Chatham, New York Is The Reprieve You Need
Getting away from the noise for some natural organic life.
Manhattan can be a lot. Of course Manhattan is great, but, you know. It can still be a lot.
Manhattan is full of people. Apparently, approximately one billion people cram themselves into New York’s spottily operating subway train system at 7am and again at 7pm, every day, every year. And at 7am, if you’re unlucky enough to be at a busy stop, it truly is cramming. The kind of cramming where your jacket gets caught in the closing doors and is just flapping in the dirt of the subway tunnel and your only real thought is, “well, at least I made it on the train.” The kind of cramming where making uncomfortable physical contact with all four of the people around you is just accepted as standard practice. You might be thinking to yourself, “why would someone put up with that even once a month?” And people do it every single workday of their lives, and then again sometimes on the weekends. Unreal.
Manhattan is loud. For starters, it’s the normal kind of loud: horns honk, there’s construction happening somewhere nearby, (to quote Marc Maron, “there’s always someone in a hole”) and people yell, often obnoxiously. One time I actually heard someone yell “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!” Like he actually said that and we weren’t in, like, an old movie. Ridiculous. Also: loud.
But then there’s also the more subtle loudness. New Yorkers will tell you that the old idiom “the city that never sleeps” isn’t quite true. It does get “less loud” at night, but there’s always this…hum. It’s like a neon light buzzing; like the city can’t turn its energy off. Too many souls and refrigerators and window-mounted AC units packed into that city. Loud. You hear people talk about “noise pollution” in New York — that always sounded about right to me. Polluting any chance at peaceful brain waves.
And, Manhattan is stressful. Beyond the noise and the trains running late and when the train finally gets there there’s, again, literally no empty space left on the train, there’s also a fair chance that if you live in Manhattan, your day-to-day life is stressful. At the minimum your job, just by the virtue of being a job, probably stresses you out. And then there’s also the ambition and lifestyle and set of shared interests that goes along with the community — that pressure to hustle and grind and GaryVee your way to American-Dream prosperity.
I once overheard a conversation on the subway with a woman who could not have been older than 25, telling her friend about her first year on the job at some kind of firm (investment, maybe banking? who cares?). The last thing I heard before the subway doors opened and people filed out: “I have to bring in 1.2 million in billings this year.” 25 years old. Crazy.
So, it can all be a lot.
For all its charms and wonders you hear people waxing poetically and singing admittedly super good songs about, it’s still the kind of place you could be forgiven for wanting to get away from for a minute.
One week, my girlfriend and I were feeling exactly that way. We went to Google and typed “cities outside New York” and narrowed the results to a sub-four hour drive. The first link that popped up was a city called Chatham, New York. We entered “Chatham” into Airbnb and found an option with great reviews. The guy’s name was George. That sounded nice. We didn’t think too much — we booked for that weekend. And then that Friday after work, we just started driving upstate. North. Away.
We arrived after dark and drove up a rocky road where we couldn’t see much. Houses were spaced several yards apart from each other, I guess like how they are in the rest of the country that we hadn’t been used to.
George’s Airbnb was a converted garage out to the side of his house. We had seen pictures, of course, and it looked nice in there, but you never know. I hadn’t really looked at them that closely. It was still a garage out to the side of his house.
We walked inside and it looked and felt like a villa in Venice, California or something. Tasteful decoration. A robust dark leather couch with wear and distressing in the right places. A little old-school writing desk, like your grandmother has or that you saw on your tour of Monticello, except it felt appropriate? There was classical music playing on some speaker we couldn’t even see. It was as if the vibe of quaintness and class and calm was just part of the air.
A wave washed over us. Relief, peace. The closest thing we ever got to this kind of thing in the city was that Starbucks on 12th and 6th where they let the interior designer off his leash a little bit and had him put up his favorite Ralph Steadman.
And this was in the middle of a quote “farming town”?
George had made organic macadamia nut cookies. There was chilled milk in a mason jar that we gathered was to be used to mix with tea. There was a tea kettle there too. I don’t even drink tea. I had a glass of tea and loved it.
Of course there was the classic “Welcome to George’s Airbnb” placard with instructions for locking the door and the wi-fi password. Even this was decorated with a luxurious cursive font and a lacy border.
But the most profoundly pleasurable experience was walking in the bedroom, a calm white room with a super high ceiling and skylight, and with tasteful little art pieces on the walls, and laying our heads on the bed, staying still for a moment. I can’t accurately describe to you how quiet it was. The feeling was deeply, soul-nourishingly refreshing. It was late by the time we settled in. It was the best sleep we had had in months.
