Hudson blooms in pandemic
Warren Street’s unique eateries and shops are a magnet
Warren Street is home to a unique strip of clothing stores, home antiques and cafes that bring visitors from all across the state to the small city of Hudson. In the last ten years, the street, which was always known for its antiques, has grown to include high-fashion and luxury boutique clothing stores.
The pandemic didn’t stall Warren Street’s growth this year. Nikki Chasin, Breadfolks Bakery, Intentionally Blank, and WYLDE market (coming April) are four stores that didn’t let the outbreaks scare them away from opening. They ’ve seen surprising success, and they are humbled by it.
Instead of tourists just coming for a day or a weekend, they are spending more time and more money, merchants say.
“In our busiest month here, we made more in one month than my L.A. store had ever done (in one month),” said Ty Mcbride, the founder and creative director of Intentionally Blank, a shoe and lifestyle store which opened in June.
“We just struck the right chord at the right time,” said Norman Jean Roy, the owner of Breadfolks Bakery, which also opened this summer and has consistently seen a line of people outside their door.
“As awful as this pandemic has been it is kind of almost like people needed this,” he said. Buying a croissant and a coffee is a kind of pampering that is accessible right now and not expensive, and it provides a sense of normalcy, Roy added.
Many merchants on Warren Street similarly said they had one of their most successful seasons. But the city ’s treasurer, Heather Campbell, warns that so far lodging tax revenues for 2020 are nowhere close to those of years prior. A lodging tax is the tax property owners and managers must pay to the city and can be a good indicator of the amount of visitors a city sees in a year.
“Anecdotally, it does seem like the number of visitors has increased over the past few months, but we will have to wait until the final returns are in to gauge how much,” Campbell wrote in an email.
Nikki Chasin, the designer and owner of a clothing store that opened in September, sold a lot of her clothing to wholesalers all over the country, but when the pandemic hit, big orders got canceled fast.
Chasin decided to close down her shop in New York City and open a shop on Warren Street instead. She is open four to five days a week, as opposed to the seven days a week she was open in the city, and now is making more money some months than she did in New York City.
“I love physical retail and I really wanted to find a way to open safely, and being in Hudson has allowed me to do that,” Chasin said. Her store on Warren Street is much bigger than her 10-foot wide by 25-foot deep shop in New York.
“When you feel safe and comfortable you are more open to trying on clothes and spending money…” Chasin said. “I never really wanted to do curb side pickup. I don’t think that really works for expensive clothing. You want to try it on, you want to feel it, you want to ask the person working there about it.”
Stores like Chasin’s are following others like Minna, a home goods store, which moved from Brooklyn in 2016 to Hudson, and Loup, a clothing shop, that opened permanently in Hudson in 2019 after previously hosting pop ups in Brooklyn.
“Hudson is really a shopping destination,” Chasin said. In New York City, she saw people stopping in on their way to brunch or dinner but not planning to really shop. “The amount of people that actually walk in and buy something is much higher here.” And people come from upstate too, who want that type of shopping experience, Chasin said.
Hudson is an old whaling center that touts itself as the first city incorporated after the 13 colonies became the United States.
The tourists, though welcomed, did not arrive without creating some pandemic concerns for business owners.
“There was a lot of anxiety in town. There was a concern that we were in isolation and all of a sudden there was a pretty significant influx of people from other places coming,” said Jonathan Osofsky, the director of the clothing store Kasuri.
As the months have stretched along, many store owners were impressed by how well customers adapted to the social distancing protocols and still enjoyed the retail experience they had missed. Others felt more cautious and adapted their business models as the second wave of the pandemic set in.
“As it got busier and busier, I got more and more nervous, and so did our staff,” said Suzzane Werner, the owner of Fluff Alpaca, a clothing store which decided to transition to curbside pickup at the start of December.