In the New York Daily News today: A glowing profile of Kingston's emerging high-tech microbusiness community, complete with photos of swank lofts, breathless real estate price quotes, and paeans to the city's thriving art scene. (Oh yes. They even used the word "digerati.")
Is Kingston the next Silicon Valley? Or, as its most avid boosters like to call it, Brooklyn-on-the-Hudson? Probably not quite -- but there are some very promising things happening in the city by the river.
In 2009, [Mark] Greene and some others at the forefront of the digital wave coined a term for their community, the Kingston Digital Corridor, now a semi-official designation used by business and political leaders. Greene estimates there are at least 500 digital entrepreneurs in the area. The idea was to create an economy of microbusinesses with a diverse client base from outside the area, so there could never be a repeat of the IBM disaster of 1995, when Kingston's main employer ditched the city, leaving behind a 2.4-million-square-foot ghost town.
"There are a ton of digital professionals in the area," says March Gallagher, deputy director of economic development for Ulster County, which includes Kingston. "They're bringing New York City money here."
The story mentions the several collaborative workspaces that have sprung up in Kingston to accomodate the new surge of digital pioneers:
One of the first, the industrial chic Seven21 Media Center, opened in 2006 and is now 85% occupied. Before the recession hit, says center CEO and digital entrepreneur Jeremy Ellenbogen, there was a waiting list to get in.
Ellenbogen and his family bought the 32,000-square-foot building for $800,000 and invested $500,000 in creating two sound stages, conference space, a wireless-Internet data center, 12 studios ranging from 300 to 2,500 square feet – and an art gallery. The tenants range from a single entrepreneur to a company with 25 employees, and rents from $350 to $4,000 a month.
