By Paul Post

Tourism drives about one-third of Warren County’s economy and one of its most important, often-overlooked contributors is The Hyde Collection, a world-class art museum featuring the likes of Rembrandt, Picasso and Degas.

Hundreds of people turned out recently to view paintings created by more than two dozen participants in the inaugural Glens Falls Plein Air Festival.

“It supports the local economy and arts district here,” said artist Fred Holman of Brant Lake. “We come down here and stay overnight and go out to eat, so that’s part of it. But it also brings people to The Hyde to see its works. Put it together with other things going on and all of a sudden you have a big venue to go to, a destination.”

A retired landscape architect, Holman has taken part in numerous plein air festivals in places such as Saranac Lake, Ticonderoga, Keeseville and Canandaigua.

Plein air is a French term meaning outside, on location. It’s a style of painting, tied directly to 19th-century French Impressionism, made famous by Claude Monet, who was dedicated to capturing natural light. It’s done entirely outdoors to catch changing sunlight and weather patterns, which can be challenging for artists.

The Hyde’s July 27-Aug. 2 event gave artists a chance to paint a variety of scenes, from urban downtown Glens Falls to sites on beautiful Lake George.

By Carol Ann Conover

When Tim Montgomery’s daughter made three visits to the emergency room in a single week, the diagnosis wasn’t the flu. It was babesiosis, a tick-borne parasite that attacks red blood cells. “She ended up spending three visits to the emergency room over a week with a temperature of north of 103 for the whole week,” Montgomery said. His sister also has battled Lyme disease for years, and his brother has been infected twice. “It’s just an awful thing,” he said.

Those family experiences, along with a tick Montgomery recently had removed from his back at Hudson Headwaters, led the Queensbury entrepreneur to build TickDetect, a free artificial intelligence tool that helps people — and their pets — check for ticks and tick-related rashes before the bites become more serious.

Montgomery founded TIMIT Solutions in January 2012 after a 20-year career at GE and a series of executive roles running global technology, health care and staffing businesses. The Queensbury-based firm primarily serves midsize companies, generally those with $10 million to $1 billion in revenue, by building custom software, modernizing legacy systems and offering chief information officer coaching and mentoring, Montgomery said.

TickDetect, the company’s newest project, runs entirely in a phone’s web browser — no app store download is required. Users photograph their skin or a pet’s fur, and the tool uses Claude AI Vision to identify tick species, attachment status and rash patterns, generating a private report users can bring to a doctor or veterinarian. “There’s no reason to download an app at all,” Montgomery said.

Privacy was central to the design, Montgomery said. Photos are analyzed and then discarded rather than stored, and the tool collects no names or other identifying information unless a user opts in to share anonymous usage data. “It records no personal information. Nothing is ever stored. It’s totally encrypted,” he said. The platform is built to comply with European and California privacy regulations, according to Montgomery.

By Paul Post

“That guy’s got a lot of potential,” a young baseball fan remarked.

“Yeah, most of it’s unrealized,” his sports sage uncle replied wryly.

He might have been talking about East Field, too, which has hosted professional and collegiate league baseball almost every summer for nearly the past half-century.

Dozens of future big leaguers honed their skills there, including an American League Rookie of the Year (Ron Kittle) and two Cy Young Award winners (Doug Drabek and John Smoltz); Smoltz is enshrined among baseball’s all-time greats in Cooperstown.

The cozy ballpark is now home to the Glens Falls Dragons, which team owner Ben Bernard has kept alive for the past 10 years while operating on a shoestring budget. It’s a labor of love for everyone involved. Team members pay to play, and ticket takers, concession stand workers and the public address announcer are all volunteers.

“See the kids here tonight? That’s what it’s all about, this is the way it’s supposed to be,” Bernard said.

By Paul Post

“I’ve always wanted to open an Italian meat market event though I’m not Italian,” Mark Monahan said, smiling. “I’m Irish and French.”

The Hudson Falls native’s dream came true recently with the opening of Monahan’s Meats, adjacent to Massie’s Restaurant, at 67 Main St. in South Glens Falls.

Guanciale, soppressata and speck Alto Adige are just a few of the long line of fresh meats available, much of it from famed Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, renowned as New York City’s “Real Little Italy.”

Monahan, 52, has been a professional butcher for most of his adult life, having worked for Grand Union, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Hannaford and the well-known Fred the Butcher in Clifton Park. But he got the idea for launching his own business during a stint at Tops Friendly Markets in Bolton Landing.

“That’s where I was working when Covid was in full swing,” he said. “A lot of people have sold their house and moved up here from Long Island, New York and New Jersey since then. I’m offering things they could get in the city, but can’t find up here.”

By Rod Bacon

After being without one for 20 years, Whitehall now has a full-service retail supermarket.

Whitehall Market opened at the end of May, providing customers with a wide variety of food, beverage, and household items. 

Selections include open-case meats, fruits and vegetables, breakfast foods, condiments, soft drinks, and cleaning and paper products. Refrigerated cases hold milk and juices, prepared meals, lunch meats, and dessert items. There is a full-service deli serving hot and cold sandwiches, pasta salads, and fish selections.

The owner/manager is Muhammad Bilal, who has owned Green Mountain Food Services in Whitehall since 2019. It was incorporated in 1979 as a wholesale food company that delivers refrigerated, frozen and dry goods throughout Vermont, New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts and Upstate New York. In 2005 it was opened to the general public.

“The warehouse is ninety percent bulk items,” Bilal said. “We have a very limited number of items for the retail customer. The Whitehall Market is a proper grocery store.”

He noted that there is one aisle of the more popular bulk items so customers who want larger quantities of some items don’t have to visit two locations.