Small Town Shoppin'

Beacon, NY. Photo by Lauren Nye.

      

    This is post only kind-of-a-little about fashion or style and definitely not much about being a cheap person. Last weekend I spent the day in the tiny town of Beacon, NY, about an hour and a half south of Albany. My roommate had arranged a meetup with a friend from college who lives in the Bronx and Beacon was almost exactly the midpoint between the two. I hadn't heard anything at all about Beacon except for its MetroNorth stop. You guys, this place is awesome. First, see above. It's beautiful. And there is some serious eating to be done. We had killer burgers and fries at Poppy's and crazily delicious raspberry-lemon zest-mint popsicles at Zora Dora. I'm getting hungry again just looking at the links.
    As we ate the aforementioned popsicles we walked around the small shops mostly situated on a couple-block stretch of Main Street. The diversity and quality of these shops were a surprise, since the city snob in me sometimes wants to dismiss anything so far off the beaten path as out of touch. That front was well represented in the form of a "vintage store" selling mostly year-old mall fashions (but even there one of my friends was able to rustle up a killer purse). Just about everything at Clay Wood and Cotton was drool-worthy, and it felt good to buy something and have the owner be able to say who made it and where it came from. Dream in Plastic is the kind of place I would like to envision myself glamorously buying Christmas presents while sipping a latte. Or something.
    As wonderful as it was to spend the day there, it made me wonder: living in a city several times its size, why can't we have the same kind of vibrant shop scene that is thriving there? The owner of Clay Wood and Cotton told us that a large part of their business happens on weekends and during the summer, but Albany has a large year-round population supplemented by thousands of college students. Why do the only shopping choices have to be the malls (there's nothing wrong with them, I work there, but they murder small business) or the handful of small boutiques far from downtown Albany? I'm sure someone with economic or business savvy could answer this, but I'm just here for the whine.
    This weekend I'm going to Hudson, another small town full of awesomeness. This time I won't forget my camera (but thank you again to Lauren Nye for that stunning image), and I'll have more to say on wonderful small, local businesses!