Fancy Sharing a Farm?

(above: 200 acres to share in East Meredith. Hope you have a penchant for permaculture).

I wrote for Upstater about the cool new site Catskills FarmLink.. 

Fancy yourself a farmer but don’t want to go the proverbial whole hog (or chicken or beef cattle or field full of broccoli, say)? Catskills FarmLink is for you – and more committed farmers. The website lets farmers find land not simply to buy, sometimes to borrow and share. Created by groups as diverse as NYC’s Department of Environmental Protection, the Cornell Cooperative Extension and Farmhearts, it’s got a back to the land, Seventies vibe like the ad for sharing 200 acres in East Meredith, where the owners have “several possibilities for discussion” concerning housing and are “looking for a farmer/ farm couple with expertise in any of vegetables, berries, fruit, mushrooms, medicinal herbs and/or livestock to help re-establish our farm, preferably using permacaulture….”

Despite how easy it might be to joke about permaculture, the site has laudable aims to keep land being farmed, no small thing in the Catskills where reforestation and parceling up old farms threatens not only existing farms but the ability of new farmers to start. Personally I love the idea of the farm share in Bovina. Perhaps that’s because my husband jokes that he wants a summerhouse there. Just over the hill from Margaretville, Bovina has an excellent general store that does a fine breakfast. There, a couple offering to share or lease their 167 acres are also trying to talk their overseas neighbors into letting the sharing farmer live in their house.

While these places might not have quite cool factor of the baroque Beekman Boys (yet), Catskills Farmlink acknowledges how hard farming is and how daunting it can be to those who might like to try it. So you Brooklynites, ye of the home-butchering and back alley allotments, come up. Oh, and the farm in Bovina also boasts that its chickens have gone to Bouley. Foodie and farmer unite.

Lodge, Cabin, Inn, Motels – sleeping in the sticks

Phoenicia Lodge

From this week's Catskill Mountain News:

Drive along Route 28 and the signs for cottages and motels roll by. The places are easy to ignore, some turned into apartments with the kind of rural neglect – car jacked up on blocks, lawn gone to weed – that suggests better days. It’s enough to make you think that the best of times are no longer these times in our corner of the Catskills. But, no. Over the past five years a small renaissance has started, with people redoing those bygone institutions of Catskills’ vacations. This renaissance has even dovetailed with the recession and weathered it.

The downturn did turn on the Catskills and in some ways turned out old visitors – but at the same time it’s brought new ones, and now a few years later seems to be strengthening the local economy. Being only a few hours from the city means tourist who would have flown to a vacation spot are staying closer to home. Many of these new guests are turning to more traditional inns and B&Bs, a shift that’s corresponded with an influx of new owners whose more polished approach appeals to these visitors. Call it a bit of Proust and nostalgia for innkeeper and traveler alike, but both are taken with these places that recall the past, a past that’s been updated with better plumbing and insulation, flat screen TVs, white walls and linens. 

At the Breezy Hill Inn (“Luxury in the Country” its slogan) the owners Michelle and Alan Sidrane sit on the screened porch and describe what they were looking for in their own travels: upscale inns and B&Bs, only there was little to be found here. Instead, the couple set out to build the place where they wanted to stay. Just how personal is obvious in the details down to the antiques in the rooms. The color scheme is based on her favorite pottery pattern whose hues repeat throughout the inn.

“It’s about coddling,” Michelle Sidrane explains, describing the Breezy Hill ethos with a high-end exercise room, steam room and lavish breakfasts. And, the inn’s busiest season? Not summer but winter when they’re booked straight from Christmas to mid-April. “We’re getting young families that used to go out West on a regular ski trip, looking for places to stay for a ski weekend at a more reasonable rate.” They’ve even had guests book the entire inn for holiday weekends.

