—despite the usual small-town divisions between the old-old timers and the relative newcomers—Rosendale has an increasingly tight-knit, environmentally and socially progressive community, in the true sense of the word.
From my vantage point, I find it fascinating to keep watching this 20-square- mile town of roughly 6,400 people grow and change. The Rosendale I first observed 10 years ago was a very different place than the town I moved to, and different still from the town I live in now. It’s definitely coming up—although at its own pace.
Rosendale has a storied history rooted in the natural hydraulic cement business that was strongest in the 19th century. Sadly, last year town historian Dietrich Werner passed away. Werner ran the Snyder Estate and the Widow Jane Mine, an astoundingly vast limestone cave where occasionally musical performances and drumming sessions are held. A couple of years ago, Werner spoke to me about stories that Main Street had once been a red-light district for limestone miners, with many bordellos. He went on to tell me about the town’s more recent history, the 1960s through the 1980s, when there were something like 18 bars on Main Street. In addition to booze, he said, you could easily purchase a joint or a tab of acid. These days, Rosendale is a lot tamer than that.
Lately, there’s been a lot of positive change. The biggest news: The Rosendale Theatre, the town’s anchor business owned and operated for 62 years by the Cacchio family, is now in the process of being purchased by the Rosendale Theatre Collective, a community group. The group has drawn closely together many diverse people from the town. And in a feat of impressive social networking, they got about 3,000 people to vote daily for a month for the group to receive a $50,000 Pepsi Refresh grant. The group won.
Also, the Wallkill Valley Land Trust and the Open Space Institute last year purchased the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, a huge town asset. They’ve already begun restoring the existing path, and will also repair the defunct northern half of the railroad trestle to expand the trail all the way to Kingston.
Finally, thanks to the hard work of many in town—in an effort helmed by Environmental Commission Chair Jennifer Metzger—New York State has finally provided new sidewalks, extending all the way from the town’s senior center, past the Community Center and pool on Route 32, to Main Street, making Rosendale a more walkable town. “Our vision has been for a whole loop of sidewalks around town, including James Street,”
Metzger says, noting that much of James Street is still without sidewalks. Two pedestrians were killed on James Street in recent years. “We want this to be a pedestrian town, and so we’re hoping for more.” Many in town prefer to walk and bike when they can. With a Community center that’s powered partly with solar panels, and heated and cooled geothermically, and an annual Earth Expo, Rosendale is an environmentally progressive town. “We’ve signed the Climate Smart Communities Pledge,” Metzger reports, “which means we’re committed to setting a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and use of fossil fuels.”
These are only the most recent changes. If you ask people who’ve lived here many years, they’ll tell you Rosendale has always been in flux. “There’s always been that kind of feel here,” says Wayne Montecalvo, a musician and artist who also moved up from the East Village, but back in 1982. Montecalvo has watched people and places come and go here for going on three decades. He was a founding member of the popular Rosendale-based band The Fighting McKenzies, which played from the mid-’80s to about 2002, and also the creator of “Trash Town,” a summer-long art project in 1999 that culminated in a sort of musical performed in a minitown made of castoffs from the dump, in the parking lot of what is now the Rosendale Café. “New people are always coming here, from the city and elsewhere, and there’s always this sense that that town is on the verge of turning into something big, but then it never really does,” says Montecalvo. “I think that actually adds to the character.”
We hear it again and again: Rosendale is repeatedly declared the “next hot town.” Because it’s less affluent than nearby towns that are more attractive to weekenders, it always seems ripe for gentrification. But it never quite happens. There are many long-standing theories as to why the town never fully takes off—not enough parking, the main street doing double duty as a state highway with too high a speed limit—but the truth is, many of the locals are quite happy to keep it just the way it is.
Talking Shop
I should probably bite my tongue, but it’s hard to imagine Rosendale ever becoming a major shopping destination. The downtown area is small, and there seems to be a particular critical retail mass the town can handle before stores start shuttering. On the edge of town, there’s The Shopping Plaza That Time Forgot, known more formally as Fann’s Plaza, which is less than half filled with stores. That said, those stores and restaurants—Rosendale Liquors, Peppino’s Pizza, Chinese Gourmet Kitchen, Tiny Bubbles Laundromat, Martin Dry Cleaners, Miss Peggy’s Hair Salon, and 32 Lunch, a greasy-spoon diner with great food and an animated chef—thrive, especially because many in the Rosendale community believe in supporting local businesses.
There are some great stores on Main Street too, and they all seem to be holding their own.
There’s The Big Cheese, selling—you guessed it—hundreds of delicious varieties of cheese, but also Middle Eastern foods and an impressive selection of secondhand clothes. Always busy is Favata’s Table Rock Tours, a relocated iteration of an existing bike shop that also sells skateboards, owned by professional mountain biker Christian Favata. Vintage fashion and furniture abound at Soiled Doves, and at Rosendale Wares. There are two nice art galleries in town, Roos Arts, and Wings Gallery. The Alternative Baker, relocated from Kingston’s Rondout neighborhood, offers fine baked goods, often using alternative grains for those with special diets.
Vision of Tibet, a gift shop featuring clothes, jewelry, books, and Buddhist-themed spiritual merchandise, was a welcome addition last summer from Manhattan’s West Village. Planet Pet offers dog grooming. You can get attractive cabinets designed for your home at Woodstock Custom Woodworking. And you can join a drumming circle, shop for drums, and purchase CDs at The Drum Depot.
