Alyson Krueger

In the sage-green and white dining room, customers sat under taxidermy pheasants. Menus arrived in mysterious black envelopes, while at the end of the meal, checks were tucked into vintage Smithsonian science books. The music, selected by Chef CT Turgeon, who opened the Wilde Beest with five friends, played on a turntable. All the guests were given a playlist.

A year later, although menus now dispense with the envelopes and customers no longer receive playlists (“several people called us out on Yelp for being hipsters and elitists,” Turgeon said), business is still booming.

Wilde Beest is not in the Williamsburg or Bushwick sections of Brooklyn, however. The restaurant is in Kingston, about 90 miles north of New York.

And it is not the only one. Another celebrated New York City restaurateur is planning to roll out three establishments in Kingston over the next six months, while a state-of-the-art brewery opened over Memorial Day weekend. From last summer to this one, Kingston saw at least six new restaurants open, and more are on the way. Trailways, which offers bus service to Kingston from Midtown Manhattan several times a day, recently renovated its bus station here.

“I’m happy to take visitors to Wilde Beest when I need them to realize how amazing and ‘on the rise’ our upstate area can be,” said Shawn Brydges, 50, a photography agent who is based in Manhattan but heads to Kingston on the weekends.

Up until a few years ago, ever since IBM shut down its operations here in the mid 1990s, Kingston, in Ulster County, had been a sleepy bedroom community, with vacant buildings and an aging population. But recently, it’s seen some interesting new developments, like the bookstore Rough Draft Bar &amp; Books and the chic Hotel Kinsley.

It’s telling that Taavo Somer, the brains behind the Lower East Side bar and restaurant Freemans, is opening, alongside his business partners Charles and Aviva Blaichman, three new restaurants in the Kingston neighborhood of Uptown, also known as the Stockade District, where the Wilde Beest, Rough Draft and the Hotel Kinsley are.

Kinsley, Somer’s first restaurant in Kingston is part of Hotel Kinsley and was built inside a bank that dates to the 1860s. Lola, an indoor-outdoor venue that specializes in wood-fire pizza, and Fare &amp; Main, a market cafe, will both be up and running before the end of the summer.

It’s certainly not news that New Yorkers are eager to leave the city on weekends, heading to Hudson and Rhinebeck and Phoenicia. But Kingston is an actual city, with a population of over 23,000. It’s also more spread out, lacking the quaint Main Street vibe of smaller towns.

“In Hudson if you walk a few blocks you end up in the water,” said Brian Tress, who works for Ernst &amp; Young in New York and who owns a house 15 minutes outside Kingston. Kingston does have a waterfront, but it is “a real city,” he said.

The dining scene here is drawing chefs like Turgeon, who previously worked at 42 Grams, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago that has since closed, and who is now running the kitchen at Wilde Beest. Others in the restaurant industry are following suit.

According to a report put out by Kingston’s Office of Community Development in April, the city had 300 more people working in the leisure and hospitality industry than in March. That number is up by 600 people from just a year ago.

Of course this development raises the question of whether there’s truly a market in Kingston for all of these restaurants. Are these high-end dining options catering purely to weekenders?

So far, so good, Tress said. “We aren’t at the point where you have to wait in line, but you do have to make reservations now,” he continued. “Places are crowded on a Monday, and that is unusual.”

The idea of being a big deal isn’t completely foreign to Kingston. In 1777 the city became the first capital of New York state, a role that didn’t last long after the British burned it down in the Battle of Saratoga the same year.

One of the new places in Kingston paying homage to its Revolutionary War-era history is Crown, a cocktail bar that opened last July. It’s in one of the oldest houses in the city: the Cornelius Tappen House, built in 1704. It’s aiming for a very cosmopolitan vibe.

“I had a drink called Mary’s Lemon Phosphate,” said Brydges, the photography agent. “It had Japanese gin in it, and it was the best I’ve had in awhile.”

“It’s kind of sophisticated for Kingston,” Tress said. “There was a gap there, there wasn’t really an upscale lounge, and I think Crown is filling it.” The bar holds special events like burlesque shows that sell out in advance.

There is also a less fancy, though equally appealing Kingston neighborhood to visit, in terms of cutting-edge restaurants and bars: Midtown.

“Midtown is full of little hidden pockets, back street restaurants and bars and even bike shops among residential areas, that sit waiting to surprise you,” said Sam Osterhout, a television writer who moved to Kingston from the East Village in 2012. “That’s something we thought we’d miss when we moved upstate.”

One of his favorite spots is Lis Bar, a Polish tapas place that opened last fall. Patty Rich, one of its owners, grew up in New York, and she was attracted to the industrial Midtown neighborhood because it reminded her of Queens in the 1980s. The building is surrounded by former factories that in the past few years have been converted into artist studios and coffee shops.

Rich and her husband, Jonathan, bought the space in 2017 and outfitted it with vintage armchairs, bookshelves, rugs, lamps, even old TV-dinner trays. On the brick facade of the building is an original mural of a naked woman. A neon sign, made by the local design firm Lite Brite Neon, is on the door.