The Sidrane’s is a very different approach from Sara Loughlin and Brian Batista’s at the Phoenicia Lodge. In their late 30s they treat inn-keeping like contemporary pioneers. They handle everything. On a quiet Monday (their “Saturday”) they’re both dressed in faded denim, work boots with white iPod earbuds dangling like necklaces around their throats. He’s mowing and she painting a cottage. The couple happened into the motel and cabins almost as a dare. They were looking for a place upstate, but not a motel – or a new career path. When they saw the place though they couldn’t stop thinking about it –and they had no idea what they were getting into. The local SBA loan officer even advised against it, but it’s been a huge success – busy now in summer and winter. They’ve replaced dark wood paneling with pale walls and new linens, and Sara stresses that this isn’t about luxury.

“We’re not trying to be upscale. There’s a need for a low-budget vacation.” People come to hike and fish, like they themselves did before moving. “We’re modest people,” she says, “and having a swanky place wouldn’t feel right. It doesn’t fit the way we live. Here in our region of the Catskills the middle hasn’t been done so well, so we saw what we could do. What might be possible.” What might be possible includes restoring original vintage features to give the lodge a Mad Men feel that fits not only the buildings’ era but the zeitgeist now.

Running the Mountain Brook Inn was even more of a jump for Gary Simmons. His home was in L.A. and his lodging experience more along the lines of staying at the Waldorf and The Plaza. His job had him virtually living in hotels, and there he studied the beds and how they were made, storing up the information for his future, not that he knew the Mountain Brook was his future. “And, not that this is a hotel,” he says in his Southern drawl as he runs around on a Monday afternoon dressed in a button-down shirt and coveralls, his version of a suit for the office. “Far from it. I love hotels but it’s definitely not that.”

The Mountain Brook is a motel – quaint and rustic on the edge of the Little Delaware. He found the place when visiting a friend after working on a show at Rockefeller Center. The Inn had been empty for two years and long on the market, but he knew it was his destiny. He also knew that destiny was going to take some work and jokes that he moved in with only an electric screwdriver. Since, he’s replaced and reworked just about everything – adding wainscoting and soundproofing and painting over the wood paneling that made the rooms claustrophobic. Now they have sitting rooms with deep sofas and inviting bedrooms with plush linens. 

The Mountain Brook's bridge

The three properties operate at different ends of the spectrum but taken with the Roxbury and the Hidden Inn’s re-opening show the vitality of Catskills’ lodging. Patty Cullen, Delaware County’s tourism director, explains: “There are a few trends driving visitors to the Catskills – first the growth in destination weddings [most of this summer’s guests at Breezy Hill and the Mountain Brook are attending weddings.] With a couple of events on one weekend, all the lodging in neighboring towns gets booked up. 

Additionally, with the growth of the locavore movement we’re attracting a younger audience interested in food and farming as well as getting outdoors. There are also second-homeowners’ friends who are visiting longer and opting not to stay with their friends. In all this, people are looking online, reading reviews before even booking. A business’s online presence is hugely important in the choices visitors make.”

This is something the Sidranes and Batistas both attest to, and all three businesses agree that once someone comes, if they have a good experience they will return. All three properties have developed a huge audience of fans and returning visitors – visitors these inns and motels have all cultivated since opening. 

Breezy Hill

The Rockets Red Glare... redux

This being the 4th of July weekend, it seemed timely to repost my piece in Frieze last year on Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl's awesome shindig in Bovina....

‘Some, who are never wrong, will say my joy in fireworks is regressive. You bet it is, and none too soon after long months of approximating grownupness. With fireworks, I discover old, inchoate excitements probably pertaining to a boy’s dim anticipations of sex.’ 

Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Fireworks’, 1988, The 7 Days Art Columns: 1988–1990

Across the US the 4th of July is – appropriately, patriotically – celebrated with the kinds of fireworks that cost taxpayers many pennies. There are oohs and ahs to be had but the kind you get with, say, choreographed violence in movies: slightly enervating with a vague frisson of something. But spectacular? Not even. And what about that river of fire trick down the Thames for the millennium? Out in front of the Tate where I stood the water maybe fizzled, and the crowd collectively wondered what had happened. 

