Category Archives: Palenville
Greene County Pick of the Week: Pretty on the Outside Palenville Farmhouse for $139,000
This Palenville property is the kind of listing that always catches my eye. A graceful white farmhouse, ideally built before women had the vote, is basically my platonic ideal of an Upstate property. I sometimes feel like Victorian vernacular builders knew how to market to me even better than those geniuses behind the Anthropogie catalog.
While I think this one has such nice curb appeal, I wish the listing included more interior photos. The outdoor space isn’t large but it has some good selling points, too. It’s on a relatively quiet street, across the road from Kaaterskill Creek. The realtor points out that the yard is big and flat enough for a pool. The location is village-seeping-into-country: not totally private, but plenty of trees as well as that creek. Note that Palenville really doesn’t have much of a town center, so Catskill would be the closest town. You’d be close, too, to Kaaterskill Falls and some good hiking, though a good thirty minute drive from skiing farther up the mountain so it would be harder to make this one into a ski or winter rental.
Stats and map on the jump. Read the rest of this entry
A Country Home for $2,000/year*
As our readers (3,000 so far–thanks, everyone!) have probably figured out by now, I don’t necessarily want to be alone when I head up to country houses in upstate New York. So when I met 65-year-old Harley-driving Rennie in a Ditmas Park Coffee shop today (and his Pomeranian, Moxie, who rides in a pink basket in the Harley), I was intrigued by his description of his “country house”–a trailer permanently parked in Hunter Lake Campground in Palenville, N.Y, in the western Catskill Mountains.
Rennie describes the place as family-friendly but not overrun by kids–fair representation of folks in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s–and surprisingly private considering the layout of the place and the 94 campsites. If you set up shop there and are hungry for new faces, there are always the weekend campers–in tents, not trailers. Rennie himself is a fisherman, so he’s all about the lake, but there’s entertainment in the rec hall, air hockey and ping-pong, playgrounds and soccer fields. It’s like an upstate new york bungalow colony, but without the bungalows. To rent a seasonal spot, with water, electric and sewer hookups, it’s about $2,000–*camper not included!
For Rennie, the appeal is not only the Hunter Lake Campground itself, but the portability of his upstate New York country house–it doesn’t have to be in upstate New York if he doesn’t want it there! As he said this morning, “If you wanna vacation in Florida, you just unhook everything and go.”
Hunter Lake Campground GMAP
Distance to NYC: 123 miles; 2 hours, 37 minutes
Transportation: Trailways Bus to Palenville; car recommended