The next morning we were greeted by the sunlight gently streaming in the windows. (I know.) We lounged around the house for a couple hours; we found the stereo playing the classical music and tuned it to an old-school jazz station. I sat at the Grandma Monticello desk and actually wrote in a notebook with a pen. Light kept streaming in through windows. It was awesome.
A few hours in we decided to drive into the town center. Driving around the area was calming — not to be hyperbolic — in an almost overwhelming way. Maybe it was just the distinct lack of, well, nature we had subjected ourselves to in New York, but seeing streets flanked with greenery on both sides, and houses that had entire plots of land to themselves, and fenced-in areas of farmland, horses, cows — it just felt like getting hit with different breaths of fresh air every way you turned.
In town, little shops and stores flanked both sides of the street. They were a hipster instagram micro-influencer’s dream: plenty of charm, knick-knacky merchandise and “this would be a perfect gift for your cousin” vibes.
They had that same type of bookstore that every bookstore in the country apparently has to be now: copies of Little Fires Everywhere everywhere, other anonymous New York Times Best Seller List-makers on display, and not much depth beyond them. Still, the smiling lady behind the counter and the smell of coffee and paper made me stay there flipping through books for half an hour.
Then there was the classic Little Movie Theater With Two Screens; one played the crowd-pleasing Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary RBG, the other played the crowd-pleasing indie darling Eighth Grade. Old-school box office kiosk. You could smell the popcorn from the sidewalk — that was a good touch.
More little shops. One guy sold just his watercolor paintings in a tiny, 1/3 size storefront. They were good. Another woman’s wares looked transported from Betty Draper’s 1959-era kitchen: those pale blues and yellows and ceramic jars and picnic-blanket-patterned oven mitts. Julia Child style. To call it quaint would feel diminishing. To call it lovely would be too simple.
And every shop for a whole block was like this. Handmade cowboy boots. Organic honey in mason jars. (I was half-expecting to hear someone say “we got the bees out back!”) Yoga classes with a woman named Sheryl. Sheryl seemed nice.
We wondered how all of these businesses with such specific wares were able to stay afloat twelve months a year. One shop owner told us that while the town was fully sufficient on its own and the small population made everyone feel together and mutually supporting, they did also enjoy decent help on the side from “weekender” types like us — those that just float in, peruse the shops, pretend to be interested in a lot of things, and maybe buy something to take home. They basically had a revolving door on the town.
The last thing we noticed before heading back might have been the best. The crown jewel for someone from my 90s nostalgia-loving generation: a video store, still selling and renting VHS tapes and DVDs. Not even a Blockbuster, but an out-and-out third party, non-franchised, small business video store. It was called Video Visions. My basic hipster millennial heart swooned. There was a section of VHS tapes facing a sunny window that were so faded you could barely read their labels. Clearly they hadn’t been moved, or maybe even touched, in years. Like everything was stuck out of time.
Whenever one of those articles about “The Last Blockbuster In The Midwest” comes out (it seems like there have been five in the past year alone) the author always tries to nail down the “why” of the franchise owner — their motivation to fight against the dying of the light and keep a shop like that alive in the face of overwhelming history and technology and scary “trends.” Sure, it’s cute to have a Blockbuster in 2019 — influencers will come and take pictures there, and everyone will wax poetic about their nostalgia. But after those people move on, you’re left with just a town and a video store, and that video store needs customers.
Indeed, this store displayed a sign that read “only open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.” But the “returns” box was full, the little popcorn machine was popping fresh popcorn, and there were multiple people browsing the shelves on a random Saturday along with us. They even had more modern candy options like M&Ms Caramel and Sour Patch Kids Extreme. Which had to mean people were actually buying the candy at the video store? Clearly, something was working, and would continue to. Those people in this town were going continue to rent copies of Balto and Cheaper By The Dozen for the foreseeable future even if they were both now available in 4K UHD on Disney+. Maybe it’s just cause they get to say hi to Ralph twice a week and he keeps the candy prices low. Maybe it’s because that experience was a part of something greater that they truly value, and are wise enough to know is fleeting.
This is what the whole town felt like. There must have been temptation among certain groups or leadership or visiting weekenders like us to renovate something or add something more modern or get a pipeline of fiber internet installed underground, but instead they stuck with what worked; what they knew to be great, and charming and real.
I kept feeling this feeling of “this is how people live their lives every day here.” A Wall Street dude with his weird blue shirt might find a way to feel derisive or even foster some strange misplaced condescension about things here, but that would, plainly, be wrong. The thought that kept coming back to me after that first one: “these guys have got it figured out.”
