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Can Cute Windows Resurrect a Depressed Town in Upstate New York?

A project in Cherry Valley, a longtime artists’ haven, is brightening storefronts and telling the world, “We’re still here!”

Decorated storefronts in Cherry Valley, N.Y., aim to bring some cheer — and some visitors — to the isolated town about an hour west of Albany. This installation by Anne Loretto is called Konditorei Europa.Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times

Last winter, Anne Loretto found herself gazing out at the downtown intersection where the upstate town of Cherry Valley’s lone traffic light hangs. This is the center of downtown, home of the historic village’s storefronts. The problem was, so many of them were empty — and had been for a long time.

“I thought, ‘Look at all of this window space, all of this visibility,’” recalled Ms. Loretto, 53, who has lived there for around 20 years. “People drive through town all the time to get up to Route 20 and Route 90, and for the people who live here, maybe we could populate these windows.”

Through decades of trade and industry ebbs and flows, the village of Cherry Valley in Otsego County, 15 miles northeast of Cooperstown, has remained an artistic haven that has often suffered economically. A stop on the road between Sharon Springs (home to the goat farm/cosmetics boutique/country store Beekman 1802) and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Cherry Valley has harbored artists, musicians and writers like Willa Cather and Allen Ginsberg. But in recent years, its beacon had begun to flicker.

Then, last spring, a plan was made to bring some radiance back.

The idea was called Light Up Cherry Valley, an art and light installation in the vacant storefronts of the Historic District. Created by Ms. Loretto and Jessica Marx, who has lived in the area for about 15 years, as a way to bring cheer to residents and attract visitors, the display was unveiled early last December; it is scheduled to run through the end of February.

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Jessica Marx curated the project, which is scheduled to run through next month.Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times

An Instagram account dedicated to the project has posts showing the storefronts before and after. “Come, take a safe outdoor stroll through historic downtown Cherry Valley,” one post read. “Discover what can happen when a community coalesces to proclaim: ‘We’re still here!’”

Although the installations are an ideal pandemic project, the idea for them was sown before Covid-19 was a crushing reality. Last winter, Ms. Loretto, who has a background in the arts and was a Catskills gallery curator at one point, noticed how dreary the town seemed. It was hit hard by the 2008 recession and still hadn’t recovered. She conferred with Ms. Marx, who used to own a gallery in Cherry Valley, about how to liven up the musty storefronts downtown that had been vacant long before the pandemic began.

Ms. Marx, 47, loved the idea and became curator of the project. She began trying to locate and contact building owners and then invited local artists to design lighted installations for the empty 19th-century Federalist and Greek Revival facades along Main, Lancaster and Alden Streets.

“I said to them, ‘We just need some kind of beauty and light, so we can drive and walk through town and feel like there’s life and things are happy,’” said Ms. Marx, who had worked with Ms. Loretto and her husband, James Rasin, on a 2011 documentary called “Beautiful Darling,” about the transgender actress Candy Darling, a star in Andy Warhol films, whose ashes are buried in Cherry Valley Cemetery.

Ms. Marx brought on local artists she knew, like Harriet Spear (a graphic designer), Normandy Alden (a studio potter who teaches ceramics at Hartwick College in Oneonta), and Tracey Thew (a photographer and painter). The group started designing and creating their windows last fall. The result is eight installations by 13 artists, which were joined by the handful of occupied stores decorating their own windows.

Madeline Godman knew the window of her assigned building well: She owned a record and antique store there with her partner for three years before they had to close the shop last spring because of the pandemic.

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Ms. Marx partnered with local artists and owners of empty downtown buildings to create installations like this one, called “In the Woods With Friends.”Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times

“I almost thought about requesting a different window space, but I felt like if anyone was going to make those windows light up again this year, I wanted it to be me and my girlfriends,” Ms. Godman, 34, said. She and three collaborators filled the two windows with dozens of paper birds suspended from wires and called it “Murmuration.”

