I had no idea what I’d come upon when I first saw Hudson’s Shantytown during an exploratory jaunt around the city some nine years ago. There they were, a few hundred feet from the bustle and boutiques of Warren Street: rows of dusty cabins cobbled together from found materials, some of them sitting over the…
Audrey Brand delicately curves her paintbrush along the looping grain of the wood as a trio of European women pause on their way through Gardiner Liquid Mercantile in Ulster County. Brand greets them, stepping back from her easel as they apologize for interrupting her work. “No, you’re supposed to watch,” she says. “You can have…
I was desperately trying to snap photos from the sidelines of the Columbia County Fair Demolition Derby when a giant “OOoohh!” rippled across the crowd, a contradictory noise of concern and excitement delivered en masse by thousands of rapt spectators. “What happened?” My girlfriend pointed to the other side of the rectangular track. One of…
BEFORE I could enter the bathroom, a teen with chemical-green hair and cadaver-white facepaint swung the door ajar holding a pistol. The pistol was pointed at the ceiling, as though he wanted to avoid discharging it into someone’s stomach, but the orange tip showed the only thing it would be shooting was airsoft pellets. I…
You usually don’t hear a lot of obscenities called out from circus rings, which is odd, because most circuses are pretty obscene. I went to the Ringling Bros. Circus while I was a child, and remembered two things: -Everyone was covered with mud And -There were crying elephants You could ride the crying elephants, which…
The first thing I saw when I arrived at the Hudson Bed Races was an ambulance conspicuously positioned at the starting line. There was another one parked ominously near the race’s finish a block away. Six teams were vying for the glory that comes with shoving a friend down a steep incline in a wheeled…
I dressed as quite the dandy for the New York Renaissance Festival. I wore purple crushed velvet riding pants that hugged my calves and billowed out at the thighs with a sash across the pelvis to sustain the pure thoughts of female attendees; a scandalously unbuttoned silky pirate shirt that was technically a woman’s blouse;…
The smell of sticky asphalt wafted into my car from the newly paved road as I rolled past a steady stream of pedestrians walking towards the 2017 Rosendale Street Fest. The town, a cluster of vibrantly painted shops on the Rondout Creek between New Paltz and Kingston, has a population of 6,000 on non-festival days,…