There are places where there is still character and texture that you don't have to go diligently searching for. But we need real laundromats. These things matter. In many ways, the landscape defines the Hudson Valley community. There are natural limits on where people can live, economic limits on how many people can live there, and both the climate and the terrain shape consciousness.
Economic realities keep the onslaught of time and the smash of progress down to a reasonable pace.
Corporate downsizing by IBM in the early '90s reversed a process that is killing most other places with prosperity, and the interesting thing is that the quality of life was not seriously impacted for the worse. The community did not become an impoverished wasteland like Flint, Michigan after General Motors pulled out. People just learned how to survive, and many took the change as an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along. Everybody became a Reiki master. Much of who I am today was defined by the land that surrounds New Paltz, High Falls and Rosendale.