The magazine begins each month as a messy pile of unrelated stories. A dance festival in the Berkshires. A new restaurant in Hudson. A family of painters in Woodstock. A community barbecue in Beacon. A report on rail trails.
At first glance, they have nothing to do with one another.
Then, somewhere around the third edit, the connections start their big reveal. A grandson turns his grandfather’s life story into a novel. A musician forms a band with his 82-year-old mother. Gardeners spend decades shaping landscapes they’ll never fully see completed. Communities rescue abandoned rail lines and transform them into beloved public spaces.
Before long, a theme begins stalking you from page to page. Like Banquo’s ghost at Macbeth’s feast, it keeps appearing where it wasn’t invited. You’re reading about painters: there it is. You’re reading about community dinners: hello! You duck into a story about rail trails, thinking you’ve finally lost it, and find it leaning against your car at the trailhead.
This month’s theme is inheritance.
Take rail trails. One of the stories that stayed with me this month was a report estimating that the Empire State Trail generates nearly $2 billion in annual economic activity each year. That’s an impressive number, but what fascinated me wasn’t the economics. It was the imagination. At some point, decades ago, somebody looked at a network of abandoned railroad corridors and decided they were worth saving. Not because they generated tourism dollars or supported local businesses. Those arguments came later. They saved them because they could imagine another future for them.
Once I noticed that pattern, I started seeing it everywhere. “Going Upstate” at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts traces nearly a century of artists in the Avery family responding to the same landscape. The mountains remain. The paintings change.
The Borscht Belt Festival celebrates a culture that no longer exists in its original form, yet somehow continues to shape comedy, food, entertainment, and memory. The resorts are gone. The stories remain.
The Diago family’s monthly gatherings in Beacon carry echoes of family traditions from Colombia. Different place, different guests, different century. Same impulse.
Even our food coverage kept nudging me in the same direction. Mr. Cat occupies the former home of Kitty’s. Same ownership, different restaurant. Continuity and reinvention sharing the same address.
The farmers’ markets featured in this issue offer another example. On the surface, they’re places of commerce where peaches, arugula, maple syrup, flowers, and sourdough loaves are sold. But they also preserve agricultural traditions while creating opportunities for neighbors to encounter one another face-to-face. In an era increasingly mediated by screens, that feels less ordinary than it once did.
And then there is the small matter of the magazine hidden inside the magazine.
For the first time, we’re including 16 pages from our sister publication, Rural Intelligence. The Berkshires, Northwest Connecticut, Columbia County, Dutchess County—the map insists these are separate places. Culture is less convinced. As I read through the Rural Intelligence section, I realized many of the stories were wrestling with the same questions. Gardens shaped over decades. Arts institutions sustained across generations. New restaurants building on old traditions. Artists in conversation with artists who came before them. The particulars differ. The underlying story remains consistent.
And then there are the Readers’ Choice Awards. Every year, tens of thousands of Chronogram readers cast hundreds of thousands of votes for their favorite restaurants, bookstores, parks, nonprofits, artists, mechanics, dentists, radio personalities, breweries, florists, and just about every other category of human endeavor we can think to place on a ballot. What began in the strange early months of 2020 as a way to support local businesses has become an annual census of affection. More than 350,000 votes were cast this year across 275 categories.
The winners matter, of course. Everyone enjoys a trophy. But then look at the collective portrait that emerges from the voting. Taken together, the awards answer a deceptively simple question: Who are we? In a hundred years, historians will know who was president (sigh) and what (totally unnecessary) wars were fought. They may have a harder time discovering where people in the Hudson Valley preferred to get a bagel, hear live music, buy a record, or watch the sunset. Fortunately, we have receipts. Like the rest of this issue, the awards are another way a community tells itself what it values and what is worth carrying forward.
Which reminded me of a line attributed to Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
It’s a delightful distinction. We often think of tradition as preservation. Keeping things exactly as they were. Protecting them from change. Trapping them like bugs in amber. But that’s not what any of the people we’re covering are doing.
Nobody is trying to reopen the Borscht Belt exactly as it existed in 1958. Nobody wants to turn the rail trails back into railroads (the Catskill Mountain Railroad folks excluded). The Avery family isn’t producing carbon copies of earlier paintings. The Diagos aren’t staging historical reenactments in their backyard.
They’re tending fires.
Fire is a useful metaphor because fire only remains alive while it is being transferred. A campfire dies if nobody feeds it. The Olympic torch—surely the world’s most elaborate relay race—exists only because somebody keeps carrying it forward.
Looking through these pages, I don’t see anybody worshipping ashes. The gardeners are planting new things. The chefs are rewriting menus. The artists are reinterpreting traditions. The historians are rescuing stories from oblivion. The trail advocates took infrastructure built for one purpose and found another. Everywhere you look, people are carrying fire from one vessel to another. The form changes but the flame remains recognizable.
We spend a lot of time celebrating innovation, and rightly so. New restaurants are exciting. New books carry fresh ideas. New festivals, new exhibitions, new businesses—these are the things that generate headlines. Novelty is the engine of attention.
But what struck me while assembling this issue is how often the most interesting new things turn out to be conversations with older ones.
The people who preserved those rail corridors couldn’t know exactly what they would become. The people safeguarding Borscht Belt history can’t know who will encounter those stories 50 years from now. The gardeners, artists, musicians, chefs, historians, and community-builders in these pages are all participating in the same long relay. They’re caring for something they inherited while adding something of their own. The fire they pass along may not look exactly the same as the one they received.
Good thing. Otherwise we’d all still be waiting for the train.
This article appears in July 2026.
