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Moving on Up A new crowd of hip, Hamptons-phobic Manhattanites is heading upstate to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills - where the air is fresher and the paparazzi fewer. Who cares if the locals occasionally shoot household pets?

Randy Florke with Sean Maloney and their childern Jesus and Daley. Below: Their residence in the Catskills.

It all began, some say, on the day Brad Pitt came to town. One sunny afternoon a few summers ago, Pitt and a couple of friends made an unexpected appearance on the streets of Woodstock, New York. Within days, a rumor was spreading throughout the tranquil Catskills hamlet: Pitt had bought a house in the nearby hills. And over the next few months, the alleged sightings of the actor grew more frequent and more difficult to verify. Hikers claimed to see him on the trails early in the morning, bikers saw him pedaling up Overlook Mountain (without a helmet), fly fishermen saw him casting a line into the gentle rapids of Esopus Creek. The truth was, Pitt had just visited for the weekend, and to this day he has not bought a place in upstate New York. But here's the surprise: Just about everyone else has. The Hudson Valley and the Catskills, an area long dismissed as a poor man's Hamptons, is quietly becoming the retreat of choice for a wide swath of Manhattan's cultural elite. For starters, there's the film crowd: Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke have settled into a lOO-acre farm outside Woodstock; Robert De Niro is building an elaborate compound in Gardiner, complete with a regulation boxing ring; Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson live year-round at their place in Dutchess County. Indie actors are concentrated in the minuscule village of Kripplebush, where Steve Buscemi just moved into Harvey Keitel's old place, right down the road from Willem Dafoe's. Then there's the fashion pack: Gisele Biindchen bought a cabin last summer in northern Ulster County; several other models, including Carolyn Murphy and Chandra North, have colonized the area near Stone Ridge; makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin has just moved into a Middletown farmhouse that once belonged to Laura Ashley. Also ensconced in the area is a prominent but low-key assortment of New York artists, writers and musicians. - painter Alexis Rockman, photographer Stephen Shore, New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn, singer Natalie Merchant.

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PHOTOS BY PRESTON-SCHLEBUSCH
TEXT BY CHRISTOPHER BAGLEY