Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesSHALL WE? Piermont Avenue, the main street, has the kinds of quirky shops restaurants that draw visitors. Its riverfront setting at the foot of the Tallman range helps, too. More Photos »
A free iPhone app offering in-depth property search tools and mobile features to help you navigate the real estate market.Three miles south of the Tappan Zee Bridge, with a colorful main street of quaint shops and historic homes tucked along the shoreline, it is insulated from the noise of traffic crossing the span between Rockland to Westchester. But at the same time the George Washington Bridge is about 12 miles south, close enough for residents to commute to Manhattan. Not surprisingly, the 0.7-square-mile village in Orangetown, with a three-mile-wide section of the river to its east and the steep hillside behind it, has become a refuge for artists, musicians, authors and others seeking a peaceful respite from the clamor of everyday life. “This is definitely not a place to come and build a McMansion,” said Joan Dye Gussow, professor emerita at Columbia University, environmentalist and author of “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2002), among other books. Ms. Gussow, 83, moved to Piermont with her husband, Alan, a painter, in 1995. The house they bought with the intention of renovating it turned out to be unsalvageable, so they built another on its footprint for about $400,000: a three-bedroom two-bath Italian-style rose-colored stucco residence. But it wasn’t really for the original house that they moved to Piermont. “I don’t know exactly what it was,” Ms. Gussow said, “but when I walked down to the river with my husband, it was the open space, the nonsuburban aspect of the site that called to me.” Now a widow, she conducts writing classes in her home and tends a large garden that sweeps down to the water. “I get up every morning and pull up the shades and look out at the river,” she said, “and I just love that.” Piermont has not always been idyllic. As recently as the 1980s, it was so reminiscent of a village laid bare by hard times that Woody Allen chose it for the backdrop of his 1985 movie “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which takes place during the Great Depression. Formerly a factory town, Piermont was the home of the Continental Can Company in the 1950s and then the site of the Piermont Paper Company. When the mill closed in the 1970s, the village fell into decline. It wasn’t until the 1990s that developers began building condominiums and town houses on the pier, enticing new residents like Fara Abramson, the owner of a gift shop in nearby New City. After dining out one evening in Piermont with friends, Ms. Abramson, now 43 and the mother of a 9-year-old son, was so smitten that she returned the next morning to buy a three-bedroom three-and-a-half-bath town house with a deck and views of the riverfront, spending $300,000 before even putting her home and business in New City up for sale. “I could never have taken a chance like that in today’s economy,” said Ms. Abramson, who has since opened another gift shop, Presence, in Piermont, “but I’m glad I did back then.” So magnetic is the village today, according to residents, that tourists and bicyclists often arrive in droves on weekends. The bicyclists often pay little heed to the designated bike lanes, said Robert Samuels, a former journalist and author who has lived here since 1982. “They talk loudly and shout back and forth to one another, often waking me out of a sound sleep on a Sunday morning,” said Mr. Samuels, whose book “Blue Water, White Water” (Up the Creek Publishing, 2011) details his struggle with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a muscle disorder. But other than the bicyclists and high annual property taxes, most of Piermont’s 2,500 residents consider their village as close to perfect as it gets, said Mr. Samuels, the president of the 500-member civic association. WHAT YOU’LL FIND Ash Street winds down from Route 9W, its various house styles on display: stone homes built in the 1700s, Greek Revivals dating to the 1800s, Victorians, ranches, split-levels and contemporaries. Mr. Samuels and his companion, Karen Brown, a retired social worker, live in a barn-red wheelchair-accessible modular home on Sparkill Creek that he built for $175,000 when he moved to town 30 years ago. As David Sanders, president and founder of Sanders Properties in Nyack, puts it, residential real estate in Piermont attracts “a very creative, do-your-own-kind-of-thing buyer.” 
