Smorgasburg not returning this year
Outdoor food/flea market operated during past two summers at former brickyards
There won’t be a third season of Smorgasburg Upstate at the former Hutton Brickyards, a co-founder of the outdoor food and flea market said Monday.
“Despite how meaningful the project was on a personal level, we had to make the difficult decision to not continue Smorgasburg Upstate in 2018 for very basic business reasons,” Jonathan Butler said in an email. “Despite some outward appearances to the contrary, we are still quite a small company in terms of our management team, and we couldn’t justify spending limited internal resources on a project that, after two years, had not achieved the kind of scale we needed.
“It’s certainly possible we could still do a one-off event at the Hutton Brickyards or somewhere else in the Hudson Valley this year but, there’s nothing planned as of now,” Butler added.
Butler said Smorgasburg Upstate drew 10,000 people on its opening day in the summer of 2016. Last year, the average daily atten-
dance was 1,500 to 2,000, he said.
“With the fixed costs for our crew, the security team, waste disposal, insurance, etc., we really would have needed twice the number of people to come ... to make it viable over the long term,” he said.
The local Smorgasburg, based on an outdoor market of the same name in Brooklyn, operated every Saturday from early August through mid-October in 2016. The following year, it operated
one full weekend per month from May to October.
Smorgasburg was held in a riverfront building that once was a restaurant but now has no walls, so it’s covered but also open-air.
The same space hosted two concerts by folk-rock music legend Bob Dylan on consecutive nights in June 2017, and property owner MWest Holdings LLC, of California, has talked about having future concerts there.
MWest also has floated the idea of developing a “destination retreat,” including a hotel, on the property, though no formal plan has been submitted to the city of Kingston.
MWest President Karl Slovin said Smorgasburg’s departure will not slow development at the Hutton site.
“It’s been wonderful
to work with the team at Smorgasburg to establish their upstate footprint and welcome hundreds of visitors to Hutton Brickyards to take part in the one-of-akind culinary experience for the last two seasons, Slovin said in an email on Monday. “It’s a partnership that is indicative of the programs we will continue to curate as Hutton Brickyards programming evolves.
“We are committed to bringing new partnerships and experiential events to our site and look to create a robust and vibrant schedule for this coming season,” Slovin added.
MWest bought the 60acre
Hutton Brickyards property in 2014 from a bank that had foreclosed on it.
The site was used for brick manufacturing from 1865 to 1890 by Cordts and Hutton Co. and from 1890 to 1965 by the Hutton Brick Co. It later was sold to the Jova Manufacturing Co. and then the Staples Brick Co., which lasted until 1980.
A restaurant operated at the site briefly in the late 1980s.
The site is part of the land that was to be used for a housing development called Sailor’s Cove on the Hudson, but that project never came to fruition.