Catskill, New York
Everyone defects to Hudson. The antiques dealers, the gallerists, the weekenders pricing brownstones over natural wine—they all wash up on Warren Street, leaving the town directly across the river to mind its own business. That town is Catskill, the seat of Greene County, and it has spent the last few years turning its own neglect into the best contemporary-art address north of the city. The engine is Foreland, an 85,000-square-foot campus stitched from three 19th-century mill buildings on Catskill Creek—31 artist studios and four galleries where a paper mill used to grind, founded by the artist Stef Halmos, who bought the dormant brick piles in 2017 and let the work fill them.
This June, the international Gaa Gallery, until now a Provincetown-and-Cologne operation, opened a Catskill outpost there. The Empire Service reaches Hudson in about two hours, and Catskill sits eight miles across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge—a car earns its keep in the mountains, but the village walks. For the stay, point it toward Camptown in nearby Leeds, a 1968 motor lodge made over into 24 rooms and 26 log cabins across 22 wooded acres, with its Mexican kitchen, Casa Susanna, run by chef Efrén Hernández, a 2025 James Beard semifinalist. In town, dinner is Phos, the Greek-American room chef Stephanie Skiadas opened on Main Street last June, where the grilled octopus has been humbling the Hudson crowd that bothered to cross the bridge. Time it to Upstate Art Weekend, June 25 through 29, when the studios throw their doors open, and the village stops being a secret.