On a Friday evening in March, Jonathan Rich suggested that many of the customers were creative types, visiting from the city. “See that woman?” he asked. “She is a movie director.” He pointed to a man nearby. “He is a photographer who comes here often.”

Last year, when the Riches opened Lis Bar, other restaurateurs in the area warned them about the difficulties of finding experienced waiters, Jonathan Rich said.

But Jonathan Rich noticed that with the influx of restaurants, there has also been an influx of decent wait staff. “More people from the restaurant industry have moved up from the city or moved here from elsewhere,” he said. “There are more opportunities that appeal to them.”

Lis Bar’s head bartender, Miles Crettien, 32, moved to Kingston from Hudson. “Honestly, the Lite-Brite neon sign on the outside facade initially drew me in,” he said.

At Kingston Standard Brewing Co., another new place that opened in Midtown over Memorial Day weekend, locals and weekenders seemed to easily mix. Over 300 people of all ages packed into the former transmission shop. There were wooden tables, a stainless steel bar, and a gravel beer garden outside.

At the brewery all the beer is served in batches, which means styles get changed often when the keg empties. “We can only open Friday to Sunday, or we’ll run out of beer,” said Tait Simpson, the head brewer and co-owner.

Kyle Needham, another owner, is the resident oyster expert, having founded Oyster Party, a catering company. He works with farmers across the North Atlantic and North Pacific.

“You can’t really find these kind of oysters around here,” he said. “I Just want to bring something new to Kingston.”

New Yorkers Are Scrambling to Make Dinner Reservations (90 Miles North of the City)

On a warm summer day about a year ago, it was standing room only at Wilde Beest, a garden-to-table restaurant that had just opened. Those lucky enough to get a table included actors Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig — James Bond himself.

New Yorkers are scrambling to make dinner reservations (90 miles north of the city)

“Last year it was politician year, all the kids,” said Alan Rish, spokesman for Surf Lodge. “Malia Obama comes every year over the Fourth of July for her birthday.”

The Surf Lodge, a casual-chic hotel and lounge known for free concerts and its outdoor deck, attracts celebrities like Rosario Dawson and Jon Bon Jovi, as well as local fishermen and weekenders.

But in recent years, Surf Lodge has also been known for something else: Its ridiculously long bathroom lines. The queues for the four tiny women’s stalls were the stuff of local legend, curving into the lobby and at times out the main entrance, creating fire hazards. VIPs with security details would have to notify a staff member in order to be escorted to a “secret bathroom” (which a lot of people seemed to know about) in the manager’s office.

“So much of my daily job involved people needing to pee,” said Jonny Lennon, a bouncer who has been with Surf Lodge since it opened 11 years ago.

There were also environmental concerns. The few overused bathrooms relied on an old septic system that hadn’t been renovated since the 1940s. “Nitrogen from waste was leaking into the pond,” said Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, deputy town supervisor of East Hampton, referring to Fort Pond, the 181-acre body of water behind the lodge where the concertgoers on kayaks sometimes congregate.

After years of Surf Lodge trying to address the problem, it seems to have been resolved. This Memorial Day weekend, it will unveil 12 new bathroom stalls. They replace what used to be an art gallery. A special tank, brought over from Japan, was installed to stop the pollution of the pond. The entire project, including the new units, will cost $1.4 million, according to Surf Lodge.

For some this development marks a new beginning for Surf Lodge, and a better relationship with the town of Montauk. For others it signifies that Surf Lodge is no longer a place where strangers make out on the dance floor, and celebrities throw caution to the wind, chugging as much rosé as they like.

For Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners and the face of the hotel and lounge, it simply means her baby is growing up. “It’s an opportunity to say we are getting older, we need to get a little bit more mature,” she said. “We need to end this bathroom business.”

When it opened in 2008, Surf Lodge was a little beach shack at the very tip of Long Island that played reggae. “I remember raising money,” Cardoso said. “They were all like, ‘It’s too far, nobody will go there.’”

People went. As the popularity of Montauk and Surf Lodge grew, the creaky old facility, the main part of which had been built in the mid-20th century, could barely handle the numbers.

The Surf Lodge has a capacity of about 395 people, which it hit on summer weekends from the moment it opened. Crowds formed outside the door and spilled into the busy intersection of Edgemere Street and Industrial Road. Surf Lodge had to start limiting the number of people waiting outside just to get in.

Meanwhile its septic system was overwhelmed.

“Jayma was pumping her old system every few days because it was filling up so quickly,” said Laura Tooman, president of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, an environmental group that had lobbied for the lodge to fix the situation. “You should only have to pump every three to five years.”

Almost from the beginning, the out-of-control bathroom lines started. “We would have security meetings about it every day,” Lennon said. “We tried all sorts of things,” like opening up unoccupied hotel room bathrooms, he said.

Of course, the important summer people, the celebrities who stayed there and the regulars who learned how to game the system, always somehow managed to skip the line.

Lennon, in fact, met his future wife, Ashley Aversano (now Lennon), when he took a liking to her and her friends who naïvely stopped by the lodge to use the bathroom. “I had a room in the hotel,” Lennon said, “and I let her and her friends use it all night. The rest is history.”

