bohemian spirit two hours from New York

Evil tongues like to say that a purebred New Yorker hates leaving his city, except for a trip to the very chic Hamptons, a sort of American Deauville, at the tip of Long Island. However, a two-hour drive north of the Big Apple, it’s the Manhattan accent that you recognize when crossing a string of small villages.

Welcome to the Catskill Mountains. A region without mountains, but with a hilly landscape, green in summer, snowy in winter – Hunter Mountain or Windham Mountain are popular with skiers. Hills streaked with rocky streams, dotted with traditional farmhouses, which many New York artists, designers and musicians have ended up adopting for a weekend … or for life.

Unknown on this side of the Atlantic, the Castkills, which nevertheless adjoin the famous Woodstock, are home to bucolic holiday camps (as in the film Dirty Dancing) and inspired the painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848), arouse renewed interest. What city dwellers come here for: American-style authenticity and a certain rural ideal.

“An original America”

“After the 2008 stock market crash, we chose to buy a house here. After all, we are not much further from Manhattan than those who live at a premium in Brooklyn ”, says Paul Denoly, a Frenchman who left New York for Hudson, in the Catskills, where he runs a designer object store, Hawkins New York. There are lamps, rugs, designer candles, but also a line produced locally by him. Here he discovered a radically different life, at a more natural pace. “Unlike Manhattan, where people never have a minute to lose, here we leave room to chance. Meetings happen slowly, naturally ”, adds Paul Denoly, who likes to punctuate his days with walks in the forest.

Kate Orne, a Swedish photographer living in Manhattan in the early 1990s, was also seduced. She used to go camping in the Catskills. “I saw the birth of a trend: there, in the middle of the forest, we met artists like Richard Prince or Ellsworth Kelly, attracted like all of us by this traditional, original America”, she says. Like Paul Denoly, she bought a house in the area in 2008, and settled there permanently, charmed by the calm of nature and the welcome of the “bohemian” community. This new life even becomes the subject of the magazine that the photographer launched in 2014, Upstate Diary, devoted to the region. “The Catskills are not a community of hermits, but of young people who have consciously chosen another life, where we consume differently. “

“An extra soul”

Driving from village to village, in an atmosphere similar to the films of David Lynch, we discover an artisanal America. Bill Hovard produces oils and soaps, Joshua Vogel, craftsman and sculptor, makes pretty wooden spoons. “My artistic work allows me to go beyond the purely functional aspect of the object, it brings an extra soul. By anchoring ourselves in nature, we oppose a culture of mass consumption, uprooted and frenzied ”, he explains.

The Catskills spirit pervades everywhere. For breakfast, we serve Upstate Granola; Invented in the 1960s in the region by a housewife, it continues to be produced today by her grandchildren. For the times, this muesli is even available in a gluten-free version – a very “hickster” or “country hipster” trend, the locals would tell you. At aperitif time, we taste a beer brewed on site, before tasting the traditional chicken and waffles (“Chicken and waffles”) organic – it goes without saying – from the very picturesque Phenicia Diner, built in 1962, which is only supplied from farms in the area.

In the evening, the “community” will listen folk singer Jeremy Bernstein, born in Woodstock, in his studio located in the heart of the valley – which does not prevent him, moreover, from making world tours. “Here, the hills, rivers and forest create a unique and vital context for creation, far from the incessant noise of the city. We are touching on something essential and universal ”, says the singer, inspired. Yet, unlike their Woodstock-era elders, these new generation hippies are not cut off from economic reality. Small-scale and artisanal production, of course, but anchored in a distribution system in connection with the rest of the world.

« Anti-Hamptons »

In November 2015, the Parisian boutique Colette thus proposed an exhibition devoted to the Catskill Mountains, presenting local creators and their works. Handcrafted backpacks label Peter Mountain Works, founded in Woodstock but collaborating with trendy brands or Ace hotels, was one of them. “There are real interactions between city and countryside: the outdoor trend is in fashion, and the countryside is more connected to trends than ever”, says brand director Asa Nishijima, a native of the Catskills, who chose to relocate there in 2011, after living in Tokyo. The next fashionable “made in Catskills” product might be a T-shirt with “Anti-Hamptons” written on it. The hollow message: to forget the “bling”, in favor of a slowness in phase with nature.

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