Living Above the Store: Six Business Owners in Rosendale, New York

Living Above the Store is a unique set of portraits using photography, text, and the individual voices of six independent business owners in the village of Rosendale—a former cement-mining town in New York’s Hudson Valley. Each of these owners adapted an older building to create their unique living/work space, giving them flexibility in running their shops and creating a distinctive sense of community along a two-block stretch of the town’s Main Street. Trained as an architect, writer, and photographer, author Christine Hunter is interested in these modern adaptations of a traditional worldwide building typology rarely found now in the United States.

Her photographs document the town—beginning with an introduction to its history, followed by personal portraits of the owners and their shops: a bakery, a puppet workshop and theater, two restaurants (one Japanese, one Middle Eastern), a candle workshop, and a one-of-a-kind boutique junk store. This book celebrates the importance of these small enterprises, which survive in a challenging retail environment and contribute to a unique sense of place in a struggling town. The full-color softcover book is 133 pages, with a trim of 6 x 8.25 inches and 86 images. The book was published in 2022 by StrudelmediaLive. $10 from each sale goes to support the Rosendale Library.

Christine Hunter is an architect and photographer interested in housing design, preservation, and sustainable neighborhood planning. For 13 years, she was a principal in a New York City firm specializing in affordable housing and community facilities. She is also the author and co-illustrator of Ranches, Rowhouses, and Railroad Flats—American Homes: How They Shape Our Landscapes and Neighborhoods, published in 1999 by W. W. Norton & Company.