THE 12534

The Hudson community has lost a real treasure in Neil A. Montone Jr.

He was an old school bookseller of the finest sort, a man extremely knowledgeable yet unpretentious and more than willing to share his quiet bemused warmth over his latest find.

We are all looking forward to supporting Karen and Hudson City Books.

"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to." - Alain de Boton

Memorial service to be held Sunday, November 9th at 3:00 pm, Christ Church Episcopal, 431 Union Street, Hudson, NY 12534.

Welcome to
"The Friendly City”

THE NAME "HUDSON" is a veritable trident of true Americana, having sailed through nearly three centuries of revolutionary history. The first leg of this tripod is Hudson, our city; the second, explorer Captain Hendrik Hudson; the third leg, the Hudson River - the source of pleasure, sustenance, migration, transport, and misdemeanor indecent exposure charges.

HUDSON, 1609 AD: "...The lands are pleasant with grasse and flowers and goodly trees as every we have seene, and very sweet smells come from them..." (spellcheck and GPS were invented a few years after Henry Hudson ran aground here...)

WE ARE TOLD THAT THE 12534 was once a Native American settlement, and that for reasons lost to history, in the lore of the Mohicans the region was known as "territory where old tomahawks, arrowheads, canoes, and papooses are traded, the teepees are cheap, and the comely painted squaws work for beads."

THE DUTCH PURCHASED THE LAND from the Native Americans in 1662 for 500 guilders in beaver, the first recorded reference to our legendary easy virtue, Hudson's illustrious commerce of ill-repute.

CHRISTENING THE AREA "KLOVER RACK," the Dutch were continuing Hudson’s tradition of gratuitous sexual innuendo, which began with the landing of Hudson's "Halve Moon." Historic annals detail that in 1805, Hudson became Columbia's much abused "County Seat," and also became a "Port of Entry" in 1790, celebrating that position legally until 1815, and just as frequently illegally.

FORESIGHTED WHALERS from Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Providence, fearing invasion of their exposed ports by the British during the American Revolution, settled The 12534 in 1783 and chartered it as a city in 1785; the fearless crossdressing settlers from Provincetown landed just a few years later. Those self-described “Proprietors” laid out a street grid, and the city grew rapidly as a bustling, beautiful upriver seaport, by 1790 the eighth largest city in the United States. Frequented by whaling ships carrying sealskins and sperm oil whose sailors celebrated their leave with a devil-may-care insouciance, Hudson earned a lawless reputation as upstate's emporium of prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging that it enjoyed all the way into the 1950's. You'd think there'd be a grocery store here by now.

WITH THE DECLINE IN POPULARITY of whalebone corset stays, spermaceti candles, Blubber Helper, Avon's Ambergris spray cologne, and whaling in general, the days of Hudson's North and South Bays as international ports of call were numbered. In 1845 the Hudson Whaling Company was abandoned, and our last whaling vessel, the "Martha" was sold. And she still hasn't forgiven our titular insult.

THE 315-MILE LONG HUDSON RIVER, by connecting the Erie Canal to the Atlantic Ocean, was America's first superhighway of interstate commerce. Actually an estuary, the Mohican ("Muhhekunneuw") tribe called the Hudson River "Muhheankantuck" - The River Which Flows Both Ways. Originating at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks, the river's current changes direction four times each day from Troy to New York Harbor, as Atlantic tides push ocean saltwater upriver. Native Americans were prescient in calling the Hudson "The River Which Flows Both Ways" given the sexual proclivities of 21st century residents.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION and railroads led many other productive businesses to Hudson. One can easily locate the vestigial remains of factories for successful industries like cannonballs, cement, mushrooms, breetches, lab rats, rope, glue, pocketbooks, bricks, goldfish, shirtwaists, icepicks, matchbooks, dehumidifiers, and Section 8 housing.

ALAS, IN 1951 NEW YORK'S Tom Dewey (our then-governor and yeah, that "Dewey Defeats Truman" guy) instigated raids that lowered the boom on all historic Hudson's famed institutionalized vice. Coming from licentious Albany, this brief moment of moral crusading was a true anomaly.

DIAMOND STREET, HUDSON'S NOTORIOUS red light district, disappeared overnight, bulldozed and renamed Columbia Street. And Main Street, earlier renamed "Warren," was beset by the issues and problems typical of 20th Century America and upstate New York in particular – lamentable educational opportunity, closure of outdated local industries and the loss of their economic buttress, abysmal urban redevelopment schemes, an intransigent Republican state administration, lack of access to modern dentistry, enthusiasm for men's combover hairstyles, and a shortage of the necessary open space for drive-through fast-food restaurants.

THE WELCOME LATTER-DAY RESURGENCE IN DEPRAVITY (with its related economic stimulus package) began in the 1990's as enterprising new settlers landed ashore: boatloads of antiques-peddling butt pirates, stroller-shoving Williamsburgians, historic-preservation fanatics, underage piercing-enthusiasts, wig-wearing degenerates, self-mutilating performance artists, aesthetically-sensitive Bard youths, lute-strumming sexaholics, tattooed skateboarding thriftshoppers, and Farrow & Ball-paintchip-wielding-Vuitton-carrying-hybrid-driving-bordeaux-swigging-cement-factory-battling-yoga-enthusiast-tchotchke-shopping-addicted-twelve-steppers.

THIS MOTLEY CREW has banded together to attack status quo, challenge convention, and restore Hudson's sordid Rococo renown. Harboring big city immorality and small town conviviality, The 12534 is New York's showplace of sexy, sustainable new urbanism, Hudson Valley's green Gomorrah, its urban bucolic sensualism posited to be the axis of a new Loire or the next Napa.

THE 12534

Monday, November 17, 2008

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Friday, November 14, 2008

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Monday, November 10, 2008

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Friday, November 7, 2008

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Inside