All that glitters...
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8/8/2010
The person that called Beacon a jewel yet to be polished,got it somewhat right. There is A LOT of polishing that needs to be done however! In addition to the drug addicts and drug dealers,there is a problem with bums hanging out on Main Street and backward citizens living in the town.Beacon wants to be this little artist's enclave on the banks of the Hudson,but it has a long way to go. They think that if they decorate the old abandoned factories with artwork and have "river celebrations" people will think they are the upstate answer to what SoHo used to be or Brooklyn. Not exactly.
They make a big deal of the DIA being here,but DIA has absolutely no involvement with the town! They have a number of galleries and shops at both ends of Main Street,but the middle is a forgotten "no-man's land" where the bums hang out. All the places in town are geared to the people that come up for the weekend from Manhattan and are barely open during the early part of the week.The one supermarket in town is very low-rent. You have to drive to Fishkill and go to ShopRite to find a decent selection of anything. Unless of course,you want to shop at the ridiculously over-priced health food store.
Oh yeah,about those "river celebrations": They have these festivals on Main Street or sometimes down by the river where they drag Pete Seeger out(he's the big Beacon celebrity) and have the school kids sing folk songs with him. Nothing against Pete,but they need to start coming up with something new.
A lot of the people that live here have trailer park mentality and really backward ideas about the way the world works.A lot of the others are old hippies that never left the 70's. The school district has to be one of the worst in the state,with a severe bullying problem and some teachers that shouldn't be teaching at all.
This is truly a case of all that glitters not being gold.
Jamie | Beacon, NY