It is possible to spend your life around a place and never really know it; few will understand this better than a New Yorker. We live, after all — newsflash! — in a city that’s too big to ever truly know. So, we form perceptions based on our limited knowledge of a place, perceptions which then, unfortunately, sit squarely in the way of true understanding, sometimes forever.
The cities of the Hudson Valley fall squarely into this problem area. Too many little decaying dots on an otherwise world-class landscape, they are easy to avoid; most visitors do. For years lacking the sort of energy and vision required to pull them out of their post-industrial (and, in some cases, post-IBM) slumber, these towns are now fortunate to find themselves as landing pads for entrepreneurial and creative young people who simply do not care to spend their entire lives slaving away in the bigger town to the south.
And why should they? Much of the valley, in recent years, has become quietly and often fiercely cool, offering a sort of off-site big city experience in more naturally pleasing surroundings, all just a short jaunt from Manhattan. It makes sense in the internet age. Why spend 24/7 huddled with the masses when you can hang loose an hour or two to the north, giving you the freedom to, say, spend part of a good weather day away from your computer, hiking up a very nice mountain, followed by a visit to a nearby brewery for pints of peat-smoked stout in a beautiful beer hall on the Hudson River with big views of the Hudson Highlands?
If that sounds like the perfect use of an early fall afternoon, I can assure you that it was, having taken the itinerary for a spin myself just a few sunny days ago. After hiking up and around Storm King Mountain from the Cornwall side, when somebody says, after 6 miles of pretty fierce exercise, “okay, cool, let’s go drink beer,” you kind of just go. Even if it means a trip to Newburgh.
Pulling up in front of the Newburgh Brewing Company, which is housed in an old factory building on Colden Street, it is difficult to feel optimistic. But then you climb the stairs. Located on the building’s second floor and boasting three walls of windows thrown open wide to take in the river breeze, views of Bannerman Castle, the Highlands and all the river you can stand, the brewery’s setting alone turns out to be about as close to ideal as you will find.
On top of that, though, the interiors will be the envy of many a beer hall proprietor. The space itself is vaulted, full of light. Those wood floors. Gigantic, rough-hewn communal tables. A Ping-Pong table, board games and – most importantly – the front counter, where you buy your beer. There are many to choose from: A solid cream ale, a very proper bitters, that amazing peat-smoked stout, which turned out to be a nicely sessionable dark. I drank three of them.
Walking out two hours later – after chowing down on the very good bar food – I wondered for the first time in ever, whether or not all those nice old homes on the city’s side streets might be worth the investment risk.
Of course, then, I made the mistake of driving out via Broadway. A street that begins just a block from the brewery, is one of the most architecturally appealing main drags in the state. At the same time, it is also one of the state’s most appallingly blighted. Speaking frankly, of all the blemishes on the Hudson Valley landscape, Newburgh has long been the most awful.
Along with its cousins up and down the river, it has been doing its best to get in the way of the region’s grand rebrand, an unofficial but determined effort to push the area into becoming a sort of eastern Sonoma, or a more convenient and less precious Vermont, where everyone will make cheese or bread or beer and grow organic veg and hang around hip little colleges and run up mountains and swim in lakes and try their hand at knitting things to sell on Etsy, or maybe grow some grapes for wine. With the opening of this new brewery, Newburgh, after fumbling its way through some rather tepid riverfront redevelopment, is finally on the van for real.
It was inevitable, honestly, when you consider that it was right across the Hudson not too many years ago that DIA took over a warehouse on the Beacon waterfront, a bold move that began a years-long (and still very much in the works) rethink of where that city is headed.
It has happened now also in Kingston, where one of the country’s most respected boutique butchers — Fleisher’s, of course — took space in the town’s historic but moribund Stockade District, unleashing a tiny but potent tsunami of Brooklynness, bringing along with it carefully made cocktails and smart late suppers and better art galleries and, soon, a restaurant from the Fleisher’s crew that looks quite promising.
And then there is Poughkeepsie, where the decaying railroad bridge — a vital part of American industrial history — is now the Walkway Over The Hudson State Park, the world’s longest pedestrian bridge, a thing loved by growing numbers of outdoor enthusiasts, many among them the sort of people who might previously not have had much reason to consider the city of Poughkeepsie at all.
Back in Newburgh, sitting by the window and sipping on that peat-smoked porter, surrounded by happy people of all ages, I could see it happening all over again down here. Sometimes, a place to drink beer is so much more than that.
Read David’s Hudson Valley feature in the Travel section Oct. 2.