The Worst of Perth

BSWAM sends a wide ranging appraisal of Nyack New York.

Today we visit the historic city of Nyack, settled in 1707, in Rockland County, “The Pearl of the Hudson”!  Split up into North Nyack (the aristocratic Gatsby-looking bits); South Nyack (lawyers and doctors and people who care a lot about lawns) and Mid-Nyack (crap antique shops, frat bars and two-star Italian restaurants plus the opera house, various little theater companies, half a dozen churches and the fire department) (shown above).

Many were the mansions raised in Nyack in those early days, when the city was the richest in these, the United States of North America, and the city of Nyack’s merriment and love of fine living were known throughout the land from the very first.

Many too, the proud buildings both public and private, heaped up in a way thought during those times to be insensible of certain brakes upon the display of wealth, even when you factor in cardboard doors.

Indeed, verily, even from the 1700s, the buildings of Nyack were oft times the subject of criticism as to wanting conformity to certain received notions of architectural balance and proportion.

Or, indeed, verily, again, compliance with the doctrines of Newtonian order.

Fucks related thereof this criticism were given to the number of none, and the citizens of Nyack continued to build in a manner that pleased them best. Carson McCullers, Helen Hayes, Edward Hopper and Dorothy Parker all took up residence in that town and the quaffing of many a quart of bathtub gin occurred. After such quarts were imbibed, who was to say if the house opposite had one tower or twelve?

Then came the 1970s upon the land.

And the Angel of Urban Renewal didst say: “Fully One Quarter of the historic downtown shall be razed for a sunken shopping mall of supreme hideousness.”

To be continued…