Community Notebook

Letter from Cold Spring

February 16

Last Wednesday the Grand Union in Cold Spring burned to the ground, and overnight the quality of life in this village has been changed. It was no case of arson, and this was not a supermarket that was slated to be shut down. It is said to have been the most profitable Grand Union in the state. Why? Because this is a town where so many people walk. We walk to go shopping, we walk to the train, we walk to run into our friends along the sidewalks. We walk because this town is a beautiful place to walk through, nestled between the mountains and the river, a place built at a human scale, where people live, work, and shop, all around the corner from each other, in the midst of preserved land and rolling hills.

Everyone is in some kind of mourning for the market, not a spectacular or up-to-date place with all the latest trendy foods, but a place that had most of what we needed, easy to walk to one or more times a day. And the best part of that walk was to realize how many people know and acknowledge each other in the village. Just taking that trip and seeing so many familiar faces was a comforting fact in this disturbing world, making us feel that here is a community where people are not afraid to look one another in the eyes, a friendly place, a town where people, not cars, are in charge. Why is it easier in this country to find a pretty place to live far off in the woods than a community where you can walk to work, shop, and to see other people that you know? The American dream is a largely personal quest, and most who escape the city for a better life seem to want isolation as much as clean air to breathe. Well, not everyone. There are more and more people who are disillusioned by the cloistered vision of suburbia and instead imagine they can find somewhere to live with a scaled-down sense of community as much as peace and calm. Cold Spring was that kind of place, and now the streets are much more deserted. It’s full of quaint antique shops that cater mostly to weekend tourists, and though visitors are essential to this town they aren’t the ones who make it thrive. We didn’t realize how much this one store made the town a place that worked. The closest supermarket is now a 20 minute drive away, the store that has everything, the place that sells for less. Yet when can less ever be more? It’s disorienting, overwhelming, and when you run into someone you know in that giant place, you’re embarrassed, as if you’ve been found out. Why exactly? We know there is something amiss with this way of shopping, but everyone wants to save a few cents. The price of all those cans of soup adds up. Or does it?

Consider the whole cost, if you now have to drive a while to get something to eat. One store doesn’t make a village, but it makes possible the chance interactions that make a town welcoming and within reach. There is no disagreement about this. Many senior citizens and others who don’t drive moved specifically to Cold Spring so they could get around the place on foot, and get what they need. Now things have changed.

What we can do is appeal to everyone’s sense of community to help bring back something that seems an obvious necessity, but something increasingly rare: a place worth walking to where you can get what you need to live. The whole town can hope for something as mundane as a supermarket, but in the end we have to depend on the good will of the one person who owns the burned-out site. He says he’ll rebuild. Within a year. Will he make sure the new tenant is a grocery store, and not a more lucrative drugstore that the town doesn’t need? A grocery store will likely be profitable, but is profit enough to convince? People may agree on what it takes to hold a town together, but it is hard to know how to proceed all together when what we take for granted suddenly bursts into flames.”

—David Rothenberg