Hudson: the trendiest town in New York State

This entire town tricks my brain, in the best possible way. The look of it. The mad eclecticism. The weary grandeur. The shattered roof slates and shot-to-bits shutters. The hardware store, JC Rogerson's, where the very motes of dust appear to have been suspended in the air since before the Civil War. The bookshop that dispenses tankards of gluten-free ale alongside Cabin Porn. The unfamiliar and oddly endearing combination of perky metropolitan smugness and careworn, small-town humility.

'A haven for tolerant middle-aged people airlifted directly from Cobble Hill,' is how the satirical novelist Gary Shteyngart describes it - somewhat unfairly, since although it's true that Hudson is crawling with Brooklynites, I'm fairly sure most of them would've taken the Amtrak train to get here. It's the musicians and film stars, not the hipsters, who get choppered in.

Hudson is a phenomenon, a 21st-century twist on an ancient pastoral fantasy that runs from Hesiod and Virgil to Giorgione, Milton, Marie Antoinette and Modern Farmer magazine (which, as I discover to my delight, is edited above a yoga studio here). The charm of the pastoral fantasy is that it doesn't really need to be enacted to be enjoyed. Mere proximity to green spaces, happy animals, fresh vegetables and relatively clean air is enough for most of us. On my bedside table in one of the new boutique hotels in town is The Trapper's Bible, Shelters, Shacks and Shanties, How to Raise Goats, and Basic Butchering of Livestock & Game. I don't suppose many of the weekenders who put up here will ever try their hand at such strenuous and gruesome rustic pursuits. Why bother? The rooms are gorgeous and the restaurant downstairs is terrific.

It's not just Hudson itself that's having a moment. Ask around and people will tell you that such-and-such a town set some kind of record in terms of Gilded Age overmantle mirrors and nickel-plated Art Deco standard lamps per capita. Gallerists, restaurateurs, boutique-hoteliers and (Boo! Hiss!) unscrupulous property developers duly followed where the antique dealers led. All have played their part in making Hudson what it is today, though I'd say that, even if it was the brown-furniture merchants who got the ball rolling, it's the foodies who've propelled that ball on to something like terminal velocity.

Red Dot is the longest-running restaurant on Warren Street. The holder of the keys is Alana Hauptmann, a veteran of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and another of the pioneers in the Great Hudson Revival. She and her late husband bought Red Dot in 1990 for $20,000. (A similar building might sell for 20 or 30 times as much today.) At first people came here because there was nowhere else to go in the evening if you wanted a drink and a chat rather than a crack pipe and a knee-trembler. Some of the locals, however, proved harder to win over than others. Some, indeed, were downright unwelcoming, taking potshots at the windows or dismantling and abandoning their old cars outside the front door. Eventually Alana won them over - her sailor's mouth and Belgian-style fritas probably helped - and today Red Dot is a Hudson institution.

The joint is packed when I turn up for dinner with Alana's old friend James Ivory, of Merchant Ivory fame, who's lived in nearby Claverack for 40 years. Alana has to shoo Tommy Stinson, the sometime bass player for The Replacements and Guns N' Roses, and his lady friend off their stools to make room at the bar for the distinguished director. 'That gentleman, by the way, was an Anglican bishop,' James says after Tommy has bid us goodnight. 'And the younger gentleman with him was his husband.' This has me baffled for a moment, until I realise that James is talking about a different couple altogether. I'd had Tommy pegged as a pagan and a bachelor, for sure, and certainly there was nothing outwardly mannish about his date.

I ask James about Hudson in the 1980s. 'At that time it was not a place people were dying to come to,' he says. 'But the tribe of antique dealers got a lot of people here who wouldn't have dreamed of it before then.' For Alana, though, an equally important event in the town's evolution was the hard-fought, seven-year battle between the St Lawrence Cement Company, which wanted to build a vast factory in Hudson, and sceptical residents who banded together to prevent it. In the end, and against all odds, the residents won - a significant and emotionally charged victory that, as it were, cemented a new sense of community in Hudson.