(There aren’t any movies about farmers getting existentially depressed about the meaninglessness of their work, you know?)
That night on our way back to George’s we passed a Mexican restaurant. The hostess told us their grand opening night was actually next week and “tonight was actually just a pilot test run for friends and family” but she’d be happy to seat us if we would fill out a survey. The meal was great. There was a pool table in the back — that’s always a great idea. As we went to leave I asked her for the survey. She said, “oh, don’t worry about it. We’re just grateful you gave us a try.” The experience of Chatham is just like having that interaction all day.
After dinner we ventured out to wander around the same little area. We heard music coming from somewhere near a bay of office buildings in the town’s center. A peek around a corner revealed that there was a band of what looked like fifty year-olds enthusiastically playing jam band music.
We walked back around to the entrance of the place and found some kids our age sitting on benches.
“Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here? We heard some music.”
“Yeah, my Mom is throwing a party”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Oh, literally nothing. Those guys are in a band and love to play anywhere you ask them to.” She turned to her friend. “What are they called again?”
A dude wearing a flannel shirt and boots a couple people down called out “Neil Minus Young!”
“That’s it, yeah. Neil Minus Young.”
She turned back to us. “I guess it’s a Friday — is that a reason?”
I don’t know why but the next question we asked was, “Would it be crazy of us to pop in for a minute?”
“Oh, I bet she would love that! Everyone’s welcome.”
So, we just walked in to this boomer jam band party in the backyard of an office park in Chatham, New York. And no one gave us weird looks. And then we went to the dance floor (which, candidly, was just a patch of grass in front of the band) and danced. At that point we did get some weird looks. That was understandable.
But most couldn’t care less. Most were too busy smiling and laughing hard. They seemed really happy. They seemed really free. That was the lesson of Chatham, I think, that I realized— as we listened to that jangly cover of, maybe it was Phish or something? It really is simple pleasures and good people. That’s all you really need. That was the real lesson.
The next day, late Sunday morning, was our time to leave. (Never get between an AirBnb host and their 11am checkout time.) We were proud of how we were able to pack in plenty of activity and non-activity into what was largely 39-hours in this place. But we also definitely did not want to leave. I was worried the jittery nerves and honking horns of New York would come flooding back, honestly, the minute we passed the “Welcome to Chatham” sign.
Driving back to New York didn’t feel like driving back from one of the other New York adjacent towns like New Jersey, Connecticut, or even Tarrytown. Chatham doesn’t feel like it’s “in the shadow” of New York like those cities do. That could of course partially be chocked up to the fact that it’s much further away. You can’t feel something’s shadow as strongly when you’ve driven for four to seven hours in one direction away from it.
But it also just felt so much more like “its own thing.” And I recognize that it might not be necessarily a new or special thing. There are “cute little towns” with artisan shops in their town center all over the country. Every state has its own “oh it’s so charming you have to visit one weekend.” But I don’t know, Chatham felt different. Particularly nestled. Specifically special.
It was this place that was right in the intersection of classic, forever stylish, and charmingly reinvented — like a house with modern touches and distressed wood paneling. Built in 1922, remodeled in 2009. You know?
As we drove back we crossed a classic stretch of highway that every New Yorker who has ever driven to the airport and back will recognize: the lane next to you gives way and the neighboring cars clear and suddenly the city skyline is illuminated and put on display from across the water. You can feel its energy pulsing. You can almost hear the cars and the UPS guys with their hand trucks and bankers and baristas and journalists and students bustling around, from miles away. And it’s so beautiful you feel overwhelmed again. It used to make me anxious. But this time, seeing it for the first time after our voyage to simpler (and decidedly greener) pastures, I didn’t feel that dread. Rather, it felt like a deeper appreciation.
Chatham didn’t make me realize that I hated Manhattan. On the contrary: I might love it in spite of some things (people, stress, loud), but I do love it. Living in Manhattan is a truly worthwhile and worthy thing to do, if you can handle it.
You just might have to get up to Chatham and see George once or twice or four times a year.
Note: this author has since moved to California, where among other things, it’s less loud.
Second note: In case you care, here’s the full text of our AirBnB review for George’s place (looking back I think we didn’t lay it on thick enough):
George was so great! The place was lovely, charming, beautifully decorated and sparkling clean. Everything we could have wanted was provided, from amenities and toiletries to complimentary treats. It was stunningly quiet and peaceful. George was there for everything we could have needed. This was a positively perfect change of pace from life in the city — brought us down to earth and gave us so much peace! We can’t wait to come back again soon!
Find George’s AirBnb here.
