“The sky is filled, with good and bad, mortals never know…”
--"The Battle of Evermore" Jimmy Page/Robert Plant, from Led Zeppelin IV
This month I want to talk about more cheerful things than market gluts and flat or faltering stats: I want to bless the bounteous return of bluebirds, the abundance of monarch butterflies, and my wife’s colorful landscaping, which might have helped attract them. I’d like to praise the magnificent quality of golden light the sun provides here in upstate New York this time of year—contrasted against the backdrop of lush greenery which we may take for granted but other parts of our drought-ridden (or over-flooded) country might not be enjoying right now. If July is the King of Months, then August is Queen around here, and always has been; her beauty is unsurpassed, and I want to appreciate it more than ever this year.
As with many resort cities, year-round residents might take for granted or overlook some of the visual charms of the place they call home, seeing it every day. But two different men—neither of them prone to gushing about such things—extolled Saratoga’s beauty to me recently in the same week. My brother-in-law from Decatur, Georgia drove up with my sister Lisa for a quick and functional visit (more on that later), and he is a guy who travels heavily in his executive position for the EPA in Atlanta. Their family has taken vacations to England, Ireland, Quebec, Coastal Carolina areas, California, and most recently the Ozarks of Arkansas, where they visited the town that boasts the Hot Springs. He commented that in all those destinations, there was usually something unsightly about the approach into any of the resort towns they visited, but that Saratoga seemed to look stunning from all directions. This I took as a compliment not just to the area’s natural beauty, but to the enhancements rendered by Saratoga’s famed DPW (specifically the Flower Crew, which most cities presumably don’t sponsor), plus the past decade’s real estate upgrades, which have eliminated or improved some of the eyesores that existed in years past.
The other comment came from a retired client of mine when he returned from an excursion to Florida on a solo trip back in his beloved Jaguar. He told me he’d specifically meandered to and through any towns he’d heard about which might be considered rivals to Saratoga’s reputation as a place combining natural beauty, artistic culture, and a prosperous sense of real estate values. He concluded that, after 1500 miles of cruising up and down the eastern seaboard that there was no place else he’d rather reside, confirming what he and his wife and already decided. “Wayne, there are just no bad parts to this town,”he proclaimed when I spoke to him upon his return. I realized that he was voicing the same thing I felt every time I returned from a vacation elsewhere—the old Wizard of Oz theme—“There’s no place like home…” It’s trite but true, and that’s why a lot of those people that start out here as visitors eventually choose to become residents, whether fulltime or seasonal.
This influx of new, usually cultured, relatively prosperous citizens is a phenomenon which most of upstate New York (other than Albany, with its Nanotech trend, or perhaps a college town like Ithaca) doesn’t experience. Yet there is a faction of Saratoga Springs’ native population which sees all the changes to the City as a negative development, or even a curse. The “Sound Off” section of the local daily newspaper regularly features anonymous commentary railing against “Condos, construction, & carpetbaggers!!” So you can’t please everyone. While there is some truth to the belief that Saratoga’s growth has made it a less personal, less friendly place—especially to those who had it mostly to themselves 30 or more years ago—this must happen inevitably to any place that gets “discovered” as a hip destination and healthy locale for living. There are a few thousand other small towns in the northeast which would likely LOVE to have our problems, and the swelling population that brings such “problems” to the forefront of Main Street, or in this case, Broadway.
In any case there has always been a bit of a tense dialectic between natives and newcomers: I was once called a carpet-bagger to my face a few times when I first moved here, even though I grew up just 40-some miles south of here, and it wasn’t like I was drawling in Southern dialect, much less foreign inflection. But this attitude on the part of the old blue-bloods and neighborhood natives of Saratoga has diminished greatly in my 30 years here—it has to, since they are now out-numbered by transplants, suburbanites, and newcomers. I don’t recognize the majority of people strolling downtown these days, but that’s fine; that’s what makes this a city and not just a hick town, like so many that never seem to change.