Peter Darrow, 32, who spends his summers in Montauk and has been a Surf Lodge patron since 2012, found a secret bathroom upstairs years ago and used it to his advantage socially. When women he was chatting with would say they needed a bathroom break, he would say, “Follow me,” he recounted. “After that they would think I was amazing and go get a coffee or drink with me.”

Rish, the Lodge spokesman, was not above escorting celebrities to the VIP bathroom. “One day Blake Griffin, a basketball player, came in, and I walked him to the bathroom,” he said. “He told me how much he loved the busboy uniforms so I took him into the office and gave him one to try on. This bathroom thing led to a lot of great conversations.”

But for those who couldn’t skip the line, the charm wore thin quickly. So the Surf Lodge started drafting proposals to update its bathrooms four years ago.

But the lodge found that when it was ready to submit its plans, town regulations would change. “It’s been sort of a moving target in some respect,” said Andy Hammer, Surf Lodge’s lawyer. “Technology and town code has evolved, so we’ve evolved our proposals.”

Overby, the deputy town supervisor, has a different take. She said that Surf Lodge agreed to install new technology after it faced other town violations like crowding and safety violations.

For now, Surf Lodge and the town seem to be on the same page. The bar has promised local officials that it will use a new crowd control tactic for Saturdays in the summer: Only those with reservations will get in.

It’s a compromise that will certainly change the freewheeling vibe of the place. “I never wanted Surf Lodge to be this guest-list-only place,” Cardoso said. But, she added, it’ll make the neighbors happy, and it’ll make the town happy.

So far, they are. “In terms of water quality, it’s a win for Fort Pond,” Tooman said.

Of course, new ideas could introduce new problems. The recent construction has actually sparked some inspiration.

“The other day there was literally a hole in the middle of the parking lot, where they were installing everything,” Cardoso said. “I was like, ‘Can we do a pool?’ It would be amazing. The rooms could be cabanas or bungalows, and it would solve the overcrowded parking issue, because no one could park.”

Solving Sanitation Issues at a Montauk Hot Spot

This past summer, on a typical weekend at Surf Lodge in Montauk, New York, Jaden Smith performed Saturday night while surfer Evan Valiere cheered him on and Tiffany Trump and Naomi Biden posed for photos — with each other. The next day, rapper Lupe Fiasco would draw almost 400 people at a packed, outdoor performance; some guests showed up on kayaks to watch from nearby Fort Pond. It was so crowded that the guest list ceased to make a difference.

Solving sanitation issues at a montauk hot spot

Long said to be on its way out because of a changing industry and continually rising rents in Chelsea, its surrounding neighborhood, the district could be saved, at least symbolically, from the very thing threatening its existence: gentrification.

In between the shops offering garden accessories and roses or ferns in bulk, several trendy hotels have recently opened on the block. Instead of pushing out the local shops, they are relying on the uniqueness of the flower district to lure visitors.

The Moxy Chelsea opened on West 28th Street in February. The property is covered in flowers. In the lobby is the first retail shop of a well-known floral design company, Putnam &amp; Putnam, which has its workshop across the street. Vertical gardens are on the second floor.

The hotel’s crown jewel is the Fleur Room, a lounge and nightclub on the 35th floor. Cocktails are dressed with blossoms (some are even lodged inside ice cubes). Couches are covered with a floral velvet. Vases of flowers are placed strategically between tables.

“It is all inspired by Dutch floral paintings from the 17th century,” said Angelo Bianchi, who operates the Fleur Room alongside Tao Group.

Part of his attraction to the project was that it was on this particular street. “I moved to the city when I was 17, and the first time I discovered this block I felt it was a magical oasis, one of the coolest blocks in the city because you just don’t expect all these flowers of different colors here,” he said. “Being on this block is essential to our identity.”

On weekends young people line up for the Fleur Room. And lines are not something to which this neighborhood is accustomed.

Historically, the sidewalks of West 28th Street have been more cluttered with potted plants than people, with the exception being early in the morning, when florists, event planners caterers and other trade professionals visit. But now, throughout the day, tourists and New Yorkers alike are visiting. And lingering. The vegetation, it turns out, is proving to be popular backdrop for photography and general loafing.

“The flower district has become more of a fun neighborhood,” said Tom Weisse, who owns Caribbean Cuts, which has been on the block for more than 30 years and specializes in tropical flowers and foliage. “People come in wanting to take pictures,” he continued. “Some people have even asked to rent my space out.”

Troy Baksh, the owner of JRose Wholesale Flowers, which has been on West 28th Street for seven years, said people are also looking for Instagram moments inside of his shop. “It’s forcing me to do a better job cleaning my floors and walls,” he said. “You never know who will see those photos.”

Whether this interest in the neighborhood will be lucrative for the flower shops is up for debate. But interest means attention, at least. And some people on the block are capitalizing on it.

Lewis Miller, a florist and event planner based in the district, has started a “flower flash” where he sets up elaborate displays in trash cans, subway stations and against random brick walls all over the city. “Surprising these jaded creatures who live in this urban jungle with a surge of flowers when they least expect it is a total joy for me and hopefully for them too,” said Miller, who has over 120,000 followers on Instagram.

