Press Stories

Alexis Rockman and Jill Rowe on their front porch in Sullivan County.

Sitting on their porch a few miles up the road are artist Alexis Rockman and his wife, Jill Rowe (also a former model), who gave up on East Hampton when they found their place, a 1910 farmhouse with a gurgling stream out back. Rockman is now working on plans to turn the barn into an extension of his TriBeCa studio, and Rowe (partnered with Florke) has just taken the bold step of opening a country-chic restaurant, called the Kitchen, in downtown Jeffersonville. She hopes to draw a regular crowd of both locals and weekenders - challenging the longtime reign of Ted's Diner.

It need hardly be said, however, that mixing with the locals is not the goal of every New Yorker up here. "Mind you, I'm not befriending many of my neighbors," declares one fashion editor who spends weekends at her mountaintop home, a former hunting lodge near Jeffersonville. "It can be a little frightening around here - a little Deliverance," she explains. "On your way up, you drive past all these mobile homes with decaying cars in the front yard. And then hunting season comes around, and you start hearing all these guns going off The first few months I spent up here, I thought, Oh, God, what have I done?"

She quickly learned that the key to her happiness upstate is importing everything she needs - including friends and food. "I bring my own party," she says. "We drive up on Fridays, stopping at Fairway in Manhattan on the way, and once we get upstate we stay in the house for the entire weekend." Most of the locals she does encounter - plumbers, electricians, etc. - treat her perfectly well, and she has a theory about why: "Of course they're friendly. When they look at me, they just see dollar signs. But they don't try to take advantage of me. A plumber will come over, fix everything, and charge $35."

Still, the culture clashes in these parts occasionally have a sinister edge. Rockman and Rowe suspect one neighbor of shooting and killing their cat And a few weeks ago, Aucoin was awakened early in the morning by the ominous whir of a chain saw. He rushed out in his pajamas and drove down to the end of a 700-foot-long driveway, where he discovered a town road crew chopping down centuries-old trees he believes are his. (He blames a local official who he says is picking on weekenders in his quest to widen the town's roads.)

The locals have their own gripes about the weekenders - particularly on the west side of the river, where the difference between the two crowds is most pronounced. Rick Ricciardella, a realtor in Phoenicia who's been in business since the Sixties, when cabins were on the market for $500, rolls his eyes at the naive Manhattanites who march into his office and announce their intention to purchase a local farm. "We haven't had a farm in this town since 1957," he says. (Phoencia and its environs are part of New York City's reservoir system, so agriculture is forbidden.) Ricciardella is also mystified by the weekender's habit of lining up for brunch outside Sweet Sue's restaurant on Main Street. "They'll stand there for hours, waiting for a plate of pancakes!" he says. "New Yorkers are like cattle - everybody wants to be like everybody else. They see Uma Thurman lives here, so now they have to live here.

"But hey," he adds, smiling, "it's good for the area."

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