Latest news with #HudsonValley
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Seven Democrats vying to run for Mike Lawler's House seat. Here are the contenders
One by one they threw their hats in the ring: a crowd of Democrats eager for a shot at the House seat held by Republican Mike Lawler in one of the country's most competitive districts. The field of Democratic contenders for New York's 17th Congressional District had grown to seven by early June, with no additions since then. Each is courting party support and raising money long before the 2026 primary for a Hudson Valley seat that Lawler has won twice and Democrats hope to flip in next year's mid-term elections. One early marker came Tuesday, July 15, when candidates reported how much they collected from April through June — an initial gauge of their support and viability for a costly battle. Two led the pack with big hauls: Cait Conley, a former national security official and Army combat veteran, raised $480,000 Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson raised $352,000 Yet the newest candidate — Peter Chatzky, a tech company founder and deputy mayor of Briarcliff Manor — vaulted himself into their ranks by lending his campaign $500,000 and raising $180,000 in less than three weeks, according to his campaign. Lawler's campaign, meanwhile, took in nearly $1.4 million over those same three months, a quarter of which — $360,000 — came from three Republican committees that support GOP House candidates with tough races ahead. Lawler had $2.2 million in his coffers by June 30. Will Mike Lawler run for a third term in his NY House district? A big uncertainty still hanging over the race is whether Lawler will run for a third term. He has been weighing a campaign for governor instead, which would take him out of the House race and lift Democrats' chances of claiming his seat. Lawler had planned to announce his decision in June but hasn't said yet which office he will seek. Westchester County Democrats held a series of forums to introduce the large cast of candidates to party members. Suzanne Berger, Westchester's Democratic chairwoman, said the party is planning a forum with a slightly winnowed lineup of four or five top contenders in September. Democratic voters in the 17th District — all of Rockland and Putnam counties, half of Westchester and a sliver of Dutchess — ultimately will choose their party's nominee in a primary next June, still 11 months away. Here are the seven Democrats now vying for that role. Jessica Reinmann Reinmann, a 49-year-old Chappaqua resident, jumped in first, filing federal paperwork to be a candidate in January as the new House term was just getting under way. She is the founder of 914Cares — a nonprofit that fights poverty in Westchester — and has pitched herself as a problem solver with a "mission-driven" campaign. Her finance report shows she raised $109,000 and contributed $115,000 of her own to her campaign in the second quarter of the year. She had $443,000 on hand as of June 30. Beth Davidson Davidson, a 52-year-old Nyack resident, has been a county legislator since 2024 and served two terms on the Nyack school board before then. She joined the race in February with an early endorsement by former Rep. Mondaire Jones, who represented the 17th District before its lines were redrawn in 2022 and who lost a comeback bid against Lawler last year. Davidson, who has long been active in politics, has since rounded up endorsements from a few dozen elected officials and Democratic leaders from Rockland County, along with a litany of activists from around the district. She reported raising $352,000 in the second quarter and finishing with $489,000 in her coffers. She had raised a total of $855,000 during her five months in the race — the highest overall sum of the candidates. Cait Conley Conley, a 39-year-old Ossining resident, worked in the Biden administration for four years, first as director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council and then as senior advisor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. She's a West Point graduate who served 16 years in the Army, with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. She has been endorsed by the progressive veterans' group VoteVets and a pair of forward-looking Democratic groups: New Politics and the Next 50. Conley reported raising $480,000 in the last three months and $816,000 overall since entering the race in March. She had $614,000 in her coffers by June 30. Mike Sacks Sacks, a 42-year-old Croton-on-Hudson resident, is a former journalist who has covered the Supreme Court and was a TV reporter for Fox 5 New York for four years. He now works as a "pro-democracy advocate and constitutional analyst." Sacks joined the race in April and has since raised $212,000, finishing the second quarter with $102,000 in his coffers. John Sullivan Sullivan, a 41-year-old Piermont resident, is a former FBI analyst who quit the agency after 17 years because of what he said was the chaos caused by the new Trump