Now a little about Tivoli. I moved to Tivoli 40 years ago this month..the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1967. Then there were 3 children, Maria 5, Laura 3 and Paul 2. We chose Tivoli for its beauty, but mostly for the Red Hook School system, which even 40 years ago had a great reputation. The house was a small one, open porch, big kitchen, living room that had completely covered walls and ceiling with knotty pine paneling, bath downstairs and 3 bedrooms upstairs, one so small only a child's bed would fit. Uncle Phil came to the house before we bought it to give us a carpenter's view of its condition. He told us not to buy, even though it was quite a bargain at $10,000. The bank, likewise, refused a mortgage on the unsafe condition of the house. We were not discouraged by this news, in fact the price went down to $8,500 and another bank gave us the ok. So 40 years ago we bought a house for less than you can buy a car or even some lawnmowers today. The yard was a little more than half an acre and we had four apple trees, two on each side of the house.
Tivoli was almost a ghost town at that time. Stores were boarded up, the population had dropped to less than 700 since the train station had closed and the ferry from Saugerties stopped. You had to go Red Hook for a pizza and Kingston for Chinese food. It took a while to get use to the isolation. There was a store in Tivoli, Dino's at the intersection of the entrance to Broadway. Broadway is the main street in Tivoli, running from 9G to a dead end at the Hudson River. Dino's was half grocery and half liquor store. Divided in the middle, if you wanted a bottle of wine, Dino would get the key off the wall, put on his jacket (you had to go back outside) and unlock the door on the other side of the building. Across the street from Dino's was Bailey's, a beautiful old hotel, unused now except for the bar downstairs. Mr. Bailey was a handsome Irishman, tall with white, white hair. He made a Bloody Mary that people still talk about - tall glass topped with stalks of celery, piece of tomato and maybe even a black olive. His fruit drink was also noteworthy. So, I got used to living in our new home, and enjoyed the excitement of exploration and discovery of all the new places and the sense of the community of the Village .
The locals called us "the new people" and it probably took almost all of the last 40 years to lose that title.