THE CITY VERSUS THE COUNTRY…
Now I should admit (as I’ve done before) that while my above-mentioned client and brother-in-law are both urban and urbane, I am more in favor of a country-based lifestyle, having been drawn in that direction by my wife for the past decade and a half. In my 20’s and early 30’s, the downtown corridor attractions were all I craved, and I was supporting those establishments I favored for all I was worth, or more. Nowadays, though I am in town virtually every day for business or shopping or recreation, I enjoy the retreat to home in the western foothills, where traffic noise rarely reaches us, and the nightly ritual of sunset watching with my wife from our front porch is unobstructed by buildings or power-lines. To me, it’s worth the nine-mile drive each time to find serenity of a sort I rarely found early in my life unless I was camping or hiking in the high country.
Some people crave constant stimulation and they do well as city-dwellers and socialites and party-goers—Saratoga can give them all they want, especially in August at the height of its splendor:
For some people, what turns them on is The Racetrack, or the Philasdelphia Orchestra at SPAC, or special events like Dave Matthews Band (on August 14th this year!), the new “Vapor” nightclub at the Racino, the Congress Park soirees at the Casino, North Broadway’s elegant private affairs, a hundred or more fine restaurants all bubbling with patrons, plus taverns and music spots and bars open till 4 a.m.—
filled with tourists and year-rounders and students and those who converge here from all over the Capital District to be part of the best downtown scene within a hundred fifty miles.
Augmenting the downtown nightlife these days is the updated and upgraded scene at “The Racino,” aka-- Saratoga Gaming and Raceway--seen here from the Jefferson Street entrance near the new “Vapor” nightclub. Formerly “just” The Harness Track, but now featuring hundreds of slot machines, the Racino has reinvigorated the Harness horsemen’s livelihood while proving that legal gambling does not necessarily lead to the downfall of civilization.
For others it’s just being able to hang out in any of the six or eight coffee shops on Broadway, or one of the dozen outdoor cafes-- the daytime version-- just watch the array of summer people go by. You will see everything from the denizens of stretch limos and a well-dressed array of shoppers and diners and strollers, to the occasional homeless guy with no shirt on, though they try to keep him out of sight. There aren’t as many bohemians visible during the day as there used to be back when I was one of them, but then again they are mostly nocturnal, both at work and play, and likely avoid Broadway before dusk. There are a smattering of young skateboarding souls who may work their way through the daytime sidewalk weave, and every time I see a few of those youngbloods circulating in small groups downtown, I think to myself:
“What a great place to grow up…” even if they might not say so.
There are more prominent coffee shops in town, both national and locally-owned, but this is one of the newer ones on the west side of Broadway, featuring fully organic fare…
*
I think at some point in the not-too-distant future I will again become a downtown denizen, and have time to hang out and socialize and drink lots of organic coffee and jot random ideas into a notebook like I did when I first got to town, absorbing Saratoga and looking around, some 360 moons ago. But that will be after my kids are safely off to college and the work world is not so pressing.
For now I am just part of the backdrop, a local yokel who loves to give directions to those who can’t quite find what they’re looking for as they scrutinize their guide-maps or tour books or diner placemats. But it’s a blast seeing how popular this small city has become in my 3+ decades here. A lot of the growth in and around Saratoga is on the outskirts, but downtown is where it’s still at for people watching—where the populace goes to see and be seen.
But more than ever, at the moment, my preference is to hang at my family’s home-front, ten miles west of Broadway, where quiet prevails, and the stimulation is of my own choosing.
BACK TO THE BLUEBIRDS AT HOME…
When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I wrote a report on the near-disappearance of the New York State Bird—the bluebird. For years
thereafter I thought the species might still be on the cusp of extinction, but once I moved out to this plateau in the foothills of the Palmertown Range, I realized it wasn’t true anymore. First my wife and I began to see one or two perched on the pergola on the back deck, and were thrilled, thinking them rare.
Then we began seeing what seemed to be “nesting pairs” swooping around joyously through the yard, either chasing each other or garnering insects as they flew, we weren’t sure. But more and more they appeared, till we realized they weren’t just stopping by, or finding refuge in the rear fields, they were living near our home.
