When Craig Mersky and Stephanie Miller bought a house in Accord, N.Y., eight years ago, they envisioned it as a weekend place to escape from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. But nearly two years ago, the pandemic pushed the couple to make a permanent break. In December 2020, they bought a bigger house and an adjoining lot with plenty of space where their son, Max, 3, and rescue dog, Lemonade, could run and play.
Ms. Miller, 38, a digital marketing director, and Mr. Mersky, 50, a lawyer, know two couples from the city who have followed them to Accord, an Ulster County hamlet in the town of Rochester. Although the hamlet is officially only 3.4 square miles, with a population of 573, according to the 2020 census, unofficially the area is about 30 square miles, with a population of around 3,000, said Mike Baden, Rochester’s supervisor. Increasingly, many of those residents are coming from New York City.
“Most of the parents of the kids in Max’s preschool class are from Brooklyn,” Ms. Miller said. “We’ve been able to connect with other parents, just being out in the playground or going to local events.”
Accord sits in the Rondout Valley, with views of the Catskill Mountains to the north and the Shawangunk Ridge to the south, and is near the hamlet of Kerhonkson, dubbed “the Kerhamptons” in recent years because of an influx of New Yorkers.
Thanks to its central location, farmland, orchards, rail trail and proximity to nature preserves, “Accord was already a focal spot for many city dwellers looking for upstate homes,” said Joseph A. Satto, a lawyer who owns a home in the area and founded Fresh Air Realty in 2014 to help friends and relatives find Catskills properties. “Of course, the pandemic accelerated this trend quite dramatically.”
Mr. Satto, 51, who counts Mr. Mersky and Ms. Miller among his clients, bought his Accord house in 2012 and moved full-time from Dumbo, Brooklyn, in 2020 with his wife, Elle Rivera-Satto, 49, and son, Eagle, 8, who attends the private High Meadow School in Stone Ridge. “We wanted a place with fresh air and a connection to nature, where wildlife was abundant and farming and food were part of the culture,” he said.
An active L.G.B.T.Q. community is also part of the culture, said Rachel Tipograph, 35. The founder of the e-commerce company MikMak, Ms. Tipograph married her partner, Sami Ginsberg, 31, a graduate student in social work at New York University, at Stonehill’s, a local inn, on Oct. 8.
The couple closed on their 1850s stone house in January 2021, and still keep an apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. They had initially looked at houses in the Hamptons, but felt uncomfortable there. “Sami and I were sitting at dinner in East Hampton, and we looked around and we didn’t see anyone like us — young, 30-something lesbians,” Ms. Tipograph said. “Accord is so gay. We love it. We truly feel welcome, and we probably know 20 gay couples here.”
What You’ll Find
High-profile current and former homeowners — including the fashion designer Keren Craig and the actors Michelle Williams, Vera Farmiga and Willem Dafoe (whose former property, the Rubber House, is available to rent for $854 a night) — helped put Accord on the map. So did the 2021 opening of the high-end resort Inness by Taavo Somer, whom the Times has described as the “high priest of heritage chic.”
Inness’s 220 acres include 28 cabins, a 12-room farmhouse, a restaurant, two saltwater pools, 60 acres of trails and an event barn. The resort offers memberships and runs summer camp sessions for children. Ms. Miller and Mr. Mersky are members, and they swim, cross-country ski, and play golf and tennis there. A yearly membership for 2023 is $5,000 with golf privileges and $1,800 without golf, with additional fees for family members.
Other popular (and less pricey) recreation spots include Westwind Orchard, which offers wood-fired pizza and a game of cornhole; Saunderskill Farms, founded in 1680 and one of the oldest farms in the country, with apple and berry picking; Arrowood Farms, which serves house-brewed beer and farm-to-table food at its restaurant, the Apiary; Stone House Tavern, which hosts live music in its outdoor garden; and the new pop-up Catskills Cocktail Club, organized by Brendan Casey, a former New York City bartender, which brings residents together on Fridays from 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m., at the Stonehill’s inn.
A longtime presence in the hamlet, the Accord Speedway holds auto races and monster truck shows in the summer and fall. Residents also make frequent use of the O & W Rail Trail, which runs through the hamlet, and Veterans Park, beside the trail, which has a playground.
Accord doesn’t have a true commercial district, and the nearest supermarket is in Ellenville, 10 miles away. Main Street does have a historic district lined with 19th- and 20th-century houses — including examples of Greek Revival, Italianate and Craftsman architecture — but the area has only a few shops and no restaurants. Last year, residents cheered the opening of Accord Market, on Main Street, which sells local dairy, produce and meat.