Welcome instead to Bovina, New York, population 600 in the western Catskills named for its former industry—cows (the local baseball team is called the Dairymen) and part-time home to art critic Peter Schjeldahl. Here, once a year, all of the fireworks you’ve ever seen are put to shame. You get the full force of terror, the tremor and aching beauty of explosions, shooting stars and flames. Every year someone ponders just how he can afford to do it; an art collector who once was a producer of big corporate spectacles confided that it had to cost at least 50 grand. Others have said that Schjeldahl simply knows how to get bang for his buck.

This love for fireworks harnesses all of Schjeldahl’s contradictions: nebbish with slouched posture, big glasses, college drop-out, excellent poet, even better art critic and (best of all) serious pyro. It strikes me as ironic that his interview with Cai Guo-Qiang a couple years back bore no mention of Schjeldahl’s own gunpowder obsession. His greatest joy comes from blowing stuff up and making it gorgeous. It’s the sort of beauty that oddly fits with 19th-century Romanticism. (Awe-inspiring rural setting? Check. The shudder of real danger? Absolutely.) Here in this natural amphitheater on the side of a mountain he’s been blowing shit up beautifully for the past 20-something years. Initially to entertain his daughter and nephew, though you have to guess it was really to exercise his own need to make things go boom.

Another thing I like about Schjeldahl – his democratizing impulse. He writes about art for everyone and shares his love of explosions with one and all. A thousand or more are arrayed in this hollow cleaved from the stream running through his property. There are the famous: Steve Martin and Alan Cumming and Mr and Mrs John Currin. But that is boring compared with the swell of folk who turn up: kids running wild and setting off bottle-rockets (he calls them: ‘the world’s most satisfactory manufactured product’) and EMTs and nurses and farmers and excavators, the great and good (as well as the hangers-on) of the art world and weekenders who turn out to gawp and gape as they’ve heard it’s quite a shindig. This miraculous multitude meets up and rubs arms and elbows, shoulders and asses, blanket to blanket on the back lawn. Like President Andrew Jackson, who once threw open the doors of the White House to the common man, Schjeldahl and his wife Brooke Alderson invite everyone – including the firemen. Especially the firemen – and thank heaven too – because this is the night of the burning bush.

Early on before the actual display you got the inevitable maths of kid + bottle rocket + historic draught = flaming tree. Which was saved by Jim, head of the Oneonta fire deptartment and a crew of volunteers armed with buckets of water. Later, two-thirds of the way through the display, burning lanterns flew into a willow and everyone held their breath. Would it catch fire? Minutes past, three… five… It didn’t and everyone cheered.

Schjeldahl has a neat trick (though trick is perhaps too cheap a word) of using nature as a prop. There’s a back-lit tree with fireworks exploding from its boughs, burning silver and bright like a star and the mountain shimmering, bushes and scrub in silhouette like some giant Kara Walker. It’s a sublime gift that lets you re-see the landscape, and words are spelled out in fireworks, this year ‘2010’. (In 2008 it was ‘Hope’ and ‘Obama’ lit up in trees.)

We start by singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, that compromised anthem always off-key whose tune was taken from an English drinking song. (Better though than the US’s previous one where we set new words to ‘God Save the Queen’.) At the end of the singing, lanterns lift magically, floating away, and Alan Cumming and his friends chant: ‘Peter, Peter, Peter.’

Every Memorial Day Schjeldahl grants a small view into his process like an artist sketching out materials. He tries different fireworks – Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels and Chrysanthemums all with names like ‘Shock and Awe’, ‘Search and Destroy’ or ‘Air Assault’. He waits for the claps, sighs and shouts, the ‘that one, Peter! That’s the one!’ to see which will work. Still there’s no hint of how he translates these from mere pyrotechnics into performance. They go up and off and scatter in flaming glory but a month later they’ve been transformed into something of awe – uplifting, scary and sublime. Perhaps it’s best put into words by Schjeldahl himself:  ‘The point is not to congratulate America but to just go ahead and be American in the classic mold: free, somewhat obnoxious, and up for a good time.’