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Diamond Street CD

Diamond Street
A Comic Opera
A delightful comic opera set on
the notorious Diamond Street of Hudson, New York.

$15, audio CD (Albany Records)

As the world is turning from the 19th to the 20th century, Hudson, New York, on the Hudson River, in the Hudson Valley, was a little town with a big red light district centered on Diamond Street. Harold Farberman has written a comic opera (libretto by Andrew Joffe) that involves politicians, a heroine forced to work in the red light district and a hero, who rescues her. Harold Farberman is a distinguished composer, conductor and pedagogue. He has conducted many of the world's leading orchestras and his accomplishments as a recording artist have been widely recognized. A prolific composer, he counts orchestral works, chamber music, concertos, ballet music, film scores, song cycles and operas among his compositions. He is founder and director of the Conductors Institute. Commissioned by the Hudson Opera House for the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Performed by Diamond Opera Theater. Produced by Hudson Opera House and Diamond Opera Theater.

Credits:
Harold Farberman, composer
Diamond Street, A Comic Opera
Charles Perry Sprawls, bass-baritone, Patrick Layton, tenor, Keith Spencer, baritone, Megan Weston, soprano, Mary Deyerle Hack, mezzo-soprano, Harold Farberman, conductor

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Diamond Street
The Story of the Little Town with the Big Red Light District
by Bruce Edward Hall
with a new foreword by Margaret B. Schram

$16.95 (Black Dome Press)

“How was it that, at one time, institutionalized vice virtually became a department of Hudson city government? And perhaps most importantly, why didn't anyone think this was unusual?”
Bruce Edward Hall, 1994

This is the astonishing illicit history of Hudson, New York, which for many years was the unlikely setting for a world of prostitution, gambling, murder, and government corruption—with more than a touch of the Keystone Kops thrown in.

In the century or so before 1950, Hudson was famous as a shopping center of vice. There were at least two major illegal horse rooms, a big-stakes floating crap game, and as many as fifteen houses of ill repute.

Meanwhile, the church suppers took place and the parades marched up and down as Hudson's respectable citizenry convinced themselves that there was nothing out of the ordinary in this town described as, “ten streets wide and ten streets deep... a Norman Rockwell painting in motion.”

Critical Praise:

This small city on the banks of the Hudson River is casting a nostalgic eye back to its bawdy history.
The New York Times

Hall has produced a lively and engaging local history ... Essential for regional collections and an entertaining addition to social history collections.
Library Journal

Some of his anecdotes are hilarious. Diamond Street is a gem.
The Hudson Valley Regional Review

A racy page from Hudson’s history.
Associated Press

(paper, 6 x 9, 240 pages, maps & photographs)

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Historic Hudson:
An Architectural Portrait
by Byrne Fone
With a Foreword by John Ashbery
Introduction by Rudy Wurlitzer & Lynn Davis

$24.95 (Black Dome Press)

A city saved by its architecture

More than 200 Photographs, Illustrations and Maps from 1850–2005
“In the spring of 1991, we turned off the Taconic Parkway and made a detour through the city of Hudson. As we drove up the length of Warren Street—the city’s main thoroughfare—we experienced an eerie sensation, as if we had slipped through a scrim of time and landed at the tail end of the nineteenth century.” from the introduction by Rudy Wurlitzer & Lynn Davis

From an unlikely—but very successful—whaling and merchant seaport 120 miles from the sea, to a boom-and-bust factory town, and then to a depressed and failing city with a “frontier” reputation for prostitution, gambling, and official corruption, the city of Hudson, New York, founded on the shores of the upper Hudson River by New England Quakers in 1783, has recently blossomed into a vibrant antiques and arts center with a national reputation.

Through these cultural and economic ups and downs, much of the city’s remarkable architectural legacy somehow survived the plagues of the centuries, making Hudson today “a dictionary of American architecture.” As remarkable as the survival of so many of Hudson’s 18th and 19th-century buildings, is the survival of a magnificent collection of photographs intimately documenting the city from the 1850s to the 1920s, published herein for the first time.

The city’s architecture has suffered over the years, sometimes from fire and other accidental causes, more often from neglect, sometimes from instinctive hostility toward what is old and distinguished—think of William Carlos Williams’ line “Beat hell out of it / Beautiful Thing.” … Today there is new awareness of just how valuable, both aesthetically and monetarily, our architectural heritage is. As many of Hudson’s old buildings undergo or await restoration, this book’s long-overdue visual record of its treasures should provide a further inducement toward preserving what has so miraculously been handed down to us—nothing less than “a whole range of small forgotten things …, things intensely Hudsonian, more than Hudsonian.”
From the foreword by John Ashbery

(paper, 8 ½ x 11, 206 pages, over 200 photographs, maps & illustrations)

