I’ve already seen one headline, “Love in the Time of COVID-19.” It just doesn’t have the flow of Love in the Time of Cholera, the 1985 novel by Gabriel García Márquez. (Nor is it as exotic as Spanish Influenza.) But don’t expect that to stop reporters, bloggers, and other writers from using the formulation, in… Read More
Category Archives: Ruminations
Plagues and Economies
You know Covid-19, aka the coronavirus, is serious when authorities in Italy cancel top level soccer matches. (If you have season tickets for the New York Mets or have booked a flight for the Tokyo Olympics, you might look into force majeure.) In South Korea, cases have grown exponentially over the past few days,… Read More
Arrested Development
And this year’s Emmy Award nominees for Best Drama series are: Better Call Beacon The Beacon The Beacon’s Tale House of Beacon Stranger Beacon This is Beacon Beaconworld And the winner is…The Beacon’s Tale! Credited with single-handedly blazing a new tv genre, this urban planning procedural drama focuses on a small former river mill… Read More
Planning Board Gives Green Light to New Gas Station on Main Street
Earlier this week Beacon’s planning board issued a Certificate of Appropriateness for a new gas station on the western end of town at the intersection of Main Street and Cross Street. Because the station will be in an historic district, the certificate was a required first step. The final site plan approval process “will… Read More
City of Beacon’s Real Estate Savvy Quotient
Some of the real estate dealings involving the City of Beacon appear puzzling, at least when looking in from the outside. For instance, the city recently purchased a lot on the creek for over half a million dollars. Yet only two years ago, it sold a prime double city lot in the heart of… Read More
New City of Beacon Newsletter is Light on Facts, Figures (and Copy Editing)
The City of Beacon recently published the first installment of its new quarterly publication, an electronic newsletter.”The City has launched this new information service which is intended to help you keep up on the ‘happening’ around City Hall, such as events, happenings, projects, and services” reads the introductory message from the city administrator. The… Read More
Beacon, Gentrified?
Recently, we looked at how the teetering economy will likely turn Beacon’s housing boom into a bust. But what if all the glaring indicators of severe engine trouble are wrong, and don’t mean what they usually mean, or the Federal Reserve’s head mechanic Janet Yellen breaks out her magic toolbox and tinkers around a… Read More
NYC’s Mayor De Blasio
Reaches Out To Yarn Bombers
A few years ago it might have been called synergy. But it was just a matter of common sense, according to Beacon Mayor Randy Casale, who received a quick ring over the weekend from his New York City counterpart, Mayor Bill de Blasio. “He had a problem to solve and he saw a great outside… Read More
The Dummy Light Wars
“You can be someone doing something, or you can be someone talking about the people doing things.” Anonymous Beacon yarn bomber (BYB) Beacon, NY. Reuters The Beacon Yarn Bombers claimed another victim in what is being called the Dummy Light War here in this small former mill town 60 miles upriver from New York City. … Read More
BAU Set To Close Due To Greece
& Oil on the China, Etc.
BAU was Business As Usual before it was Beacon Artists Union. Our apologies for any confusion. Wigwam is a home economy journal. It looks at how we can start to decouple from the industrial global economy and become more resilient and self-reliant as a community. It attempts this mission because the global economy cannot last… Read More
Beacon and the Tourism Trap
I’ve lived in this city since it was an industrial community, and that was our economic engine. Today, our economic engine is tourism. ” Beacon mayor Randy Casale, April 2015 Last night was Second Saturday and one imagines it was exactly what a successful Second Saturday was envisioned to look like when the monthly… Read More
Signs of Spring: Peeps & Eats
My son and I were at Denning’s Point last week, where the spring peepers are out in force in the northern marshy section where the trail first divides. Only the week before we found the last third of the trail up Mount Beacon was an Olympic bobsled run, covered in ice. (Dad had a… Read More
Wigwam’s Weekend Bonus Post!
There are still a couple posts waiting in the draft box, but in the meanwhile I figured I would put up this mishmash of observations I’ve had while walking about town, random local stuff that just happened or is about to happen, before it gets too stale, and another short slideshow of photos featuring snow,… Read More
LUST Comes to Beacon: It’s Volatile!
Update on the gasoline leaking from the underground storage tanks at Main and Fishkill Avenue: Removal has continued after a delay due to too much moisture in the soil. Truckloads of contaminated dirt are being hauled to an approved facility in Albany. Still no word on the extent of the contamination, but at this point… Read More
Beacon’s Soul Intact!
On this day for hearts, it’s reassuring to know that, according to a recent article in The New York Times, Beacon still has a soul. Okay, I admit, I can’t help it. These trifles in The New York Times that tout Beacon as a getaway for slickers from the city are one of my pet… Read More
Gas Leak Update: The Hole We Dig Grows Ever Deeper
The attempt to clean up the spilled gas at Main Street and Fishkill Avenue continued today, with quite a few more truckloads of contaminated soil carted away in dump trucks throughout the day. And it may not be just the soil that has been compromised. According to several locals, there are subterranean feeder springs to… Read More
Beer Grants, Jobs, Lumbersexuals & LegoLand
I was sitting in Yummy Taco on 17k in Newburgh last December having lunch with a friend. We met a dozen years ago, when he was running a small eatery on Main Street in Beacon and I ran a second-hand furniture place next door. As we sampled what he called the fusion menu—the place was… Read More
Bombogenesis and Beacon
Anyone who missed the chance for a snowy stroll this past Saturday morning will have another opportunity shortly. As the Hudson Valley Weather guy described it, we are in for a bombogenesis. What a fun word. It has a technical meteorological definition, but it could be repurposed generally to mean something along the lines… Read More
One Foggy Christmas Eve
I don’t know the words to many songs, but this one would take a frontal lobotomy to remove. Many have covered it, but Dean Martin’s version from 1959 is extra special. Happy Birthday, Rudolph! (Although 75 is positively ancient for a reindeer, he’s a babe in the woods compared to another famous savior, Jesus,… Read More
Hudson River Interlude
Since late August I’ve been commuting from Beacon to Newburgh for work. It’s given me a renewed appreciation for the mighty body of water currently known as the Hudson River. Some days I have a camera with me. I was drawn to the combination of water and expansive skies and how they relate to the… Read More
Strawberry Moons, Shorter Days, Seafood, & Casinos
Maybe from the title of this post you guessed that there was no city council meeting this week—only four per month allowed. So we’ll catch up on a few things, for those who care to follow a summer ramble… Friday, June 13 was the night of the Strawberry Moon, the Algonquin name for the full… Read More
Airbnb Regulations Getting Convoluted Fast
Meet Homeowner Example A, a family with a nice three-bedroom house in Beacon. They also have a vacation home in the Berkshires. On weekends when they head north, they rent out their Beacon house to tourists via a listing on Airbnb, using the extra income to splurge at Smokers Mecca. 271 feet away is… Read More
Rebirthed Beacon’s Quaint Make-Over Rediscovered by New York Times!
Look, the New York Times mentions Beacon! Here we go again, with the Times announcing our rediscovery, our rebirth, our make-over. These bits of journalistic cotton candy have been spun out with minor variations every two or three years for at least the past decade. Here’s one from 2007, when Clara Gould actually was… Read More
Drink, Beacon, Drink!
Just as a certain political party solved the energy crisis with the dictum “Drill, baby, drill,*” Beacon appears poised to defy a sluggish economy with a veritable onslaught of alcohol-based businesses. The newest member of the club will be at 394 Main Street, sandwiched between Kennedy Fried Chicken and the late, lamented Nichols Hardware, where… Read More