This middle of July weekend was spent in the Hudson Valley near my daughter's MFA opening in Red Hook, NY. What a great mid-summer destination, from the funky urban to the rural historic, with a sculpture park to link the two. The city of Hudson has a main street filled with antiques shops, specializing mostly in 1950s Scandinavian modern, interspersed with lots of cafés, a few art galleries, and some expensive shops selling jewelry, hats, rugs and other high end accessories. What it doesn't have are chain stores, which makes the town look mid to late Twentieth Century, especially if you venture away from Warren Street and find yourself in a generic post-industrial sadness that some people actually may like.
the MFA grad in her usual second hand chicness
vintage on Warren Street, Hudson, NY
Looking for coffee on Warren Street
Photos of very old houses, some dating back to the eighteenth-century with their characteristic tiny second floor windows I do not have. Fine views of ribbons of roads rolling through acres of farmland I don't have either. The region is a strange juxtaposition of the old and the new, the modern and the archaic, the very rich, the very poor, and everything in between. On the drive back to New Hampshire, my friend and I stopped in Northampton, MA, to see my other daughter but also to check out the used bookstores. In one of them, off of the main street in downtown, I picked up these two books on fashion. Fashion can be summed up in the three words on the awning of that store in Hudson: antiques, vintage, modern. What is old can be very modern when it is considered vintage. Old can coexist with new. Ultimately, you just want to take care of something and make it last: a piece of cloth, a house, or an entire town.
talking about recycling...
In the window of a gallery, Hudson, NY
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