These days, if there's tension in the air, I suspect it's not so much between blue-collar, Hudson-born-and-bred locals and well-heeled, out-of-towners as between different generations of out-of-towners. 'These kids come in and I ask them where they're from,' Alana says with a sigh. 'They're all from Brooklyn but I ask anyway. They say, "I'm from the city." And I say, "Oh. Do you mean Brooklyn?" And they say, "Yeah - the city." And I say, "Excuse me, no. Brooklyn is not the city. Manhattan is the city. Don't even try to tell me Brooklyn is the city. I was hip before you were fuckin' born.'

Well, quite. Though part of me sympathises with those wide-eyed kids from New York's second-most-populous borough who turn up, fall madly in love with Hudson and decide to stay. True, they face fewer struggles than Alana did 30 years ago. But if they appear ungrateful for, or blithely unaware of, the achievements of their predecessors, perhaps that can be attributed not so much to arrogance or ignorance as to an innocent excess of youthful enthusiasm - the delight that kids traditionally take in the pleasant illusion that, rather than having inherited something from their parents, they've discovered it for themselves.

And what a something Hudson is to discover. On my last night in town I find myself drinking sake and eating truffle-dusted potatoes at Fish & Game, the locavore hotspot of the moment, with its owners Zak Pelaccio and Jori Jayne Emde. They started coming to the Hudson Valley together in 2006 on weekend breaks to get away from the stresses of life in the city - well, away from Brooklyn in any case. Usually this involved a night or two in Hudson. Their crush on the town deepened, grew serious. 'And then one night we ended up at an impromptu Vetiver acoustic show at the old Cannonball Factory on Columbia Street,' Jori remembers. 'And I just thought, What are we doing? We must live here immediately! I dig it!'

WHERE TO STAY IN HUDSON

Boutique hotels are blossoming in Hudson. Three of the best are Wm. Farmer and Sons, The Hudson Milliner and Rivertown Lodge. Each has a completely different vibe - plush and cosy, chicly creaky and motel-minimalist, respectively. The coffee shop, bar and restaurant at Wm. Farmer and Sons (which takes its name from its proprietor and head chef, who is a Farmer though not yet a farmer) are excellent.

wmfarmerandsons.com; doubles from about £250. thehudsonmilliner.com; doubles from about £200. rivertownlodge.com; doubles from about £170. Red Dot (+1 518 828 3657) and spag bol at Ca'Mea (Swoon, followed by the similarly thoughtful and inventive Crimson Sparrow (Fish & Game (Moto Coffee Machine (Talbott & Arding (The Spotty Dog (Backbar (Ör Gallery & Tavern (The Half Moon (Arenskjold Antiques (+1 518 828 2800). If the 18th century seems too much like ancient history, there's no shortage of mid-century delights to be had at 3FortySeven (+1 518 391 3165), Finch (Neven and Neven Moderne (Valley Variety (Hawkins New York (JC Rogerson's (+1 518 828 1832) has been selling nuts, bolts, sandpaper and stopcocks since 1832.

AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT

Nearby stately piles Olana and Clermont are elegant reminders of the Hudson Valley's artistic and genteel heritage - the former is the Persian-inspired folly where Frederic Church lived and painted, the latter the ancestral home of the Livingston family - not quite as grand as some of its rivals, such as the stonking great Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park or the only marginally less stupendous Springwood estate - but none too shabby. It's tantamount to blasphemy to say so, but Otto's Market in next-door Germantown is arguably the one thing Hudson hasn't got that it desperately needs: a fantastic grocery store where you can get normal, useful, everyday stuff such as bread, eggs and milk, along with bottled cola-espresso, quince paste and flaxseed meal.

GETTING TO HUDSON

BA flies from London Heathrow to JFK International and Newark; britishairways.com. From New York's Penn Station, catch the train, which takes two hours; amtrack.com.

This feature first appeared in Condé Nast Traveller June 2017

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