Others businesses in or around West 28th Street are also cropping up, making the neighborhood more of a destination for those outside the flower trade. Two years ago, a hotel on the block since 2009 rebranded as the Hotel Hayden and opened a buzzy rooftop bar, Mykonos Blue. In January Emeril Lagasse helped open a restaurant in Hotel Henri, four blocks away. A Peloton studio and a Cha Cha Matcha are also close by.

“The area was very deserted,” said Audrey Stipanovich, who owns Pastoral, a flower shop on the Lower East Side, of the flower district, where she still conducts business at least once a week. “There wasn’t even a place to get coffee to go.” She now has breakfast at the Chelsea Moxy, where she bumps into other florists. “It’s quickly become a local spot, a place we can hang,” she said. She even spent the night at the hotel once, when she needed to be at the market early the next day.

The growth has inspired shop owners already in the district, like Baksh, to create a more inviting environment for clients. In the next two months he’s opening a space in his store for customers to get bagels and coffee. “I want to show them how much we appreciate them,” he said.

Still, there are downsides to the rapid development, the main one being parking. “The parking garage where our clients used to park has been torn down,” Baksh said. “Now they have to park on the street. It’s a nuisance for them.”

Weiss said having lots of random people browsing in his shop is not helpful for professional florists who come there to focus. “A lot of my customers need to come in here and get out,” he said. “I can feel their frustration. It isn’t as easy for them.”

Then there is the unfortunate fact of renting in a hot neighborhood.

“Is the flower district dying right now?” Baksh said. “No, but rent is going up, and eventually flower shops won’t be able to afford it. It’s going to cause a slow death.”

In the short term, Baksh hopes that the new businesses continue to honor the neighborhood’s history and identity. “At least the Chelsea Moxy has Putnam,” he said of its mini store. “At least they are keeping the flower market surviving.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/nyregion/the-flower-district-hotels.html" id="e4410607-f6c5-39f6-a2f2-2df4202331b3">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — New York’s flower district, more than 100 years old and a home mostly to wholesalers, used to thrive like a jungle along Sixth Avenue. Now it is concentrated in just one block of West 28th Street.

Will Selfies Save the Flower District?

“We were depressed and demoralized,” said Greene, an editor at Afar magazine in her late 30s. “We needed to do something fun.”

Cruz, a sonographer in her mid-40s, had noticed a community of houseboats in Sausalito during one of her sailing lessons. And that led the couple, on a lark, to tour a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,000-square-foot house on the West Pier, where they fell in love with the beamed-roof living room and the light and views in every direction.

“I never thought I would be living in a floating home,” Greene said. “But we both had a strong feeling we wanted to go for this house.” They moved in last November.

Across the country, other couples and professionals are also turning to houseboats as a way to live in the heart of cities without breaking the bank. While some live in houses that sit on concrete hulls, like the place that Cruz and Greene own, others choose smaller sailboats or yachts.

The relatively low cost of buying a boat and low docking fees can help reduce monthly housing costs, and boat owners say added bonuses include stunning views and vibrant social communities.

But living on the water has its challenges. Not only do you have to empty the septic tank, you also have relatively little living space. And bad weather can make you feel like you need to find shelter elsewhere.

Greene and Cruz paid $645,000 for their home in Sausalito. They had to draw a little from their Roth IRA accounts and get help from family members to buy it. But to them it was worth it. While they haven’t officially christened their new home yet, its working name is “The Love Boat Has Docked.”

The Sausalito floating home community has 11 docks lined with houses of varying sizes: Some are as small as 400 square feet and relatively affordable, while others are valued at more than $1 million, with names like Unlimited Joy and Fairy Tale.

The community is so serene that geese and otters also call it home. And yet it’s only a 30-minute ferry ride to San Francisco, and downtown Sausalito is a 10-minute drive away. There is an ice cream shop, an organic grocery store, a seafood restaurant and a quaint cafe — all within walking distance.

“I love the peace and calm that comes from living on the water,” Greene said. “It’s truly soothing. No matter what is going on in our lives or the world, I feel my shoulders loosen when I look out the windows and see the water, or when I come home from work and walk down the docks.”

This is particularly true at night, she said, as there is little ambient light, apart from the light that comes from the homes, and it feels almost as if they are camping.

At first, Greene said, she noticed the motion during windy weather or when the tide was rising, but now it hardly registers: Her floating home feels just like any home built on land.

The couple’s house is attached by enormous brackets to pilings driven into the bay, so technically they are permanently docked, although the structure can be towed out if major repairs are needed. The couple pays for a berth lease, which includes water, garbage and sewage service, as well as maintenance of the docks and the ramp and pier that lead to their home.

More conventional boats used as homes can cost much less or much more, depending on scale.

“It could range anywhere from $1,500 to $15 million,” said Chris Mitchell, who lives on a houseboat in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The cost of docking a boat differs depending on where it is. In New York City, for example, a lease is based on a boat’s length and varies by season. In the winter, it can range from $70 to $90 a foot in some marinas, and in summer it can go up to between $250 and $320 a foot.