They are augmented by cousins of theirs, who look somewhat similar—the barn swallows—but aren’t quite as rich a blue, and have a different wing pattern. When I manually mow the front lawn they like to playfully dive-bomb within a few meters of my head, and when I relocate the sprinkler in the early evenings there are now at least a dozen of them, blue bodies and red bellies, with distinctive forked tails and swooped-back wings, very fast flyers. Between those beauties and the zany antics of bright yellow gold finches, plus occasional cameos from a hummingbird or two, we feel we are in an exotic, healthy aviary of a place. Anyone can have blue jays or crows, sparrows or grosbeaks; but we have some diversity up here in the hills.
But despite my wife’s lavish gardens—which do help to attract the lush birdlife, I’m convinced—I haven’t witnessed the en masse return of the honeybees I’ve been so concerned about for the past few months. I do see one or two here and there, so they are not totally missing-in-action, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a swarm of bees, or heard that contented buzzing you hear when several hundred of them are busy pollinating a field of red clover or wildflowers. If anybody DOES see such a display locally, I hope they alert me. I’m still hoping that the mysterious “Colony Collapse Disorder” is a short-lived phenomenon, and not the demise of the healthy bee population. Fortunately, I haven’t seen a honey shortage yet at the stores, and let’s hope we don’t get to that point.
EXPANSION MODE AT SPA REALTY…
When I first split off to SPA Realty, after almost eleven years with RE/MAX (Hall of Fame as of 2002), and eight years with Prudential Manor Homes before that, I was at a point where I wanted to be a solo practitioner. I was tired of franchise fees, corporate policy, office politics and gossip, and the herd mentality many agents fall into over time. I wanted a healthier, perhaps more low-key, kind of real estate practice, and wanted to step off the treadmill of non-stop high-speed pressure to produce.
Fortunately, most of my prior clientele knew me well enough to
trust that decision, and continued to use my services. But to some I was a little TOO low-key, and they may not have known where I went off to. There’s a fine line, I found out, between being Iconoclastic, and Inconsequential. There are many high-profile Realtors out there, no doubt, unafraid of propelling themselves into the public limelight. And as I noted above, there are a host of new members of the local populace who weren’t around to read my witty Waynesword ads a decade or more ago, or my sardonic commentaries about the business on my old website, before its unfortunate crash forced me to rebuild it.
The point is, it’s good not to get stale at one site for too long, and a bit of change can be provocative, both in cyberspace and work location. I had a productive first year on my own with just a top-notch secretary (Pamela) and a laissez-faire principle broker (Marty) who also happens to be extremely busy as a noted lawyer and an Assistant District Attorney for Saratoga County. I had no assistants, no colleagues, nor co-workers for my first year at SPA Realty, for the first time in my career. I could focus solely on my clients and the work at hand, and it was very peaceful, just what I’d hoped for. But enough of that!
As of this past spring, however, I once again felt the urge to add some other agents to the mix—to make SPA Realty a bit more than “just me.” I was fortunate enough to get a call from a highly personable guy who was looking to make a transition from his prior
broker, and we clicked from the start. Sam Mitchell and his charming wife Sheila have already been fine additions to the SPA Realty team, and they brought in two more ambitious ladies who I believe will succeed in real estate as well: Cindy Kimball of Fultonville, who has already listed several properties in a multi-county area including Fulton, Montgomery, Schoharie, Schenectady, and Albany Counties;and Holly Patrick, a native of Charlton who currently resides in the Cobleskill area. These four agents have greatly increased the span of SPA Realty’s coverage, and bring great energy to our approach. I am happy to have them all on board!
New SPA Realty Licensed Sales Associates as of 2007 are: Sheila Mitchell,
Holly Patrick, Sam Mitchell, and Cindy Kimball (left to right), joining Associate Broker Wayne Perras (right), plus Principal Broker Martin W. Pozefsky and Office Administrator Pamela Pelkey (not shown).
That will have to conclude this month’s edition, although, in the lyrics of our main man Dave Matthews (due to show up ecstatically again at SPAC this month), I
still have “SO MUCH TO SAY, SO MUCH TO SAY, SO MUCH TO SAY…”
But check out the SARATOGA page for some landmark real estate history lessons, and other subsequent updates on that and the HOOP page in weeks to come, before the September edition of Waynesword arrives. See you in town!!
--Copyright 2007 Wayne Perras