American Glamping: Can You Curate a Town?

MOUNTAIN DALE, N.Y. — When Butch Resnick was growing up in this small working-class hamlet in the town of Fallsburg, he never imagined that decades later, he would be standing in the town’s former grocery store, eying a five-foot-tall painting of a naked Buddha. But times had changed.

Micheline Gingras, the curator of the Grocery Store, a new gallery, said she wanted to put the Buddha in the window. Mr. Resnick frowned, thinking of the Hasidic synagogue just up the road. “It’s a little too risqué for Mountain Dale,” he said.

Ms. Gingras seemed unconcerned. At 70, she had happily left her Brooklyn apartment for a small piece of the Catskills. “I enjoyed the excitement about giving this little village a rebirth,” she said. “I could bring everything to people who don’t even know it exists.”

Mr. Resnick, 50, a self-described “country boy” who has the hulk of a club bouncer but favors bright white sneakers and dad jeans, felt the same way. Six years ago, he bought 31 buildings in Mountain Dale — nearly all of them vacant — hoping to revive the town.

He knew this required courting a new breed of visitors: weekenders, artists and escapees from New York City’s high rents. But as a high-school dropout who made his money manufacturing grocery store equipment, he didn’t know how to find them.

Then a friend introduced him to DVEight, a regional magazine named for eight towns in the Delaware Valley that describes its audience as “a stylish and sophisticated readership interested in exploring modern rural life.”

These were precisely the people Mr. Resnick wanted. And so he hired the magazine’s editor in chief, Nhi Mundy, 39, to be Mountain Dale’s “town curator.” Ms. Mundy’s role is to turn Main Street into a living version of the magazine. “If a museum does it, why can’t I do it?” Mr. Resnick said.

Curating a town as one might an art collection — or in latter days, a party or store — is not a lonely pursuit. Wealthy individuals like Mr. Resnick, well-funded nonprofits and even corporations like Walmart have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic.

The people behind these ventures frequently install their friends and acquaintances in storefronts, while attempting to preserve (or exploit, depending whom you ask) local history. The practice is rarely free of conflict, even when developers have the best intentions.

“Everybody in this country says Main Street America is dead. It’s a bad investment,” Mr. Resnick said. “I’m trying to recapture what I had as a kid. Everything was alive, every store was open.”

‘That Energy, That Promise’

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Mountain Dale and the other Fallsburg hamlets thrived on the back of some 300 borscht belt hotels. When the resorts shuttered, so did many main-street businesses. Mr. Resnick sorely missed the bakery, dairy and ice cream shop of his youth: Even the grocery store owner the kids called Crazy Becky, because she threw cans at people from the window.

Now Ms. Mundy has brought in a new kind of kooky. In addition to the art gallery, there’s an antiques store specializing in old-timey Americana, a vintage shop run by a breeder of Angora bunnies, a conceptual boutique that also shows art and an apothecary run by a fashion model.

Ms. Mundy, who owns two Vietnamese restaurants called Bà & Me, opened a third location in Mountain Dale. Forthcoming are a coffee shop and bar, a high-end restaurant (Ms. Mundy said she has had discussions with a Michelin-starred chef), a wine shop and a bookstore.

“When Butch first approached me, I said, ‘I’m not taking part in this town that doesn’t exist,’” Ms. Mundy said. But walking through Mountain Dale for the first time, she had the same feeling she had experienced in two other “kind of dead” towns where she eventually opened her restaurants. “I felt that energy, that promise that this town would work,” she said.

At least as its rendered in DVEight — which has a circulation of 5,000 and ads from business like Kasuri (an avant-garde clothing store) and Tentrr (a glamping start-up) — Ms. Mundy’s aesthetic isn’t easily defined.

“The people we feature — farmers, fashion designers, Marina Abramovic for one issue — it’s all over the place, which is what upstate is about,” she said. “There’s a lot of poverty up here, but a lot of people with enormous wealth. I want Mountain Dale to reflect that too: both highbrow and lowbrow.”

And yet marketing the romance of rural living to city folk can seem like an affront to locals who are dealing with serious socioeconomic decline. Monson, a town in one of Maine’s poorest counties, was gutted a decade ago when the local furniture factory closed. Then a nonprofit called the Libra Foundation purchased 28 properties in town, hoping to create an artists’ retreat and, eventually, encourage painters and poets to settle there permanently.

“Monson was the perfect fit of tradition and history,” said Lucas Butler, the project manager for the new development. He pointed to artists like the photographer Berenice Abbott, the Modernist painter Marsden Hartley and Henry David Thoreau, who lived or spent time in the town.

Daniel Swain, Monson’s town manager, says the formerly dilapidated downtown now “looks wonderful” and that a few young families have even moved in. But he thinks that many locals probably care less about an abstract nod to history than the fact that milk at one grocery store suddenly doubled in price after a $1.5 million renovation.

“A lot of people say, ‘You just gentrified an entire town,’” said Mr. Butler, who was previously the town manager. “I disagree. If anything, we saved a small rural town on the decline.” Without an influx of new residents, he said, the town’s aging population might die away.

Similar changes are happening in Wardensville, W.Va., population 250, about two hours from Washington, D.C. Over the last five years, Paul Yandura and his partner Donald Hitchcock purchased a handful of buildings there with the aim of branding Wardensville as “the smallest main street in America” to tourists. “It’s about the nostalgia, the country, being out in fresh air,” Mr. Yandura said.

The couple, former L.G.B.T.Q. activists and Democratic operatives, turned an old feed store into a fancy coffee shop and country market called the Lost River Trading Post, keeping many of the original details, like the grain chute. They renovated a ramshackle farmhouse into a bakery and started an organic farm.