Kevin Wright, 44, a film producer in Chicago, used to get seasick, but that didn’t stop him and his wife, Colette Gabriel, 38, who runs a camera rental company, from moving permanently onto a yacht five years ago.

They owned a single-family house in the city that desperately needed an upgrade. They didn’t have the money to do the work properly, nor could they afford a nicer home. And becoming renters, and spending $2,000 a month on an apartment, they felt, would be a waste of money.

“One night we were drunk at a bar and said, ‘Let’s just move to the water,’” Wright said.

So they bought a 42-foot cabin motor-yacht with 350 square feet of living space, including a master bedroom, a small guest room, a living room, a kitchen and two bathrooms with showers. “That’s one more than we had in our house on land,” Wright said.

The yacht cost $77,000, and they spent another $25,000 on renovations. They rented a slip in the River City Marina in the South Loop for $1,200 a month, a fee that includes electricity, water and internet service.

While spending less on housing is certainly a perk, what keeps the couple on the boat is the lifestyle. There are nine houseboats in their marina, and many of the owners are their age. In the summer, they build fires in the firepits on the marina lawn or sit on the deck with cocktails.

“It feels like we are on vacation every day,” Wright said.

On the weekends, they sometimes take the boat to Michigan — “We don’t even need to pack,” he said — or to other marinas where the city has set aside free parking for boat owners.

Wright said he has gotten used to living on the water, and storms don’t usually bother him, as their home is well protected in the marina. “I only get seasick now when boats drive by too fast and set off waves,” he said proudly, something that happens only a couple of times a year.

Many marinas hold social events. Greene and Cruz said they can’t wait for summer, when their marina has float-in movies: Someone projects a movie onto the side of their house, and residents head over on boats or other floating objects to watch it.

Pavel Kocourek, 33, a doctoral candidate in economics at New York University, decided to live on a sailboat in a marina on City Island, in the Bronx, to save on living expenses. He bought his 41-foot boat for $10,000. It has a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom, four single beds and two double beds. Now his only expense is renting the slip, which costs much less than a conventional mortgage payment on a piece of property. In the past six months, he has paid $1,400 in total.

“I could live in New York City, but I would have to commute a lot, and I would have to live in a place with no light,” he said. “I feel happier since I’ve been living on a boat.”

He relishes the peace and quiet he gets after a long day of work at his office in Greenwich Village. “Most New Yorkers have no idea this place exists,” he said. “New York can be so overwhelming, so I like that I can go into the city and have excitement and then come here and have peace.”

Of course, there are other costs to living on the water. For Kocourek, it’s the commute. New York City has few marinas in the East or Hudson Rivers for a variety of reasons — among them, that ferries run so regularly their waves would ruin docked boats. To get home, Kocourek takes the 6 train to the last stop and then boards a bus or walks for 40 minutes.

“Last night, I went to a bar, and I was out until 3 a.m., and there are no buses,” he said. “It was too cold to walk, so I had to spend money on a cab.”

“You can’t have much stuff,” Wright said. “If you love shoes, and you have to have 100 pairs of shoes, that isn’t going to work for you, because you don’t have a place to store them.”

Some boat owners see this as a positive, though, because it forces them to live minimally.

And winter can be particularly brutal. In the River City Marina in Chicago, the water sources that boaters use to fill their tanks are turned off to prevent exposed pipes from freezing.

“There is a building next to the marina, and there is a water spigot at that building,” Wright said. “Some of the other boaters, when the weather looks decent, we will get out a series of hoses and fill up our tanks.”

To conserve water throughout the season, he and his wife often shower at the gym.

He also worries about ice and snow. The docks can get slippery during a winter storm, and wind and sleet can also cause damage to the boats if they aren’t tied up properly.

But storms generally don’t bother the couple. “We stay,” he said. “We have thunderstorms, but in the Midwest we don't have hurricanes, so it’s not a concern.”

But winter weather is the reason Will Haduch, 29, a contestant on “The Bachelorette” who works at G.M. Hill Engineering, left his houseboat in Jersey City in September 2017 to live on land in Hoboken, New Jersey.

“I’d do it again in the summer any time, but the winters were tough,” Haduch said. “Being out on the water, you’re so exposed to the wind.”

Another disadvantage is that houseboats don’t appreciate the way conventional houses on land do, said Skylar Olsen, the director of economic research at Zillow.

“When we think about home buying as an investment, the investment part generally comes from the increasing value of the land,” Olsen said. “As cities fill up, land with good access to amenities and jobs becomes more scarce, and the value of the home increases. So a houseboat — where you own the house itself, but rent the slip where the house is docked — doesn’t make a good long-term investment.”

The financial value of a boat often isn’t enough to be meaningful, said Chris Mitchell, 50, who owns a foreign-currency exchange business and lives on a boat in Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City. There is a great deal of wear-and-tear on boats, he noted, and older models are generally replaced by shiny new ones: “Boats depreciate. That’s all there is to it.”

But money isn’t everything. Living on the water has other, intangible benefits — one being that it brings you very close to nature.