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Hudson's Merchants and Whalers:
The Rise and Fall of a River Port, 1783-1850
Margaret B. Schram

$24.95 (Black Dome Press)

This is the remarkable story of the seaport far from the sea - the City of Hudson, 120 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, founded in 1783 by seafaring Quaker emigrants from Nantucket, Marthas Vineyard, and New Bedford who transformed a sleepy boat landing at the head of navigation on the Hudson River into a booming city and a bustling port that rivaled the port of New York City. Ships sailed from Hudson on whaling and sealing voyages to the south Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and traded with ports of call in Europe and the Caribbean, returning to Hudson with exotic goods, barrels of whale oil and tons of whale bone, and harrowing tales of encounters with pirates, corsairs, slave traders, cannibals, enraged whales, and the navies of unfriendly nations. Shipyards, candle factories, rope walks, and warehouses clustered near the port, while stately mansions and glittering storefronts were raised on the hills above. Then it all came tumbling down, and by 1850 the miracle city faced a very uncertain future.

"Margaret Schram's Hudson's Merchants and Whalers allows for exactly the type of systematic documentation of people and vessels that the history of the port demands. In this book Margaret Schram has uncovered documentation of Hudson voyages in the late 18th century and in the early years of the 19th. This information about these voyages has never before been published in any other whaling history, making Hudsons Merchants and Whalers a valuable reference tool and important addition to any whaling history library." Michael P. Dyer, Librarian, New Bedford Whaling Museum

(paper, 8 ½ x 11, 224 pages, 190 photos, maps & illustrations)

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Local Self Portaits
A n Exhibition of 34 Painters, Photographers & Sculptors
Foreword by Richard Roth
Poem by John Ashbery

$15, Limited Edition Catalog

Local Self Portraits was an exhibition at the Hudson Opera House June 12 through August 14, 2010, and brought together the work of 34 painters, photographers and sculptors from Hudson and the surrounding area.

Two of the artists, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Artschwager, have been awarded the Smithsonian's prestigious Archives of American Art Medal. Artschwager, whose career began in the early 1950s, shows the lithograph he created for the Archives in 2009. Kelly is known for stunningly simple lines and compositions, but the artist has also made dozens of self portraits in a wide range styles since the 1940s; the two-color lithograph in Local Self Portraits was made in 1988.

While Kelly, Artschwager and several other artists in the exhibition have been in the area for years, there's also new talent in town. One of the more recent arrivals is Marina Abramovic, the world-famous performance artists who has been sitting quietly opposite random visitors to her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art every day for the past several weeks. Abramovic intends to establish a foundation for performance art in what was once the 1,500-seat Community Theater in Hudson; her self portrait, executed with the help of a studio assistant in a helicopter, is from The Lovers, a 1988 performance piece which required her to walk through 1,500 miles of spectacular scenery on the Great Wall of China.

Abramovic's emotions are not immediately evident, but the opposite is true of Judy Glantzman's Kiss My Faces, a panel of four small oil paintings depicting faces in dire and touching need of being kissed. While Glantzman is very much a painter, some artists seem able live on line alone: R.O. Blechman, for example. The creator of 19 covers for The New Yorker and the winner of an Emmy for his animated Soldier's Tale on PBS, Blechman shows his many parts with characteristic good humor: pencil over one ear, halo, trophy, dunce cap, fiddler. Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat adds color to sunny, good-natured line and depicts himself as a mild-mannered Buddhist saint with hindrances and temptations coming from all directions. Donald Baechler, who once lived next door to Greenblat, distills himself down to a black flower and the cosmic matrix using tea and gouache.

The show takes in many other points of view as well. Hudson's most collected artist may be Earl Swanigan, who has been painting for 30 years in a primitive style that stays fresh with each day's output. The dozens of portraits of President Obama Swanigan produced around the time of the last election exude idealism; his self portrait is more guarded, with a fierce expression and piercing eyes. Dylan Kraus, the youngest artist in the show, paints himself with eyes closed completely, but he knows where he's going: he begins a four-year program at Cooper Union this fall.

Annie Leibovitz who has been called the world's most famous photographer, has a country place nearby and a piece in the show, as do three of her male contemporaries: Benjamin Swett, Gerard Malanga, and Sedat Pakay. Pakay, a student of Walker Evans at Yale and creator of a PBS documentary on his former teacher, has a vast archive of portraits from his years at Holiday and other magazines. In his self portrait, made in Istanbul he was 18, he peeks out from behind flashy Jean Shrimpton sunglasses and a bunch of grapes. Malanga, chief assistant to Andy Warhol and an actor in many of the Pop artist's early films, shows a miniature construction based on a photograph he took of himself in 1973.

This limited edition, full-color catalogue for the exhibition is available thanks to Stair Galleries of Hudson.

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