And they persuaded friends from the city to join them. One woman, an analyst for SpaceX, converted a rundown motel into the beautifully appointed Firefly Inn. Advertised as equally “rustic” and “modern,” it bears a large sign, meticulously painted to look like distressed wood. “We became the tastemakers,” Mr. Yandura said.

Many longtime residents still prefer to patronize Wardensville restaurants that either predate Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock’s activity or that locals have since opened. Arguably, some of these — like Marina’s Pizza or Cinderella’s Attic dress shop — wouldn’t have opened had the men not begun to market the town as a tourist destination. But these new establishments aren’t turning chicken feeders into flower planters or reclaiming old barn wood. Their spaces are simple, their prices affordable.

Mr. Yandura said he gets it: “We’re creating a sense of place, but a sense of place is a tourist activity.”

Walmart’s foray into place creation is more of a head scratcher. The company recently announced plans to build “reimagined centers” — that is, faux towns — adjacent to eight stores. These will include “a carefully curated mix” of food, shopping, wellness, entertainment and green space, as well as day care, pet care and bike shares.

It seems that the corporation many blamed for mortally wounding Main Street before Amazon delivered the death blow is now attempting reparations, though Ms. Mundy is pessimistic about the project’s prospects. “The cool factor isn’t there,” she said.

Culture Clash

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Mountain Dale, a smattering of shoppers wandered around the vintage store, perusing the racks of dresses and Angora hats, which Ambika Conroy, the proprietor, had crocheted from the fur of her own rabbits. Outside, Susan Jacobs-Carr, a retiree who grew up in Mountain Dale and returned somewhat reluctantly after her husband’s death, said she welcomed the changes.

“We used to have to drive seven miles for half a gallon of milk and a newspaper — in the winter,” Ms. Jacobs-Carr said. “That’s no longer the case. It makes me happy that I can go out for dinner in my own town.”

Across the street at Bà & Me, Mr. Resnick and his lawyer, Steven Vegliante, who is also the town supervisor of Fallsburg, settled in for a late lunch of summer rolls. The place was packed with artist types, but also locals wearing flannel shirts and work boots without a trace of irony.

Up the street at A Guide to the Field, a hybrid boutique-gallery, J. Morgan Puett, an owner, explained her vision. It was, she said, meant to create critical engagement with “forms of dwelling, systems of labor, design apparatuses” so that shoppers don’t simply feel “desire, desire, desire” when they enter.

Items included a line of $1,400 “swampy-fairy-dresses,” soaps made from recycled doughnut-frying oil ($85 to $195) and a felt scuba suit ($3,500), which Ms. Puett conceded was more “psychological” than commercial.

Back at Bà & Me, Mr. Resnick said, “I don’t understand Morgan’s store, to be honest.”

Mr. Vegliante said, “You know what I love? The fact that I don’t understand it.”

Ms. Mundy, who had taken a moment away from the lunchtime rush, said that Ms. Puett had recently invited a group of Hofstra University professors and art students to the store. “It was interesting to see them engage with the locals,” she said. “Just wild.”

Regarding the locals, Mr. Resnick understands that not everyone is happy about the changes he has brought to Mountain Dale, or the speed with which they’ve come. About a month ago, vandals spray-painted one of the installations in the sculpture garden across from the apothecary. The sculpture damaged was a“Cruci-selfie”: a man on a cross with an empty hole for his face. Visitors could stick their heads in and take a picture.

“It brought interest and people to the town,” Mr. Resnick said. He installed cameras to guard against further incidents.

In Wardensville, Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock were initially the subject of a homophobic online bullying campaign and their pride flag was stolen from their house. “We made lots of mistakes in the beginning by relying on our personal values and cultural references, and by believing these were somehow universal,” Mr. Yandura said.

When two friends, Jon Bier and Brent Underwood, purchased the ghost town of Cerro Gordo, Calif., hoping to revive it for 21st-century tourists, they received pushback from the nearby community of Lone Pine. “I have gold teeth and tattoos,” Mr. Bier said. “It’s ‘who the bleep are these guys? They’re going to ruin everything.’”

He added that when city people come into a small town, it’s imperative to “win hearts and minds — helping the community thrive instead of taking from them.”

Mr. Bier and Mr. Underwood are preserving much of Cerro Gordo’s infrastructure and hoping to bring in stores like Pendleton and Meshika that honor the town’s history and Western aesthetic. They also hope to work with a local brewery and source food from nearby farmers. They’re further demonstrating their commitment by living in the ghost town four days a week. “It’s weird dystopian camping,” Mr. Bier said.

Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock, who live in Wardensville full-time, are intimately involved with the farm and bake shop, which is run as a nonprofit. Fifty high-school students work there, learning organic farming techniques, business management and customer service. Previously, economic opportunities for young people were limited.

But in Wardensville, as in Mountain Dale, progress remains slow, especially during weekdays and in the colder months. Mr. Resnick is allowing his shopkeepers to operate either rent free or for a nominal fee, since there aren’t enough shoppers to keep the doors open. During the week, Mountain Dale, like Cerro Gordo, is a veritable ghost town.

But on the Saturday afternoon of Mr. Resnick’s recent visit, Bà & Me was bustling and the stores were open. Ms. Conroy, the rabbit breeder, emerged from her shop to get a cup of coffee at an outdoor pop-up stand around the corner. One of the animals, a giant ball of fluff, was cradled in her arms, and suddenly a small crowd of onlookers surrounded her.

“Look, we have people walking down the street,” Mr. Resnick said, proudly. “Before, there was nobody.”