When the town holds some of its many festivals, such as Frozendale Day in December, the shops are especially packed. One of Rosendale’s mottoes is that it is “The Festival Town,” and with eight or so, it seems like truth in advertising. The most renowned is the Rosendale Street Festival, which this year features 71 bands on five stages, plus a kids stage, and a wide variety of vendors offering food, clothing, jewelry, crafts and more.
Second in the running must be the International Pickle Fest, the 13th edition of which will take place at the Community Center on Sunday, November 21. Founded by town barber and character Bill Brooks after some friends from Japan who were coming to visit mentioned, “We like pickles,” the Pickle Fest attracts a diverse group of picklers, and thousands of visitors.
For a small town, Rosendale has a surprising number of restaurants. On Main Street alone, there are four. The Rosendale Café, in business since 1993, offers a nice selection of vegetarian dishes, and doubles as a respected blues and folk music venue on the weekends. The Bywater Bistro features an eclectic menu that ranges from bar food—three varieties of chicken wings, for example – to haute cuisine. In the warm weather, it’s a treat to sit out on the porch or near the beautiful gardens out back. Occasionally, Mary Logan, also known as “Deejay Doe,” will spin out there on weekend nights. The Big Cheese serves breakfast, lunch, and a light dinner, especially to the crowd attending movies and shows at the theater. And the casual and homey Red Brick Tavern, run by the owners of the erstwhile Loft restaurant in New Paltz, has been busy since the day it opened a couple of years ago. (We were pleasantly stunned, one Saturday night in February, when we were turned away for lack of a reservation.) The menu is vast, filled with interesting appetizers, salads, pastas, fish, and steaks.
An interesting thing is happening at the Red Brick: Old Rosendale meets New Rosendale. The restaurant attracts a mixed crowd, which is good, promoting the sense of community. There’s a similar thing happening over at the intersection of Route 32 and Madeline Lane, at Market Market, a hip café that three years ago replaced the much loved Springtown Green Grocer. There, people from what used to seem like different “cliques” are crossing paths, and divisions seem to be disappearing. Market Market, owned and run by Jenifer Constantine and Trippy Thompson, expats of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, seems also to be a place where other refugees of downtown New York City and Brooklyn find each other. “I met a guy there who lived two blocks away from us in Carroll Gardens,” says John Cox, a furnishings finisher who moved to the area in 2005.
In addition to foods that are otherwise easier to find in the city—fresh tacos, Korean bibimbap, Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches—Market Market has also brought younger, edgier entertainment and nightlife to the town. There’s indie rock karaoke every six weeks, live music from local and even nationally popular bands, and the wildly popular “Tributon,” in which local musicians perform covers of a chosen artist’s music. So far, Madonna, Prince, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, the Kinks, and the Pixies have been covered, and every time, the place is jam-packed.
The Rosendale You Don’t See from the Street
Driving through, one might get the impression that Rosendale is a sleepy little town with not much going on. But there’s a whole other Rosendale you don’t see from the street. There’s a community life that is so active, many of us can hardly keep up with it.
On many weekends, my husband and I will go to three or four different events in town—a live music show at Market Market or the Rosendale Café; a party at someone’s house; a movie; an art opening at one of the galleries or at the Women’s Studio Workshop; a play put on by the local theater troupe, Starling Productions, helmed by local actresses Julie Novak and Eva Tenuto. Meanwhile, while we’re doing all that, we’ll still be missing three or four other things. I swear, we are more booked here, socially and culturally, than we ever were in New York City.
The longer you live here, the more people you know, and the more rooted you become in the community. And, thanks to group efforts like the Rosendale Theatre Collective and the group pursuing the sidewalks, the community seems to be getting stronger and more tightly bound.
My gauge for this is the annual Memorial Day Weekend pig pickin’ held at the home of Sandy Petersen and Will Jobsis, former owners of the Springtown Green Grocer. The couple has been living in Rosendale for 22 years after each lived in various other places around the country. “Rosendale just felt like a place where we could really fit in, and it had beautiful mountains like Colorado, which I missed,” Petersen says. Now they know just about everyone—old and new. They’ve been holding the pig pickin’ for six years, and every time, there are more people in attendance, including the latest newcomers.
The first year we lived here, we went and knew no one. Each year since then, there have been progressively more people we know, plus a bigger crowd in general. This year, there were over 200 people lining up for pork pulled from a 150-pound pig cooked on a smoker built into the ground in the backyard, plus a chance to catch up with their neighbors. At one point, local graphic designer Carla Rozman suggested a group photo. It didn’t take much to gather everyone on the couple’s side lawn. Photographer Jim Fossett climbed on the roof to take the shot. And everyone in the contented crowd smiled.
RESOURCES
The Alternative Baker www.lemoncakes.com
The Big Cheese (845) 658-7175
Bywater Bistro www.bywaterbistro.com
Favata’s Table Rock Tours www.trtbicycles.com
Market Market www.marketmarketcafe.com
Planet Pet www.planetpetgrooming.com
Red Brick Tavern www.redbrickrosendale.com
Rosendale Café www.rosendalecafe.com
Rosendale Street Festival www.rosendalestreetfestival.ning.com
Rosendale Theatre Collective www.rosendaletheatre.org
Roos Arts www.roosarts.com
Town of Rosendale www.townofrosendale.com
Wallkill Valley Land Trust www.wallkillvalleylt.org
Wings Gallery www.wingsart.org
Women’s Studio Workshop www.wsworkshop.org
Woodstock Custom Woodworking (845) 658-7007
This article appears in July 2010.