administration. He then moved to Rockland County from the Washington, D.C. area and launched his bid for Congress, after declaring he could better serve the FBI "from the outside." Sullivan reported raising $301,000 since joining the race in April, the third highest total. He had $164,000 on hand after expenses. Effie Phillips-Staley Phillips-Staley, a 54-year-old Tarrytown resident, is a longtime nonprofit leader and elected trustee in her Westchester County village. With five candidates already in place, she joined the field in May and set herself apart as a progressive stalwart, rejecting the idea that Democrats must move to the right to win. She has since raised $52,000 and kicked in $100,000 of her own money, finishing the second quarter with $99,000, according to her campaign. Her spokesman said Phillips-Staley was waging a grassroots bid with no "list of corporations, ultra-rich and Washington establishment figures to seed her operation." Peter Chatzky Chatzky, a 64-year-old Briarcliff Manor resident, is the founder and CEO of a financial technology company called Napa Group LLC. He has served for six years as a village trustee — now holding the title of deputy mayor — after an earlier two-year stint as mayor. NY17: Is ex-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney the NY Dems' best chance against Lawler after 2022 loss? His $500,000 loan to his campaign and spurt of donations in June brought his balance to $674,000. That was the most any of the seven candidates had on hand as of June 30, just ahead of Conley's $614,000. Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@ This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: The 7 Democrats vying to run for Rep. Mike Lawler's seat: A guide Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Sport
- The Guardian
Vintage base ball: the charm of a sport where the 1860s never ended
The smoke-belching locomotive screeched to a halt for its final stop along the Catskill Mountain Railroad. The Kingston Guards Base Ball club alighted from their open-topped train car and stepped over the first-base line and on to their base ball diamond. The players were clad in their woolen uniforms. Baggy, crimson and grey jerseys with three-quarter sleeves. Puffy knickerbockers. The Guards ambled to their dugout to prepare for the day's hostilities with their upriver antagonists, the Brickmakers of Saugerties. They sported bushy beards and ample facial hair, arranged in swooping and swirling mustaches and endless sideburns. Their bulky wooden bats of sundry shapes leaned against the fence. Two fresh balls were unboxed – one for the game and one in case the first got lost – their seams forming a big X. Someone sipped a drink from a large, brown growler. A fiddler played the national anthem as the teams lined up along the basepaths. They faced an American flag with 35 stars for all the states in the union arranged in a double circle. The year was 2025. The Guards and the Brickmakers are part of a growing scene surrounding vintage base ball (the difference in spelling is deliberate). This retro-version of baseball is a national game and about a quarter century old, but mushrooming in New York's Hudson Valley, where five teams have sprung up in recent years with more in the works. They play by the rules that governed the sport in 1864, in the thick of the US Civil War. Why 1864? Because that was the final year in which balls caught on one hop counted as outs. Before players wore gloves. Or helmets or protective gear of any kind. When the pitching was underhand. When a walk moved up every base runner. Before strikeouts and walks were common and almost every batter put the ball in play. Back when the ball was softer – and only softened further as the game wore on, incentivizing teams to score their runs early. Dialing back the sport to an embryonic stage in its evolution, a time before ball players walked upright, as it were, is what attracts the participants to vintage base ball. 'Things changed and they progressed, and the game continues to change to this day,' says Will Quigley, who works in insurance and captains Brickmakers, which he founded in 2023. 'In the early stages, a lot of it didn't make sense because they were still figuring the game out.' Quigley, 43, like most of his teammates and opponents, is a baseball nut and a history buff and has found the overlapping area in that Venn diagram. In a sense, it's probably unsurprising that baseball should produce this alternate version of itself, winding back the clock, because no sport trades as heavily on nostalgia or its own history. Anthony Alteio has participated in Civil War reenactments and plays left-field for the Guards. 'History is my thing,' says the 59-year-old auto-adjuster. 'I'm a student of history and a fan of baseball. This is just a lot of fun because it combines two things.' Others enjoy the lighter side of the game. 'This is the intersection of athletics and humor and history and it's just, honestly, the funniest thing,' says the Brickmakers' Maria Cardow, a lifelong ballplayer and a cybersecurity executive in New York City by day. 