The Olive Press

Welcome to the first edition of The Olive Press Online

Mad Enough To Sue

SHARP's Tongore Pines Project Catches Opposition For Its Big New Growth Plans

A town resident has filed a lawsuit against the Olive Zoning Board of Appeals over an area variance that was granted in October to the Shandaken Area Revitalization Plan Committee, a non-profit development agency that built Tongore Pines, a low-income senior housing complex located in Olivebridge.

In his suit, Charlie Blumstein claims the zoning board acted in a "arbitrary, capricious, prejudicial and unlawful" manner when it approved the SHARP Committee's request to increase the zoning density of the 10-acre Tongore Pines site to allow for the construction of 5 additional units.

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How I Know I'm Local

Once Upon A Time, It Was Strange To Have Come Here From Other Parts...

By Martha Frankel

When I moved to Olive in the early '70's, my hair was short and spiky and sometimes it was tinted orange or green. I thought micro-minis were daytime attire. I had lived in Miami for a few years, and complained bitterly about the arctic weather.

I wanted to fit in, but one thing was clear to me from the beginning--- I would never be a local. The locals knew things I would never even begin to grasp--- gardening, snowplowing, animal husbandry (whatever the hell that was). They drove tractors and forklifts. They drank at the Boiceville Inn through those frigid nights. They seemed at home where I felt awkward and unsure.

So I started drinking.

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Old Olive

Country Inn Gets Sold After Thirty Years

Building The Best Bar, Larry Hangs It Up & Heads For Vieques

By Paul Smart

For the past twenty-seven years, Larry Erenberg's Country Inn, a veritable rural hole in the wall bar and grill located out Samsonville/Krumville ways, was a Mecca for anyone in the Northeast who loved beer. In fact, over the years Larry's gotten written up in all the major gourmet and home magazines, as well as the bar industry's inside rags, as being one of the top bars in the country.

Come the week before Christmas, the Country Inn has changed hands. Erenberg, 71, has retired to the second home he's kept, and dreamed about constantly (as anyone happening on his bar must surely know by now), on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Yes, the place with the naval bombing history and controversy. He says he'll henceforth be spending all his winters, and not just the month of January that Country Inn fans have long been used to, in the Caribbean and then moving in summer to a place he's bought in the Greene County hamlet of Surprise.