This Month’s Featured Articles…

It is once again the time of year when, in addition to the general merriment that comes with the holiday season, people across the nation collectively take stock of what they have and what they feel grateful to have attained. While we amass friends and family and take in the barrage of music and classic movies, perhaps this year especially, we reflect on many of those folks who still struggle with maintaining essential needs for their families. Despite the not-so-subtle cynicism many possess for the [...]

What is left to be said about the past year that has not already been learned, experienced, and shared? In the intervening months that sluggishly married 2020 with its successor, many facets of society experienced seed changes. From personal health to social interactions, the kind of daily life that seemed to have cemented itself into our collective consciousness has changed for the foreseeable future. However, despite our uncanny ability to adapt over time, and while we celebrate the arrival of vaccines and the return of [...]

There is a theme that seems to run through the constant reinvention of The Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY. “Gift.” Kodak used the tag line “The gift that keeps on giving” for years in its promotion of cameras and film.  The Stissing Center could rightly request secondary use. Originally created as “Memorial Hall” in 1914 as a gift from philanthropist Mary Ellen Lapham Saunders who presented the building to the town in honor of her maternal grandparents with whom she had lived in Pine [...]

I knew interesting things were afoot at the iconic building that is 2 Main Street in Millerton, NY, when I came in to speak with Svend Lindbaek about his plans there, and the first thing he did was put Dexter Gordon’s album Montmartre 1964 on the turntable. “Do you like jazz?” he asked, expecting no other answer than yes – which I do, very much. “It has meaning for me,” he said, referring to the year it was recorded and, of course, the place, Copenhagen, [...]

An abandoned bluestone quarry in Saugerties, NY,  became home to Opus 40 – an extraordinary sculpture park and museum that boasts 6.5 acres of earthwork sculpture and more than 50 acres of meadows and forest. Considered by many to be “the Stonehenge of North America,” the impressive site welcomes more than 20,000 visitors each year. It all began with one artist. Rather than overlooking the idle quarry, Harvey Fite saw possibility. The bluestone quarry, which once supplied New York City with building material, could be [...]