“Cherry Valley was struggling before Covid, but that just hit the village hard and a lot of businesses shut down,” Ms. Godman said. “But we’re definitely staying here. If you’re going to have a heart in your community, you need to make sure it keeps going.”

Cherry Valley, which was settled in 1739, has a storied past: During the Revolutionary War, the town was attacked by British soldiers and Seneca and Mohawk warriors in what became known as the Cherry Valley Massacre. The town was abandoned until 1797, when it was rebuilt. For a time it was a supply outpost for pioneers heading west, as well as an agricultural center for dairy and hops. In the 1800s, lawyers and bankers moved to town.

“We boast the first bank banking institution west of the Hudson,” said Sue Miller, Cherry Valley’s unofficial historian and owner of the Plaide Palette, a Celtic art and tea shop, whose windows she decorated with extra lights and greenery this year. The bank’s stone building, which stands in the center of downtown, dates to the 1830s. (It is currently open by appointment only but doesn’t have an A.T.M.; residents drive to Cooperstown to do their banking for now.)

Cherry Valley suffered ups and downs throughout the 20th century, but when Route 20 was expanded in the 1950s, it bypassed the town, sealing its current fate as a bucolic village with no industry.

But this charm and seclusion are precisely what drew artists to the area. The poet Allen Ginsberg had a farm just outside Cherry Valley in the 1960s where his beatnik friends would gather, and the art dealer Eugene V. Thaw had a home here until his death in 2018. Mr. Thaw was a major patron and trustee of the Glimmerglass Opera (now Glimmerglass Festival) nearby in Cooperstown; he took care of Cherry Valley by stipulating that most of the housing for the opera’s performers and technicians be there. For decades, the summer festival (which was canceled last year because of the coronavirus) made Cherry Valley’s few shops and restaurants a destination for operagoers.

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Angelica Palmer, a daughter of the musician Paul Bley, created an installation in his former studio in Cherry Valley.Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times

In recent years, people like the writer Dana Spiotta (who used to run one of the town’s few remaining restaurants, the Rose & Kettle), the photographer Ryan McGinley and the artist Dash Snow have lived or worked in Cherry Valley, as did the jazz musician Paul Bley, who died in 2016.

The window of Mr. Bley’s former studio was designed and decorated by his daughter Angelica Palmer, who was born and raised in the village and moved back from Northern California after she had her first child. The building is where Samuel Morse worked on perfecting his Morse code and established the Telegraph School in 1850. Ms. Palmer, 40, plans to turn the space into a dance studio in the spring.

“When I saw people putting in their windows, it just felt like this fluffy, billowing feeling of potential and growth and things happening again,” said Ms. Palmer, who had grown depressed over the town’s isolation. “We went through this period recently where a lot of people got sick locally, and to have the lights and the joyous, positive energy is wonderful.”

Ms. Marx estimates that over the last eight weeks, several hundred people have come to Cherry Valley to see the windows and visit the pop-up boutiques, traveling from Cooperstown, Sharon Springs, Albany, even New York City. It’s premature to suggest that this small number of visitors would be enough to help reverse Cherry Valley’s economic fortunes, but Ms. Marx is optimistic that the crowds may have inspired potential entrepreneurs to take a chance.

Among the visiting pop-up stores was Grahams Goods, a gift shop from nearby Sharon Springs; an outpost of a bakery from Sharon Springs; and a boutique featuring the beauty products of Eileen Harcourt, an aesthetician with celebrity clients, who used to have a shop in SoHo. She had to close her shop in Sharon Springs last spring because of the pandemic.

“It was such a privilege to be included, and the other side of that, the reward, was the community coming out in force,” said Ms. Harcourt, who has a home about 45 minutes from Cherry Valley. Now she is considering opening a permanent shop in the town, in the corner building hosting Konditorei Europa, Ms. Loretto’s patisserie-themed installation.

“I fell in love with the space based on her window,” Ms. Harcourt said. “I called to see if I can rent it and maybe even possibly buy the building.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tough Times, Cute Windows. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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