We’re visiting my sister-in-law and her family in the Hudson Valley region of New York State this weekend. We squeezed in a little side trip to Beacon, a small city about 60 miles north of New York City.
It’s interesting place. It played a role in the Revolutionary War. (The name “Beacon” refers to the signal fires that were set on a nearby mountain summit to warn of British troop movements.) It later evolved into a manufacturing city. When manufacturing dried up, it fell on hard times for a while. In the late 1990s, it reinvented itself as an arts haven, including the transformation of a former Nabisco box-printing facility into a major contemporary art museum.
The main drag has a number of funky murals, including the pictured “Songs of the Hudson,” painted by Nestor Madalengoitia in 2007.