'Because there's no gloves, every single play is a chance for so much disaster to occur. And it just keeps it exciting. It's also the intersection of people with highly questionable facial hair.' After speaking to the Guardian, Cardow bashed the battered ball into the infield grass and ran it out for a base hit, just as the old diesel vintage train screeched back into the wooden platform next to the field. Daniel Torres, who is 35 and works in politics, co-founded the Guards with the Ulster County clerk, Taylor Bruck, after happening upon a game during the pandemic. 'I got bored of photographing birds, as a lot of us did during the pandemic,' he says. By 2022, the Guards, named for a Civil War regiment from Kingston that fought in the Battle of Gettysburg, were up and weekend, the Guards will participate in a vintage base ball tournament in Gettysburg. That's part of the sport's appeal as well. It's historical roleplaying without the script. 'You can go to a reenactment and it's the same wherever you go,' says Torres. 'Maybe a line or two will be different, but it's the same story. You go to Gettysburg, you know what the outcome is going to be, right? What's nice about vintage base ball is that it is a live performance. It will never be the same. Every show is different, and you can learn while you watch something that is entertaining and you can recognize as well. It's a cool way to connect the present and the past and there's no other American sport where you can do that.' The Brickmakers' uniforms were produced by a Civil War reenactment supplier. Quigley's wife makes the team's pillbox hats. He makes his own bats with a lathe. Some teams sew their own leather balls. The Guards get their uniforms and gear from one of a small group of specialized vintage base ball equipment suppliers. Everybody wears modern cleats, for safety, but is required to paint them black. The Guards and Brickmakers played an engrossing game on a warm afternoon in late June. There were no bruised fingers or bones this time around, as there often are, owing to the absence of gloves. But the Guards' catcher, otherwise totally exposed, wore a mouth guard in an allowance to modern dental aesthetics. Torres occasionally walked out to the crowd of a few dozen sitting in folding chairs along the third-base line to explain the rules. They could also read up on them in the gameday program the Guards produced, replete with faux old-timey advertising. The play was messy but packed with action, contested by men and women – 19th century base ball was coed, after all – and players as young as 15 and pushing well into retirement age. Skill ran the gamut as well. 'We've got some people who were very competitive high school or collegiate players,' says Torres, 'and we've got people who are historians, and we've got some people who think it's fun to wear a costume.' The trick to vintage base ball, as it turns out, is to avoid hitting balls in the air because the one-hop out makes them deadly. As the game progresses, the ball deteriorates and its flightpath shortens with every passing inning. The Guards kidded each other about $0.05 fines for hitting the ball into the air. The home team tied up a close game in the bottom of the ninth inning and again in the 10th, before the Guards won it with a walk-off double in the 11th. The captains each gave an appreciative speech to both teams, stood along the base lines. Then the Guards and Brickmakers traded off a throaty 'hip hip hurrah' for the other team, twirling their caps theatrically. Aidan Lavin contributed reporting.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Vintage base ball: the charm of a sport where the 1860s never ended
The smoke-belching locomotive screeched to a halt for its final stop along the Catskill Mountain Railroad. The Kingston Guards Base Ball club alighted from their open-topped train car and stepped over the first-base line and on to their base ball diamond. The players were clad in their woolen uniforms. Baggy, crimson and grey jerseys with three-quarter sleeves. Puffy knickerbockers. The Guards ambled to their dugout to prepare for the day's hostilities with their upriver antagonists, the Brickmakers of Saugerties. They sported bushy beards and ample facial hair, arranged in swooping and swirling mustaches and endless sideburns. Their bulky wooden bats of sundry shapes leaned against the fence. Two fresh balls were unboxed – one for the game and one in case the first got lost – their seams forming a big X. Someone sipped a drink from a large, brown growler. A fiddler played the national anthem as the teams lined up along the basepaths. They faced an American flag with 35 stars for all the states in the union arranged in a double circle. The year was 2025. The Guards and the Brickmakers are part of a growing scene surrounding vintage base ball (the difference in spelling is deliberate). This retro-version of baseball is a national game and about a quarter