Recently, Greene and Cruz noticed that geese had built a nest on their pier and laid some eggs. “They are our neighbors,” Cruz marveled. “How amazing is that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/realestate/house-boat-living.html" id="387b81e3-9935-3924-afb0-022eb61b73f1">The New York Times</a>.

When Aislyn Greene and Jeannie Cruz decided to buy a home last summer in the San Francisco area, they knew the suburbs wouldn’t be right for them. But they also quickly realized that living in a city center in the kind of home they wanted was way out of their budget.

Living on the Water

Many of those admitted — there are 3,500 members — have touched upon uncharted territories, and all are active in the field of science research. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were part of the club, as was Thor Heyerdahl. Recently, Elon Musk joined.

For 115 years, members have gathered annually for a weekend of science and a black-tie dinner at the New York headquarters, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The most recent event, held March 16, featured 10 astronauts who were part of the Apollo program and an auction where attendees could bid on joining a world-renowned paleontologist on a dinosaur fossil dig.

The weekend of science also introduced something new: The club let its youngest members, some still undergraduates in college, present their initiatives.

There was Alex Borowicz, a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University, who uses high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to track whales. “It used to be that people had to go on a boat with binoculars to do that,” he said, during his presentation. “I do it from my couch.”

Another young presenter was Stephen Daire, a graduate student at the University of Southern California. He had built robots able to explore caves so humans don’t have to. His robot even builds itself a charging station before it starts its work so it can take care of its own needs later.

For generations, exploration meant going to faraway lands and bringing back significant artifacts. The club is filled with items from these journeys: tusks from a rare elephant species and flags that flew on the moon. A giant taxidermy polar bear hovers over the second floor.

But it is clear that the newer members are different kinds of pioneers. Many of them are using technology, in addition to safari gear and compasses, to uncover the world’s greatest secrets. This has resulted in some growing pains at the club, as younger and older members struggle to expand the definition of exploration in 2019.

“For the older folks, maybe they were the first person somewhere because the world hadn’t been explored that much, and they had that opportunity,” said Alexander Rikhterman, 26, a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. “We can’t do that so we have to look at exploring differently. We can use new tools to take a closer look at the environments that have already been found.”

The afternoon of presentations showcasing new technologies was the first step.

To join the club with full voting rights, two other members must nominate you, and annual fees can cost hundreds of dollars. But there is also a way to as a join as a student member, for which the initiation fee is waived, with just one referral.

That said, being a young member in the Explorers Club can sometimes be challenging to navigate. Adam Gordon, 32, who works in human rights law at NYU, said he remembered when he first got his membership and immediately went to the members-only section of the website. “It was a ghost town,” he said. “There was nothing on it.”

Going to events in person was intimidating for Gordon, too. “Members tend to be in their 50s, 60s and 70s,” he said. “And some are pretty renowned.”

The clubhouse, with its wooden walls, leather club chairs, and plaques on the wall commemorating member firsts (like the summit of Mount Everest in 1953), has a somewhat faded 20th-century grandeur that might come across as outdated to younger members.

For example, the taxidermy. “The concept of Victorian hunters is quite alien to some of the younger members,” said Joshua Powell, who is deciding whether to pursue a doctorate at the University of Oxford, of a similar institution in England. “But England tried to cleanse itself entirely of it, and its clubhouse is quite stark as a result.”

The Next Generation Explorers Network, or NGEN, was created in 2017. At first it was just a Facebook group where young members could share their work, ask questions and find one another. “The group currently has 175 members,” said Brianna Rowe, one of the organizers, during the annual weekend of science. After the event, membership grew to 199, pending approval from the club.

The network has also started holding events like “beer and gear” nights where members talk about their favorite equipment, sometimes with an expert, like climber Vanessa O’Brien, and seminars on how to get funding for an expedition.

But these initiatives are mostly created by young members for young members. (All members are welcome in NGEN, but according to Rowe, most of the participation is by those under 40.) The big problem is how to mix the new with the old.

Francesco Bandarin, former assistant director-general for culture of UNESCO and a member for about a year, said he believes the club needs to be going in this direction. “The Explorers Club has had an emphasis on geographic exploration, the South Pole, the North Pole,” he said. “It’s a little different now. We can explore the world with many more tools than hundreds of years ago. These young people are using satellites and lasers. It’s so cool.”

Peter Lenahan, 62, brings young members along on expeditions he organizes, his most recent of which was a caving trip in Laos. “I’ve been leading trips for a long time, and I try to get the young people involved,” he said. “It’s really not that hard; you just have to tell them about the trip.”

George Basch, 82, seemed a bit let down that more older people didn’t attend the most recent round of NGEN presentations. “It wasn’t that well advertised, and I’m disappointed the room was so small,” he said. “This is something that should have been presented to thousands of people. There were only about 20 of us old folks in the room.”

But Basch planned to spread the word about the presentations. “I’m going to talk about it to everybody I meet or see the rest of the weekend,” he said. “These kids are so bright, so enthusiastic and so resourceful. Our club is lucky to have them so we won’t die out.”

