So Long, AboutTown!

Published:
AboutTown, Spring 2015

For one afternoon in 1996, the day otherwise long ago lost in time, I sat in a sun-dusty room in Paul De Angelis's house on North Road in Tivoli as he and Gail Jaffe-Bennek discussed a local publication they were about to start. As a memory it's not much, its details mostly forgotten or discarded, like the calendar in which I'd jotted down the meeting's date. So I was surprised when it resurfaced so vividly as I read Paul's e-mail late this past August telling us that after 18 years, he and Gail were looking to sell AboutTown (of Columbia and Dutchess; the Ulster County AboutTown is not closing.) A more recent e-mail suggests that the paper has not found a suitable new home, and that the issue you are reading will likely be its last. Local papers come and go, of course. We have recently lost The Observer and six years earlier, The Gazette Advertiser. The Gazette's closing had a particular poignancy for me as we were its next door neighbor on Livingston Street for many years, and our children its convenient and frequent photographic subjects. But am I alone in feeling that we all will feel some kind of personal loss when AboutTown closes its doors?

In obvious respects, the original impetus for AboutTown has become almost quaint during the period of its growth from infancy to adolescence. Although Gail and Paul did make a major investment in AboutTown's Internet presence during these years, a glance at the premier issue in the fall of 1997 (its event calendar and directory predominating) suggests volumes about the ways the world, not just our tiny corner of it, has changed since then. While their readership apparently responded with a "don't you dare" when Gail and Paul suggested minimizing these print services in favor of its cyber-twin, the fact remains that although over the years AboutTown was the parchment companion we pored over while sipping our coffee (Bread Alone) or eating our sandwich (J&J's Deli), our habits when searching for children's art classes, doctors or gutter cleaners have more or less kept lock step with Google's business plan.

I met with Gail and Paul on the second floor of the Chocolate Factory in early January with these thoughts in mind. I assumed they would tell me their decision to close AboutTown was fueled in part by some larger trends foreshadowing the "demise of print media." Not at all, they demurred, both clearly uninterested in lodging their decision within a more ominous social trend. While they both werevclearly Just as happy not to have to travel any further along inevitable inroads blazed by Buzzfeed, Twitter, and Instagram, their reasons for closing AboutTown might have been articulated Just as well by the sheriff in an Alan Ladd movie. "Time to move on," was what they both basically told me.

Contrary to my assumptions fueled I guess on part from the reports I have been fed via Facebook and blogposts) Gail and Paul concurred that there is as much desire for pr!nt news now as there ever was. "People love print journalism" was how Mark Vinciguerra, publisher and general manager of Columbia-Greene Media put it in my conversation with him this month. In fact, Vinciguerra recently embarked upon The River Chronicle, a print "weekly" that I believe will be the only newspaper specifically targeting our area, once AboutTown closes its doors.

But while The River Chronicle will continue to keep us informed, its mission is different from that of AboutTown, which never intended to report on the important local news of the day–kennel fires, regional water system mergers, or school board referenda. Rifling through back issues recently, it struck me that along its humble Journey as a community "guide to Rhinebeck, Red Hook, Tivoli, Germantown, Hudson and surrounding areas," AboutTown became part of the story itself–a living repository of the unique and idiosyncratic ways in which we become a community to begin with.

In my random sampling of the papers stacked outside their offices at the Chocolate Factory, I found an interview with beekeeper Peggy O'Brien about the Bard College beekeeping project; a tribute to the illustrious Tivoli artist Dirk Zimmer (Arlene Wege); and articles on "The Lives of Barrytown" (Cynthia Owen Philip), Washington Irving, Hudson Valley "mythmaker" (Paul De Ange\is), the tastes of spring in the Hudson Valley (Laura Pensiero), archeological ruins and wonders in Rhinebeck (Jane Dodds), "Our Hispanic Mid-Hudson" (Dorothy Dow Crane) the durability of the small town, down-home Stickles variety store (Kathleen Everett), "The Roots of Sinterklass" (Jim Blackburn), "Hudson Valley's Food Truck Boom" (Barbara Jean Briskey), "New Englanders on the Hudson" (Philip), bike trails in Red Hook (Rob Rubsam), and the quandary brought about by persistent groundhogs in the garage (Danny Shanahan). In other words, I found a trove of material that somehow collectively described who we are to each other. Punctuating these articles were photographs by Douglas Baz, drawings by Dick Morill and illustrations by Danny Shanahan, Liza Donnelly, Michael Maslin and Ania Aldrich, to name a few, AboutTown having provided a welcome home for resident writers and artists otherwise accustomed to trading their wares to the south by 90 miles.

Sifting through this archive, I was particularly struck by an article in the spring 2009 issue entitled “Local Deep Down" by regular contributor and writer Dorothy Dow Crane, musing on that familiar, particular feature of the northern Hudson valley in which resides the persistent challenge–"How local are you?" In a region still populated by Livingstons and Kips, many who otherwise feel local also feel at times defiantly so; as Crane notes, though she may have lived in Rhinebeck’s village long enough to experience the collapse of three cisterns in her backyard, a friend of hers knows that her great grandparents shared with her the same mountain view out of their Columbia County home.

So, what is it to know a place? When it comes to our particular, peculiar community, part of what that means is knowing what it is not. As a local of any stripe will immediately agree, we are not Albany, or Poughkeepsie-and we are also not Kingston, Hyde Park, Rye, Tarrytown, Darien, or Park Slope. We protectvthe hitching post in our front yard and we frequent Bubby's Burritos on Route 199; we worry about squirrels that lose their footing and hurtle down our chimney into the middle of our living room (yes); and we are proud that former Presidents eat lunch at our corner restaurants. Doesn't that make us from here? Really? Without AboutTown, we will surely and sorely miss the guide that helped us to provide ourselves with our own response.