century old, but mushrooming in New York's Hudson Valley, where five teams have sprung up in recent years with more in the works. They play by the rules that governed the sport in 1864, in the thick of the US Civil War. Why 1864? Because that was the final year in which balls caught on one hop counted as outs. Before players wore gloves. Or helmets or protective gear of any kind. When the pitching was underhand. When a walk moved up every base runner. Before strikeouts and walks were common and almost every batter put the ball in play. Back when the ball was softer – and only softened further as the game wore on, incentivizing teams to score their runs early. Dialing back the sport to an embryonic stage in its evolution, a time before ball players walked upright, as it were, is what attracts the participants to vintage base ball. 'Things changed and they progressed, and the game continues to change to this day,' says Will Quigley, who works in insurance and captains Brickmakers, which he founded in 2023. 'In the early stages, a lot of it didn't make sense because they were still figuring the game out.' Quigley, 43, like most of his teammates and opponents, is a baseball nut and a history buff and has found the overlapping area in that Venn diagram. In a sense, it's probably unsurprising that baseball should produce this alternate version of itself, winding back the clock, because no sport trades as heavily on nostalgia or its own history. Anthony Alteio has participated in Civil War reenactments and plays left-field for the Guards. 'History is my thing,' says the 59-year-old auto-adjuster. 'I'm a student of history and a fan of baseball. This is just a lot of fun because it combines two things.' Others enjoy the lighter side of the game. 'This is the intersection of athletics and humor and history and it's just, honestly, the funniest thing,' says the Brickmakers' Maria Cardow, a lifelong ballplayer and a cybersecurity executive in New York City by day. 'Because there's no gloves, every single play is a chance for so much disaster to occur. And it just keeps it exciting. It's also the intersection of people with highly questionable facial hair.' After speaking to the Guardian, Cardow bashed the battered ball into the infield grass and ran it out for a base hit, just as the old diesel vintage train screeched back into the wooden platform next to the field. Daniel Torres, who is 35 and works in politics, co-founded the Guards with the Ulster County clerk, Taylor Bruck, after happening upon a game during the pandemic. 'I got bored of photographing birds, as a lot of us did during the pandemic,' he says. By 2022, the Guards, named for a Civil War regiment from Kingston that fought in the Battle of Gettysburg, were up and weekend, the Guards will participate in a vintage base ball tournament in Gettysburg. That's part of the sport's appeal as well. It's historical roleplaying without the script. 'You can go to a reenactment and it's the same wherever you go,' says Torres. 'Maybe a line or two will be different, but it's the same story. You go to Gettysburg, you know what the outcome is going to be, right? What's nice about vintage base ball is that it is a live performance. It will never be the same. Every show is different, and you can learn while you watch something that is entertaining and you can recognize as well. It's a cool way to connect the present and the past and there's no other American sport where you can do that.' The Brickmakers' uniforms were produced by a Civil War reenactment supplier. Quigley's wife makes the team's pillbox hats. He makes his own bats with a lathe. Some teams sew their own leather balls. The Guards get their uniforms and gear from one of a small group of specialized vintage base ball equipment suppliers. Everybody wears modern cleats, for safety, but is required to paint them black. The Guards and Brickmakers played an engrossing game on a warm afternoon in late June. There were no bruised fingers or bones this time around, as there often are, owing to the absence of gloves. But the Guards' catcher, otherwise totally exposed, wore a mouth guard in an allowance to modern dental aesthetics. Torres occasionally walked out to the crowd of a few dozen sitting in folding chairs along the third-base line to explain the rules. They could also read up on them in the gameday program the Guards produced, replete with faux old-timey advertising. The play was messy but packed with action, contested by men and women – 19th century base ball was coed, after all – and players as young as 15 and pushing well into retirement age. Skill ran the gamut as well. 'We've got some people who were very competitive high school or collegiate players,' says Torres, 'and we've got people who are historians, and we've got some people who think it's fun to wear a costume.' The trick to vintage base ball, as it turns out, is to avoid hitting balls in the air because the one-hop out makes them deadly. As the game progresses, the ball deteriorates and its flightpath shortens with every passing inning. The Guards kidded each other about $0.05 fines for hitting the ball into the air. The home team tied up a close game in the bottom of the ninth inning and again in the 10th, before the Guards won it with a walk-off double in the 11th. The captains each gave an appreciative speech to both teams, stood along the base lines. Then the Guards and Brickmakers traded off a throaty 'hip hip hurrah' for the other team, twirling their caps theatrically. Aidan Lavin contributed reporting.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Sport