'I Do It From My Couch': The Next Generation of Explorers

NEW YORK — The Explorers Club is exactly what it sounds like: a members-only institution, established more than a century ago, and dedicated to scientific inquiry.

'I do it from my couch': The next generation of explorers

Nicknamed Platty by locals, the mountain has a three-level utilitarian lodge with a wraparound porch and wood-burning stoves from the 1970s. Little about the building has changed, except the floor is now made of wood instead of hay, and the bar serves seasonal craft beer. Vintage sleds and skis decorate the walls.

Outside is some of the East Coast’s most difficult skiing. It is a local destination for off-piste trails. “Advanced and expert skiers will love Plattekill,” said a post on the website Ultimate Ski, which goes on to describe the mountain as having some of “the most rugged terrain in the Catskills,” where visitors have the rare option of skiing within trees.

Veronica Brock, a real estate broker who lives in Paramus, New Jersey, has been skiing at Plattekill for about a decade. She’s noticed that more of these backcountry trails have opened. “The mountain has gotten bigger with off-piste trails opening,” she said.

Or, as Troy Kasmarcik, an 18-year-old snowboarder from Norwich, New York, put it: “This mountain is pretty sick.” He tried Plattekill for the first time this winter. “It has a lot of jumps,” he said. “A lot of mountains don’t have them, but this has one right after the other.”

Plattekill can feel like a fairy tale, said Scott Brandi, president of the Ski Areas of New York, a trade group. “It’s a throwback experience while offering state-of-the-art snow making, grooming, and a cozy lodge where everyone seems to know each other,” he said.

But the real fairy tale here is that Plattekill Mountain has managed to stay open.

About a three-hour drive from New York City, Plattekill is owned by Laszlo and Danielle Vajtay. The couple, who had grown up skiing in the same circles, started dating around 1988, when they were instructors at Plattekill. They were both working day jobs, he as a packaging engineer in New Jersey, and she as a marketing manager for a perfume company in New York City. Every weekend they would reunite at the mountain.

In 1992, Plattekill went into foreclosure. The previous owners had defaulted on a loan after pouring money into an unsuccessful real estate project. That, along with not making enough snow, was their downfall, Laszlo Vajtay said. He and his future wife decided to buy the mountain, with the help of loans from the Small Business Administration and a few loyal ski families. “We were tired of living for the weekends,” said Laszlo Vajtay, who was 30 at the time. Danielle Vajtay was 22.

Operating a ski mountain anywhere is a daunting task. To make money, you must keep the mountain open, no matter the weather.

Plattekill also has some competition in the form of its well-financed, larger neighbors. Hunter is owned by the publicly traded company Peak Resorts, and Belleayre is owned and operated by New York state. Recently, taxes paid for a new gondola at Belleayre. An additional $9.1 million has been allocated to expand its base lodge.

Plattekill is also remote. “You have to drive by Belleayre to get to us if you’re coming from downstate,” said Danielle Vajtay. “That’s a huge hurdle for us.” Driving along Route 28 in the Catskills, once you pass Belleayre, with its prominent signage, you have to continue along for several more miles before switching to a small, slow, winding road that leads to a dumpy, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turnoff. It’s hard to imagine anything at the end of the road, let alone a ski resort.

But 25 years later, the scrappy, indie mountain is thriving.

“These small ski areas survive by knowing who they are and creating niches for themselves,” Brandi said. With around 50 ski mountains operating in New York state, many differentiate themselves by offering a certain expertise. Mount Peter, for example, a humble mountain in Warwick, New York, has branded itself as a perfect place for families, offering free lessons for beginners. “It knows who it is and caters to its strengths,” he said.

Plattekill, in turn, has branded itself as an intimate, old-fashioned resort for expert skiers and families alike. Most important, however, it has been able to guarantee income on the slower weekdays, by becoming a private mountain of sorts. Four days a week, it puts itself up for rent. Any group can have exclusive access to it for just a few thousand dollars a day.

In their early years as owners, the Vajtays were obsessed with two things that were not always compatible: making snow and avoiding debt. In the summer, they opened up the mountain for camping, music festivals and mountain biking. They took what they earned and invested it into snow-making equipment.

Eventually, a new business idea came from Plattekill’s regular skiers, who visited the mountain every time it snowed, even when it wasn’t open. (The mountain was and is only open to the public Fridays through Sundays.) This became so common that the Vajtays decided to open the mountain, regardless of the day, following a major snowfall. Typically, about 500 paying customers would show up for the event, called Powderdaize.

Powderdaize led to another idea: renting out the entire mountain to groups. Some Plattekill regulars so enjoyed the quiet setting of the last-minute weekday openings that they intimated to Danielle Vajtay how great it would be to have a “power day” to themselves, she recalled. The couple knew of a few members-only mountains in the United States but these were fancy, expensive resorts like the Yellowstone Club in Montana and the Hermitage Club in Vermont. Why not rent out their humble little mountain?

In 2008, they started to do just that, charging $2,500 a day for exclusive use of Plattekill Monday through Thursday. (The price has since increased to $4,500.) Clients have ranged from corporations, like Citigroup, to religious organizations. Every year since 2010, Jehovah’s Witnesses congregations from New Jersey and New York have met there once a year.