There are plans to bring more businesses to the area. Ms. Farmiga, her husband, the musician Renn Hawkey, and Henry Rich, an owner of Accord Market and a restaurateur who owns three Brooklyn establishments, bought a former granary complex on five and a half acres off Main Street and plan to build a restaurant, an inn, a bed-and-breakfast, a co-working space and a bike-rental shop to serve the O & W Rail Trail.
What You’ll Pay
According to the town of Rochester’s website, the area has more continuously inhabited stone houses — some dating to the 17th century — than anywhere else in New York. In addition to stone houses, Accord is known for beautiful old farmhouses on relatively large lots.
But all that charm doesn’t come cheap. The median sale price for a single-family home in Accord jumped a staggering 50 percent during the first nine months of this year, to $567,000 from $376,500, according to the Ulster County Board of Realtors. The median sale price in 2019, before the pandemic, was a relatively modest $305,000.
In late October, Zillow showed 12 single-family homes for sale in Accord, from a two-bedroom antique farmhouse on 1.3 acres in need of a total renovation, listed for $110,000, to a three-bedroom contemporary home on 45.97 acres, listed for $2.9 million.
The average combined yearly county, town and school tax bill in Accord is about $6,000, said Jeremy Baracca, Rochester’s assessor.
The Vibe
“Accord is a good mix of people that have been here for a while and people who have recently come in,” said Ms. Miller, who has noticed more couples with young children since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a very strong sense of community.”
Mr. Casey, 49, the former bartender, who moved to Accord in 2018 from Park Slope, Brooklyn, called the hamlet “a laid-back agricultural hub” with a “chill vibe.” He is now a part-time salesman at the Hudson Valley Seed Company, and his Catskills Cocktail Club attracts old-timers and newcomers alike, though he said it’s particularly popular among new residents from New York City who want another round after the local bars and restaurants close.
“The entire town shows up,” Ms. Tipograph said. “If you’re a 30-something or 40-something couple, you show up there and you meet everyone, and everyone is open to talking. It’s so unlike New York City. By moving here, it’s almost like the social wall has come down.”
The Schools
Students in Accord are served by the Rondout Valley Central School District, which comprises two elementary schools, an intermediate school, a junior high school and a high school. In 2020-21, the district had 1,734 students, according to the New York State Department of Education; 83 percent identified as white, 8 percent as Latino, 3 percent as Black, 2 percent as multiracial and 2 percent as Asian or Pacific Islander.
On 2018-19 state tests, 80 percent of Rondout Valley High School students were proficient in English, compared with a statewide average of 84 percent; 87 percent were proficient in geometry, compared with 70 percent statewide. In 2021, Rondout Valley High School students’ average verbal SAT score was 589, compared with a statewide average of 526; the average score in math was 605, compared with a statewide average of 531. The high school had a 92 percent graduation rate in 2021, compared with 86 percent statewide.
The Commute
Accord is about a 25-minute drive from Exit 18 on the New York State Thruway. The drive to the George Washington Bridge takes about 90 minutes, depending on traffic.
The Trailways bus station in Rosendale, N.Y., is about a 15-minute drive from Accord. Parking is free, and the trip to Manhattan takes about two hours; fares vary depending on when the ticket is bought and how many seats are available. The Trailways station on Main Street in New Paltz, N.Y., is a 20-minute drive; the park-and-ride lot near Exit 18, which also provides free parking, is about 25 minutes away.
Mass transit alternatives include Amtrak (the closest train station is in Rhinecliff) and Metro-North (from Poughkeepsie).
The History
Settlers from the Netherlands, France and England arrived in Rochester in the 1680s. The town was formed by a patent granted by the English monarch in 1703 and was incorporated in 1788, said Alice Cross, a board member of the nonprofit group Friends of Historic Rochester.
The predominant industry in the 18th and 19th centuries was farming, but many farmers had sidelines like quarrying bluestone, milling corn and blacksmithing, said Kathleen Gundberg, the town historian. Accord, which was then known as Port Jackson, experienced an economic boom between 1828 and 1902 thanks to the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which transported coal from Pennsylvania through Rochester to the Hudson River in Kingston, N.Y., where it was shipped to New York City. Port Jackson became a service stop for canal workers, and stores, hotels and taverns sprang up to accommodate them.
More prosperity arrived via the New York, Ontario and Western Railway, which took over the canal’s right of way and ferried local produce to New York City and tourists from the city to Accord between 1902 and the railroad’s bankruptcy in 1937 and liquidation in 1957. The 27-mile O & W Rail Trail runs from Kingston to Ellenville along the former railway’s route.
Rochester’s resort economy continued into the 1960s, eventually giving rise to more than 50 bungalow colonies, as well as hotels and summer camps.
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