BLOOMINGBURG – Welcome signs stand out on storefronts and signposts in the Village of Bloomingburg. Designated "Gateway to the Sullivan County Catskills" since the early 1900s, the community has long hosted visitors looking to escape summer heat and is home to a few hundred souls in its tiny footprint.

More recently Bloomingburg has been in the news not for its leafy surroundings but for the influx of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews, who live in the newly built Chestnut Ridge development and older homes in the center of the village. Public meetings have been contentious; an election tampered with and come September the developer of Chestnut Ridge, Shalom Lamm, will likely be sentenced to prison.

Outside government meeting rooms and courthouses, however, villagers say they are getting on with their lives and each other.

On a recent day the owner of Trinkets 'N' Treasures, inspired by celestial events, offered 20 percent off on items as a special Solar Eclipse Sale. Patty Bechtold started the store eight years ago on North Road, across the street from Village Hall and not far from the only intersection with a stoplight for miles. She has seen a small uptick in sales thanks to the new residents, as some mothers come in looking for toys and bicycles, or occasionally pick up a piece of furniture.

"I have eight or ten" regular customers from the Hasidic community, Bechtold said. "I feel sorry for some of the young women. They were told that Walmart was in walking distance."

Young mothers can be seen pushing baby carriages, toddlers in tow, along Main and other downtown streets, or along Winterton Road, the busy two-lane road heading south past the post office toward Chestnut Ridge. Hasidic men, dressed in long black coats, are frequently seen walking about the village too.

'Not rude, not nasty'
Pedestrians give this village a sense of resolve. People on foot can easily reach restaurants, two banks, the offices of several doctors, auto repair shops, a general grocery store and a new one catering to those keeping kosher, a hair salon and barbershop. A fish market advertising goods "direct from the ocean" recently opened and a kosher meat market is in the works. A coming soon sign fills the windows of the old hardware store, where a new hardware store is promised in its place.

Dragon City, a Chinese restaurant serving the village for years, is just around the corner from a new place, Cafe au Main, with pizza on the counter, kosher food and drinks in the cooler. There's a nighttime picture of Paris on one wall, and the cafe manager says everybody is welcome and everybody comes in to eat. He has no complaints, yet he was reluctant to give his name as were other Hasidim, perhaps mindful that just two months ago swastikas were spray painted on the walls of a mikvah under construction in the village.

A father stopped at the post office with two children in the car also declined to give his name despite saying nothing even remotely controversial. He says he moved to Bloomingburg from Brooklyn two years ago. He enjoys living here. He brings his car to a local shop and they fix it. He waves hello and goodbye to people. And he's tired of being asked if he moved here for the fresh air.

"I'm over the smell of grass," he said, noting that he moved here because it's cheaper than Brooklyn. "I'm happy if I can pay my rent."

They're "not rude, not nasty," Veronica Cram said of the newcomers. But Cram, who has been in the village for 30 years, doesn't think there is much interaction between longtime and newer residents. She thinks the village looks worse than it did a few years ago, that property is not being kept up, but doesn't have a long list of grievances beyond litter and mothers marshalling their large broods on the village's aged sidewalks.

"Watch the kids," Cram said, chatting in the parking lot of the post office.

Old and new
Bloomingburg was officially established in 1833 and was Sullivan County's first county seat. According to City-data.com the population hovers around 420 people. There are more females, 53.9 percent, than males, 46.1 percent, and the median age of residents is 31.7 years, well below New York's median of 38.3 years, though that number could continue to drop because Hasidic families tend to have many children.

As old as the village is, some buildings predate it, prominent among them the Dutch Reformed Church, constructed in 1821. It's been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, said Marc Fowler of the Bloomingburg Restoration Foundation, which ran a cultural center in the building until the local fire inspector declared the church unsafe, and nobody is allowed in it until it's brought up to code.

The foundation has been without a lease for two years and without one it's difficult to get projects underway. The Town of Mamakating owns the church and has a buyer for it. The foundation is trying to forestall any sale and "fix the things that are broken," according to Fowler.

In the meantime, weeds choke the church steps and litter has piled up near the sidewalk.

Village Hall is also old; as Woodman's Hall silent movies were shown there during World War I. It's in good shape but the grass hasn't been mowed in a while and weeds poke out of its sidewalk, as with many other spots throughout the community.

There are piles of trash even next to several of the new businesses, including Ringo, the kosher market on Main Street. But then throughout the village well-kept properties go side by side with untended ones. At the August village meeting — a loud, angry affair — the crowd raised issues of code enforcement and littering. Trinkets 'N' Treasures owner Bechtold thinks residents are hypersensitive to government decisions because "they were lied to before."

The name of Lamm, who developed Chestnut Ridge, comes up regularly. His plan for a retirement community and golf course turned into a 396-unit town-house project, marketed to Hasidic Jews. Further, Lamm and co-defendent Kenneth Nakdimen pleaded guilty in a vote buying scheme that was meant to sway the results of the 2014 village board election. More litigation surrounding building permits is still to be sorted out, and other Lamm-owned buildings, including the developer's Hickory Court apartments, are on the village planning board's agenda.

Forty-eight units are occupied at Chestnut Ridge. They've been built using a simple, neat, straight-forward design on streets with names like Honey Locust Lane, Maple Avenue and the main entrance, Chestnut Ridge Road, a short boulevard whose center is planted with colorful flowers and shrubs. Children play in the driveways and construction moves along legally on new units.

A huge cross stands like a warning in an empty field next to Chestnut Ridge and at the south end of the village, right near the county line, a huge sign with bright red letters urges passers-by to stop the development in its tracks.

In the meantime, life goes on.

Manish Patel stood in an aisle at the Bloomingburg Grocery he's owned for 11 years, along with an adjacent liquor store. Some Hasidim shop at his store, he said, but he hasn't changed his stock or made any special accommodations. He looks at the village as a businessman, he added. And for him, business is good.

On the day of the eclipse, a man named Ben stood staring at the sun through special glasses out front of the Mobile station near the northern end of the village. He and his wife had stopped for gas on their way home to Lakewood NJ from Monticello; he said that knows a bit about Sullivan County, had spent summers here and seemed aware of the issues that had boiled over in the village.

Ben described himself as somewhere between an orthodox and Hasidic Jew, and gladly offered to share his glasses for a look at the sun.

People need a place to live, he said. "Look past the clothing." The people are in their own community. "Sometimes life sucks," he said. "Deal with it."