- The Guardian
Vintage base ball: the charm of a sport where the 1860s never ended
The smoke-belching locomotive screeched to a halt for its final stop along the Catskill Mountain Railroad. The Kingston Guards Base Ball club alighted from their open-topped train car and stepped over the first-base line and on to their base ball diamond. The players were clad in their woolen uniforms. Baggy, crimson and grey jerseys with three-quarter sleeves. Puffy knickerbockers. The Guards ambled to their dugout to prepare for the day's hostilities with their upriver antagonists, the Brickmakers of Saugerties. They sported bushy beards and ample facial hair, arranged in swooping and swirling mustaches and endless sideburns. Their bulky wooden bats of sundry shapes leaned against the fence. Two fresh balls were unboxed – one for the game and one in case the first got lost – their seams forming a big X. Someone sipped a drink from a large, brown growler. A fiddler played the national anthem as the teams lined up along the basepaths. They faced an American flag with 35 stars for all the states in the union arranged in a double circle. The year was 2025. The Guards and the Brickmakers are part of a growing scene surrounding vintage base ball (the difference in spelling is deliberate). This retro-version of baseball is a national game and about a quarter century old, but mushrooming in New York's Hudson Valley, where five teams have sprung up in recent years with more in the works. They play by the rules that governed the sport in 1864, in the thick of the US Civil War. Why 1864? Because that was the final year in which balls caught on one hop counted as outs. Before players wore gloves. Or helmets or protective gear of any kind. When the pitching was underhand. When a walk moved up every base runner. Before strikeouts and walks were common and almost every batter put the ball in play. Back when the ball was softer – and only softened further as the game wore on, incentivizing teams to score their runs early. Dialing back the sport to an embryonic stage in its evolution, a time before ball players walked upright, as it were, is what attracts the participants to vintage base ball. 'Things changed and they progressed, and the game continues to change to this day,' says Will Quigley, who works in insurance and captains Brickmakers, which he founded in 2023. 'In the early stages, a lot of it didn't make sense because they were still figuring the game out.' Quigley, 43, like most of his teammates and opponents, is a baseball nut and a history buff and has found the overlapping area in that Venn diagram. In a sense, it's probably unsurprising that baseball should produce this alternate version of itself, winding back the clock, because no sport trades as heavily on nostalgia or its own history. Anthony Alteio has participated in Civil War reenactments and plays left-field for the Guards. 'History is my thing,' says the 59-year-old auto-adjuster. 'I'm a student of history and a fan of baseball. This is just a lot of fun because it combines two things.' Others enjoy the lighter side of the game. 'This is the intersection of athletics and humor and history and it's just, honestly, the funniest thing,' says the Brickmakers' Maria Cardow, a lifelong ballplayer and a cybersecurity executive in New York City by day. 'Because there's no gloves, every single play is a chance for so much disaster to occur. And it just keeps it exciting. It's also the intersection of people with highly questionable facial hair.' After speaking to the Guardian, Cardow bashed the battered ball into the infield grass and ran it out for a base hit, just as the old diesel vintage train screeched back into the wooden platform next to the field. Daniel Torres, who is 35 and works in politics, co-founded the Guards with the Ulster County clerk, Taylor Bruck, after happening upon a game during the pandemic. 'I got bored of photographing birds, as a lot of us did during the pandemic,' he says. By 2022, the Guards, named for a Civil War regiment from Kingston that fought in the Battle of Gettysburg, were up and weekend, the Guards will participate in a vintage base ball tournament in Gettysburg. That's part of the sport's appeal as well. It's historical roleplaying without the script. 'You can go to a reenactment and it's the same wherever you go,' says Torres. 