With a background in filmmaking, graphic design, historical research, and writing, the creative team of Stephen Blauweiss and Karen Berelowitz bring you their second book that uniquely combines a stunning visual presentation with concise and informative text about the vibrant 400-year history of the mid-Hudson Valley region. The book is "The Story of Historic Kingston."
FOCUS Lab (The Future of Cities & Urban Sustainability [FOCUS] Lab) opened in Downtown Troy in April 2022. The FOCUS Lab is an exhibit space and urban room that explores sustainable and inclusive community design solutions. Through a rotating series of exhibitions and interactive stations for young people, the Lab seeks to engage citizens of all ages into co-designing what the future of their city should look like.
The upcoming exhibition, “Main Streets Resurfaced,” opens December 4, 2022 and runs through July 2023. Main Streets had their heyday in the early 20th century, then faced a postwar rise of the private automobile, suburbanization, and the Urban Renewal movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in which downtowns were gutted and turned into a series of failed malls and parking lots. Recently, small cities across the country have seen a rise in downtown revitalization efforts including farmers markets, co-working. and walkable urban design. This exhibit explores the past, present, and future of our Main Street corridors and asks how we can continue to gather along these throughlines of culture, business, and community. The exhibition examines case studies of small city Main Streets in Troy, Cohoes, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Western Massachusetts.
The Kingston portion of the exhibition is a multimedia display designed by historian, filmmaker, and author Stephen Blauweiss that includes historic photographs presented both in large-format prints and via projection, along with concise, informative text about the main thoroughfares in Kingston's three neighborhoods throughout the 20th century and to the present. Blauweiss is the co-producer and co-director of Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Removal and co-author of the book The Story of Historic Kingston: Featuring 950 Images and Connections to the Catskills & New York City. He has also produced eight museum-quality exhibitions about the history of Kingston and the region over the past few years.