To commemorate the two-year anniversary of Tropical Storms Irene and Lee, which devastated communities across the Catskills on August 28, 2011, we are collecting your flood stories. To see all the submitted flood stories, click here. To see last year's "Faces of the Flood" photo project, click here.
To commemorate the two-year anniversary of Tropical Storms Irene and Lee, which devastated communities across the Catskills on August 28, 2011, we are collecting your flood stories. To see all the submitted flood stories, click here. To see last year's "Faces of the Flood" photo project, click here.
Above: Johanna and Robert Titus, local Ice Age experts and authors. Photo courtesy of the Tituses.
The craggy, jaggy landscapes we know and love as the Catskills have been inspiring the athletic and artistic for centuries. But did you ever wonder how they got that way, and what they were like before? Come down to Yesterdays’ News at the Roxbury Corner Store on Saturday and find out what shaped your favorite stretch of creek bed.
Meet Nemo, a 730-pound pig currently being treated at Cornell University for B-cell lymphoma. According to a recent television news report from CNY Central, Nemo may be the first of his species to be treated for lymphoma; Cornell vets are using a catheter behind his ear to deliver lifesaving chemotherapy drugs. CNY says Nemo's a Catskills local; if you know where he's from, let us know at [email protected].
Above: Jane Axamethy of the Bake House in Kauneonga Lake gives fresh bread to Spencer Cutler of the neighboring Fat Lady Cafe. Photo by Jason Dole.
Do you run a Catskills restaurant, cafe, bakery, food truck, BBQ joint, or other place to get great local food? Then we want you in our brand-new Catskills Food Guide online database!
We're building a searchable directory of places to eat in the Catskills. To get listed online, click here and fill out our short survey. It's free.
The directory will help us produce our next big print project: A Catskills Food Guide, which we will publish in October 2013. (The food guide will also include local farms and producers. Stay tuned for more on that.)
To learn about advertising in the print guide, email or call Julia Reischel (845-481-9155, [email protected]).
Phoenicia's larger-than-life Davy Crockett gets a bath, in preparation for his big move. On August 17, the statue -- which has stood for decades on Phoenicia's Main Street, in front of the Sportsman's Alamo Cantina -- is moving down the street to his new home in front of Mystery Spot Antiques. This being Phoenicia, the community is throwing a party for the occasion, with a Davy Crockett lookalike contest, prizes and a ukelele show.
Happy Wednesday, Catskills. It's gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day, with highs in the balmy lower 80s across much of the region.
The fate of casinos in New York State must still be decided at the ballot box this November -- but the effort to build casinos in upstate New York took a step forward today, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a piece of legislation that will authorize four "destination gaming resorts" if a gambling referendum passes in the popular election this fall.
Dubbed the Upstate New York Gaming Development Act, the law authorizes the building of four casinos in three regions: the Hudson Valley-Catskills area, the Capital District-Saratoga area, and the Central-Southern Tier area. Two casinos may be sited in the same region. The sites will be chosen competitively based on economic impact, by members of a siting board who will be appointed by the state Gaming Commission.
The law specifies that no casinos may be located in Westchester, Rockland or Putnam counties, in New York City, or on Long Island. The law also contains a seven-year exclusivity period, during which no additional casinos beyond the four initially sited will be licensed by the state.
This week, Ulster County lets its country roots show at the annual county fair, an old-timey festival featuring carnival rides, livestock shows, country music and more.
The Ulster County Fair opens at 4pm today -- Tuesday -- at the fairground in New Paltz, and runs through Sunday. A few highlights on the schedule:
Tuesday, July 30
Wednesday, July 31
Thursday, August 1
Friday, August 2
Fest-goers listen to opera under the stars at the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice.
There are plenty of small towns in America that have come to be defined by the festivals they host; but it’s not every place that can say that attendance causes the population to balloon to nearly 18 times its size. The Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice holds that distinction; last year, approximately 5,500 people showed up to check out the four-day performance series. In a hamlet with a population hovering just above 300, that’s a hell of a boom.
The seed of the fest was planted in 2009, when three professional opera singers, all Phoenicia residents—Maria Todaro, Louis Otey and Kerry Henderson (who has since left the Voice Fest to helm the Kingston Festival of the Arts)—staged an outdoor choral concert to help raise money for new playground equipment.
"Believe it or not, with a few flyers, this community effort, 800 people showed up. And it was even raining that day," said Todaro, who is now the fest’s general director.
Chop wood, carry weeds: Practitioners at work at the garden of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, which grows food for the monastery's kitchen and flowers for the altar. For more photos of the monastery garden at the peak of the summer season, see this recent album on the Zen Mountain Monastery's website.
Happy Monday, Catskills. Enjoying the weather? For once, it's worse elsewhere: The Steuben County town of Troupsburg had a tornado touch down over the weekend.
