Jeff Beck Playing Kingston Tuesday

Iconic guitarist Jeff Beck is scheduled to lead his band to the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston on Tuesday, April 21.

Rolling Stone’s fifth-ranked guitarist of all time, Beck has been leaving a deep imprint on the music scene for more than half a century. He is twice enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—once for his solo work and once with The Yardbirds. The multi-Grammy Award winner is a widely celebrated innovator in the electric guitar world. He plays the whole guitar (sans pick), deftly maneuvering the fret board, controlling the volume and tone knobs, and manipulating the whammy bar.

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Preparing for Future Catskill Creek Flooding

Tropical storms Irene and Lee and Superstorm Sandy caused $3 million in damage to structures within the Village of Catskill, and more preparation for flooding and expected sea level rise must be done, according to a flooding resiliency task force report released by the state Department of Environmental Conservation this week.

The village is situated on both sides of the Catskill Creek near its mouth. During storms it can face both the effects of water draining from much of Greene County on the creek and coastal storm surges advancing up the Hudson River combining with high tide...

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Remembering the Time All Germantown Residents' Guns Were Taken

Three hundred years before New York’s Safe Act, a much more dramatic gun grab, enforced personally by a New York governor, hit the residents of Germantown.

It was the spring of 1711 and about 1,500 Palatine Germans lived in four dense camps along the Hudson River.

The German refugees had been sent by England a few months earlier, but had received few of the supplies to settle the wilderness that they had been promised...

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Welcome to Hudson River Zeitgeist

By WILLIAM SHANNON

Welcome to Hudson River Zeitgeist, a new local media website set to deliver a unique blend of news covering Germantown, Hudson, Red Hook, surrounding towns, and important information related to the Hudson River.

Among other things, this site will deliver analysis of local issues, outdoor reports, transcribed interviews with elderly citizens in the area and stories about the Hudson River’s science, culture and history. This site may also, from time to time, temporarily turn into a travel and adventure blog.

My hope is that this website will grow and evolve into a vehicle to explore, on its more serious days, the depths of the human experience in the Hudson Valley, and, on its lighter days, the adventurous and fun things to do within a half-hour’s drive of the main coverage area.

I’m from Germantown, and live there now, in a cottage overlooking the fast-changing Hudson. I generally embark each year on a paddling voyage down the Hudson River from Troy to New York City—to think, reconnect with the river, and just for the adventure.

I started out in journalism with the Hudson Register-Star and have written stories for The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

This website will start publishing stories this week and will grow to include new insightful voices in the weeks to come. Pertaining to the name of the site, the German word “Zeitgeist” translates to “spirit of the time.”

To keep connected, please follow Hudson River Zeitgeist on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hudsonriverzeitgeist. Any comments, questions or suggestions can be sent to hrzeitgeist@gmail.com.

Thank you for taking the leap with me. I hope you will find what’s to come here useful.