Press Stories

Randy Florke with son Jesus

With the arrival of the new crowd, inevitably, come all the standard problems of gentrification: Prices and property taxes are climbing, farmers are selling out to developers, and several of the best-known towns, such as Rhinebeck and Woodstock, have already been overwhelmed by the summer tourist brigade. But take a walk through one of the smaller villages like Germantown, on the southern border of Columbia County, and you'll see a community that's still in the sweet early stages of a boom. On your right: a new cafe, next door to a pottery studio, just opened by a woman who designs table-ware for Nobu. On your left: the pleasantly scruffy general store (little changed except for the newspaper rack, which contains two copies of the financial times). Down the road in Tivoli, at Tivoli Tileworks, potter Caroline Wallner is firing up her kiln, which is layered with tiles she's custom-making for her new neighbor, actress Lili Taylor.

Despite the growing number of celebrity residents, name-dropping is a no-no around here; the newcomers are more likely to boast about being friends with their tree-guy. The only snobbery that's acceptable is the geographical variety -a sort of my-town-is-better boosterism that many New Yorkers adopt as soon as they move in. And in an interesting parallel to Manhattan's East Side/West Side rivalry, residents on each bank of the Hudson River have very different things to be proud of. On the east: rolling meadows, horse farms, Merchant-Ivory. On the west: Buddhist monasteries, faded Catskills resorts,hand-lettered signs hawking FREE DIRT.

Among the die-hard West Siders is photographers' agent Jed Root, who just bought a six-bedroom, lOO-year-old estate in Palenville, north of Woodstock "I hate the east side of the river," Root says. "It's full of, like, fake Connecticut people. You go to the train station and they're wearing jodhpurs. Here, on our side, it's freaks and lesbians and old hippies. And mountains and lots of rednecks." Root is typical of the young Manhattanites who are eagerly colonizing the Husdon Valley's roughest fringes. The true adventurers are now heading all the way to Sullivan County, on the far side of the Catskills, where the main streets are lined with gun stores and pawn shops.

Realtor Randy Florke, a blond, six-foot-two former Wilhelmina model, has lured scores of fabulous types to Sullivan County through his Manhattan-based agency; the Rural Connection. Driving around the county's idyllic back roads in his Mercedes station wagon, Florke points out dozens of old farms restored to perfection, as well as a handful of celebrity hide-aways: There's Marc Anthony's A-Frame lodge, overlooking a barn and stables; there's Joan Osborne's hilltop farmhouse, with a vintage red Chevy parked on the front lawn, local-style.

"Sullivan County was always kind of the underdog, the forgotten frontier," says Florke. "But now it's one of the most popular destinations among a certain crowd of New Yorkers." He describes his clients as style-conscious types "with a strong self-identity -they're not concerned about being seen in the right restaurant. They know that Sullivan County isn't about a scene, or about quaint small towns. It's about their own property." Florke's own weekend home in Jeffersonville, which he shares with his partner Sean Maloney, and their two children, is an 1820's parish house that he moved piece by piece from its original site, 30 miles away.Ioriginal site, 30 miles away. Now it's on a hill overlooking the valley; surrounded by a pond, a pool, a guest house and a picture-perfect meadow stocked with picture-perfect sheep.

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