Our family represents the sum total of our routines and rituals. One that’s deeply ingrained, dating back decades, has been to visit the village of Kinderhook, NY for Saturday morning breakfast. We’d once join the regulars for eggs and bacon at the Village Hutte, a small diner where the counter stools were monopolized by the town’s old-timers.
The Village Hutte closed years ago; business seemed to drop off precipitously in 1989 when New York State instituted an indoor smoking ban for most public spaces. Today the main attraction, come spring and summer Saturday mornings, is the bounteous farmer’s market on the village green. Booths, or rather tents, selling fresh produce, pork, eggs, baked goods and flowers are filled with locals and weekenders who come to shop and socialize.
But in the last year or two Kinderhook has developed something that resembles buzz. There will be those Kinderhookers who take exception to the characterization, considering it arbitrary and capricious. After all, the town has a storied history dating back to the 1600’s, even if Benedict Arnold wasn’t actually carried there after being wounded at the Battle of Bemis Heights in 1777, as a historic marker in front of the brick house in question suggests.
Its most famous citizen is Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the United States, today best known for his campaign slogan “OK” as in Old Kinderhook. The town’s residents are a proud and public-spirited population that takes historic preservation seriously. Thus, a bronze statue of the former president seated on a bench under the village bandstand, and resembling nothing so much as a farmer’s market shopper taking a breather, invited a certain amount of resistance when it was donated to the village in 2007 by the Friends of Lindenwald, the Van Buren estate and National Historic Site a mile south of the village.
But it certainly qualifies as an Instagramable conversation piece and it’s also part of a new audio walking tour of the village square that can be downloaded onto phones and laptops. Its narrators include actor and Kinderhook denizen Steven Lang, perhaps best known as the memorably evil Colonel Miles Quaritch in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Among the stories Mr. Lang tells with relish on the walking tour is that of the old burying ground, dating back to the 1600’s, on what today is the village green. Kinderhook petitioned New York State in 1817 for permission to move the bone yard. Permission was granted, as Mr. Lang recounts, on condition that the human remains be removed and reinterred at a new cemetery north of the village. The gravediggers apparently did an incomplete job and bones continued to surface for the next hundred years.
“It’s so wonderfully gruesome,” Kate Johnson, the town of Kinderhook historian told me as we took the walking tour Monday afternoon under appropriately threatening skies.
Its piquant past aside, the handsome village green is one of the features that distinguishes Kinderhook and has always drawn our family there. “It’s unusual for a Hudson Valley town to have a village green,” Kate noted. “It’s more common in New England.”
It’s a storybook space, though one that seemed to have lost its mojo until recently. When I started visiting the village regularly in the late 1970’s, it had a drug store, a grocery store, a liquor store and the town post office bracketing the square.
But Kinderhook, like other towns, villages and cities fell victim to the big box stores that rose on their outskirts, bleeding downtowns of their revenue and pedestrian life. I’m happy to report that Kinderhook has bucked that trend. It’s back, a remarkable revival that offers hope for communities in the Hudson Valley and beyond.
The centerpiece of that renaissance is a recently completed collection of shops and restaurants collectively known as The Knitting Mill. Located on the site of a late 19th and early 20th century knitwear factory, its success may be due to the fact that it wasn’t conceived by a developer but by friends artist Darren Waterston and Lower East Side restaurateur Yen Ngo. Started as a pandemic fever dream the result is the Aviary, a superb Southeast Asian restaurant run by Brooklyn chef Hannah Wong that anchors the complex. The inventive menu’s winning streak extends to the contiguous Morningbird Café where the spicy Thai lemongrass sausage breakfast sandwich is worth a detour. So, too, its strange but wonderful mochi donuts, especially when paired with one of the café’s excellent cappuccinos.
OKPANTRY, next door, is one stop shopping for penny candy not to mention designer toys, books and sundries, whatever sundries are, for children and adults alike.
The welcoming Kinderhook Bottle Shop, also part of the gaggle of stores, knows its stuff. Not much of a wine drinker myself, I don’t so I must take my wife’s word, a religious customer. Two Note Hudson, a small batch bath and beauty care company, next door is where my children spend their allowances, or rather their salaries, these days.
And across the street the Old Dutch Inn recently reopened as a boutique hotel, reminiscent of those that sprung up to cater to stagecoach travelers on the New York City to Albany post road that intersected Kinderhook two centuries ago.
And just up the street is the Jack Shainman gallery, The School, presenting ambitious, large-scale exhibitions in what used to be Kinderhook’s high school.
My Saturday morning strategy is to provision for the week at several of farmer’s markets stands – these days piled high with mammoth heads of lettuce, sprays of carrots, scallions, rhubarb and strawberries. My takeaway is that for all humanity’s imperfections, hope combined with ambition and an uncompromising sense of excellence will eventually win the day.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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