Brock, the organizer for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, said that 100 people signed up for the first trip. By 2018, 532 people were skiing the mountain, with another 400 participants socializing in the lodge.

So far this season, more than 50 percent of private rental days have been booked, Laszlo Vajtay said. The $4,500 covers the lifts, labor, electricity and overhead. Plattekill then makes money on rentals, food and drink, and snow tubing. “It’s a way for us to open the doors, staff up, and know that we will not lose any money,” he said.

Locals can feel a bit shut out sometimes, when private rentals conflict with Powderdaize. Recently the Vajtays have had to play down the event because of the conflict. “Now that we’ve started marketing mountain rentals people are booking,” Danielle Vajtay said. “So if we have a snowstorm, and it’s a snowstorm and a powder day, that day is booked. There isn’t anything we can do.”

The Vajtays are trying to honor the community that has historically kept the mountain running; they intend to keep the resort as small and as affordable as possible. They are even open to bartering with locals, it seems.

When Dennis Slauson, a regular who lives about 15 minutes away, helped them shovel the deck one morning, the Vajtays turned the lift on him for him. “It’s the best feeling,” he said. “There is nobody here.”

Slauson probably felt more like a private renter than Bart Lehmann, a Syracuse-based engineer who has rented Plattekill three times, did. The last time his group was there, he recalled that even though skiers could have spread out and seen no one else, they ended up skiing as a flock. “One trail was packed,” he said, “and every other one was empty.”

He remembered children in the group diving off the top wooden deck into snow banks. “The owners were like, Whatever you want to do, go ahead, go for it,” said Lehmann. “It was surreal. We enjoyed the heck out of it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/catskills-skiing-plattekill-mountain.html" id="779c3cfa-bf1b-30eb-acc5-7edfc2cbdab2">The New York Times</a>.

Plattekill Mountain, a family-owned ski resort in Roxbury, New York, has 38 runs and two rustic chair lifts.

Mountain for Rent: $4,500 a Day

The ball is the product of the Times Square Alliance and Waterford Crystal, the Irish company that’s been maintaining the 2,688 crystal-paneled orb for 19 years. The man entrusted with the crystal, Tom Brennan, 48, takes his role so seriously that he starts working on next year’s ball in January. “We have a glass of Champagne,” he said, “take a week off, and then start improving it for next year.”

Brennan grew up in Waterford, a small Viking town in the southeast of Ireland — and home of the crystal company — with a current population of 47,000 people. His father was a master glassblower for 30 years, and he used to run around the factory as a child watching him work. In 1986, when he was 16, he started to learn the craft. He recalled making a port glass as his first project. “With my uneducated eye, it looked great,” he said. “But then they did a quality check, and I realized the part you hold in your hand was all lopsided.”

Brennan has improved since then. Five years ago, he was promoted to the role of master artisan. With his new title came responsibility for the famous ball. “I still can’t believe this huge thing that the world watches comes out of my small hometown,” he said.

This is an edited and condensed version of a recent conversation with him.

Q: Tell us something we don’t know about the ball.

A: In the past, the ball would have the same pattern every year. But six years ago we decided to introduce themes. We wanted to give people a simple message that they could think about for just one day or one hour.

In 2014, the first year, the theme was imagination. Then it was fortitude, wonder, kindness and serenity. For 2019, the theme is harmony. Of course it’s a marketing message, but I try to personalize it. I’ve been thinking about what it means to my work/life balance and to my wife and kids.

Q: The ball is 12 feet in diameter and weighs 11,875 pounds. It’s a physical feat. How does it get made?

A: The entire ball doesn’t get remade every year. This year, only 192 panels with the new theme were replaced.

We make the panels the same way crystal has been made for 5,000 years, along with some updated technology. We take imported sands from all over the world — I’m not permitted to tell you which kinds — along with potash (a sort of fertilizer made from potassium chloride) and crushed crystal. We fire up the furnace to 2,400 degrees and heat the material. When it starts to look like this bright orange, yellow, toffee-like substance, we mold it.

That creates a blank crystal panel. Then we hold it against this cutting wheel and groove it and shape it into the design we want. That’s when we cut the theme into it.

The total process takes weeks and weeks. We have to make sure every piece is perfect. We don’t accept anything that is potentially flawed. It also takes a large team, hundreds and hundreds of people. You have the glassblowers, the glass cutters, the packaging engineers, the quality checkers, I can go on and on.

Q: How does the ball get to Times Square?

A: It is kept at 1 Times Square (in the building with the Walgreens at the bottom.) We ship in the new panels on whatever airline is flying that day. We have special containers. Then they are kept in a secret location in New York City, and we make sure that they are completely guarded until they are ready to be used. This year, on Dec. 27, our engineers installed them onto the ball.

Q: Does anything ever go wrong?

NEW YORK — For much of the past 111 years, the sparkling New Year’s Eve Times Square ball has been a signal for the 1.2 billion people watching it across the globe to dance, cheer, blow their horns and embrace. It has become such a touchstone that it almost seems like another year can’t start without it.