'Maybe a line or two will be different, but it's the same story. You go to Gettysburg, you know what the outcome is going to be, right? What's nice about vintage base ball is that it is a live performance. It will never be the same. Every show is different, and you can learn while you watch something that is entertaining and you can recognize as well. It's a cool way to connect the present and the past and there's no other American sport where you can do that.' The Brickmakers' uniforms were produced by a Civil War reenactment supplier. Quigley's wife makes the team's pillbox hats. He makes his own bats with a lathe. Some teams sew their own leather balls. The Guards get their uniforms and gear from one of a small group of specialized vintage base ball equipment suppliers. Everybody wears modern cleats, for safety, but is required to paint them black. The Guards and Brickmakers played an engrossing game on a warm afternoon in late June. There were no bruised fingers or bones this time around, as there often are, owing to the absence of gloves. But the Guards' catcher, otherwise totally exposed, wore a mouth guard in an allowance to modern dental aesthetics. Torres occasionally walked out to the crowd of a few dozen sitting in folding chairs along the third-base line to explain the rules. They could also read up on them in the gameday program the Guards produced, replete with faux old-timey advertising. The play was messy but packed with action, contested by men and women – 19th century base ball was coed, after all – and players as young as 15 and pushing well into retirement age. Skill ran the gamut as well. 'We've got some people who were very competitive high school or collegiate players,' says Torres, 'and we've got people who are historians, and we've got some people who think it's fun to wear a costume.' The trick to vintage base ball, as it turns out, is to avoid hitting balls in the air because the one-hop out makes them deadly. As the game progresses, the ball deteriorates and its flightpath shortens with every passing inning. The Guards kidded each other about $0.05 fines for hitting the ball into the air. The home team tied up a close game in the bottom of the ninth inning and again in the 10th, before the Guards won it with a walk-off double in the 11th. The captains each gave an appreciative speech to both teams, stood along the base lines. Then the Guards and Brickmakers traded off a throaty 'hip hip hurrah' for the other team, twirling their caps theatrically. Aidan Lavin contributed reporting.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
New York's Best Summer Art Shows Are Upstate
Summer in the city is group-show season — but some of this summer's best are beyond the five boroughs, in Upstate Art Weekend, a five-day festival of more than 150 participants that sprawls across 10 counties in the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. The festival, which begins Thursday, July 17, and continues through Monday, July 21, brims with museum shows, live performances and opportunities to visit artists at work in their studios. And while some of the shows are ongoing, for many, this weekend is your only chance to visit. I've gone through the entire list and visited several shows in advance. Listed below, under the heading 'Highlights,' are nine of my favorites, destinations that I'd recommend organizing a day around. But I'd consider visiting an open art studio, too, one of more than 200 listed by the Foreland art center in Catskill, the Millbrook Arts Group and Upstate Open Studios. You can also be part of a conversation and studio viewing with the collector Jack Shear (the widower of the great American painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly) in Spencertown, in Columbia County. And at the Spencertown Academy Arts Center, a show of second- and third-generation Gee's Bend quilters is worth a visit. Glasshouse, in New Paltz, has a dedicated performance art series. At Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre outdoor museum in New Windsor, the artist Kevin Beasley will be staging music and dancing in front of his 100-foot-long work titled 'Proscenium.' And just like last year there will be a dance party fund-raiser for Noise for Now, a health care and reproductive rights nonprofit, at Assembly in Kingston. One of the loveliest sites for a visit is the KinoSaito foundation in Verplanck, a converted former school building set up by the Japanese American Color Field painter Kikuo Saito before his death. There, in addition to a show of Saito's own paintings, you'll find an alluring collection of cross-cultural abstractions in the group show 'The Unknown and Its Poetics.' Other venues with interesting shows include the River Valley Arts Collective; 'Upstate Gnarly,' an annual group show in an artists' studio, with work by Judith Linhares, Carolee Schneemann and Nicola Tyson; Athens Cultural Center, with Polly Apfelbaum and other abstract artists; and 'So It Goes,' a colorful group show in the grand old wooden grain elevator of the Wassaic Project, an artists' residency center in Wassaic. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
