What began as a makeshift effort to give the city’s most vulnerable residents someplace to stay on frigid winter nights has evolved into a plan to create “transitional housing” for people struggling to overcome addiction, mental illness and homelessness.
But both the South Pine Street City Farm and the Kingston YMCA Farm Project are attempting to shift locals’ focus from their grocery carts to the benefits of cultivating and eating locally grown produce.
Against a backdrop of confusion, doubt and controversy surrounding the future of healthcare in America, HealthAlliance of Ulster County is hoping to break ground in June on almost $90 million worth of new construction at its Mary’s Avenue and Broadway campuses.
“The idea is to take these factories that have lain fallow for more than a generation and press them into service in a way that makes sense for today’s economy. That creates jobs and builds wealth in the community in the same way IBM did.”
Barbara Masterson, who lives on a farm at the top of a small mountain in the southern Ulster hamlet of Milton, had always painted landscapes. But one day in May 2015, when she was out painting on a neighboring farm in Marlborough, some migrant workers wandered into the scene and her subject began to change. “I just painted them in quickly,” she said. “It was kismet. I was just innocently painting and they just kind of appeared.”
Say you have yourself a rough night and find yourself on the wrong side of jail cell door. What next?
Each holiday season, Kingston puts on an impromptu display of Christmas cheer. Entire streets get into the act, of which perhaps the most famous is Santa Claus Lane, a.k.a. Derrenbacher Street, which runs uphill from Foxhall Avenue in the heart of Midtown near the railroad tracks.
Among the projects receiving funding: reduction of stormwater runoff, new traffic signals, crosswalks and protected bike lanes on Broadway; $500,000 for “the last piece of the puzzle” in the rail trail proposal, funding trailheads and converting the stretch between Cornell Street and the New York State Trolley Museum on the Rondout; and $300,000 for improvements to Kingston Point Park
The Ulster BOCES P-Tech program has outgrown their space at the former Carnegie Library building on Broadway. It has moved to the SUNY Ulster satellite campus in the former Sophie Finn Elementary School a few hundred feet away.
A long-time Kingston community activist will spend two years in state prison for illegal firearms sales according to the terms of a plea agreement approved in Ulster County Court.