WHEN Mark Veeder, an events planner, bought a tumbledown 19th-century house in Sullivan County, N.Y., he wasn’t thinking of giving it the wow factor that he promises his clients. But he did just that, reviving not only a house marked for the wrecking ball but also a once-moribund town on the Delaware River.
The guesthouse’s porch, above, and the River Market, top.
As a result of Mr. Veeder’s involvement, the town, Barryville, now has a chamber of commerce, an upscale grocery store, a farmers’ market, a young blacksmith and a future seemingly as rosy as the new planter boxes along the road through town.
Mr. Veeder’s Manhattan company, EventQuest, arranges multimillion-dollar functions for clients like Mercedes-Benz and GQ. That work draws on the same talents he used in his upstate community.
“I knew how to train people, although doing it in a store was something new to me,” he said. “And I knew how to do things like write a good proposal, which helped get a financial grant for the town.”
How Mr. Veeder, 43, got involved in the revival of Barryville has as much to do with his background in event planning and his hyperkinetic drive — he rises at 6 every morning and always juggles numerous projects — as with meeting his partner, Michael Schroeder, also 43.
In 2001, Mr. Veeder was coming out of a nine-year relationship and was quite happy spending his time renovating his house, which is near the town of Forestburgh, about 20 miles northeast of Barryville. Mr. Schroeder, a clinical psychologist from Manhattan who had a second home in Shohola, Pa., just across the river from Barryville, liked being single. But three months after the two met upstate, they were living together in Mr. Veeder’s SoHo loft. They kept both their country houses, however, and now spend the warmer months in Forestburgh, the cooler ones in Shohola.
Driving from one house to the other, they saw a “For Sale” sign on a worn-out boardinghouse in Barryville, a town of about 1,000 on the Delaware River. The boardinghouse had seen better days. Both men had the same thought: Why not buy the eyesore and put something back into the community?
“We wanted to create a throwback to the 50’s,” Mr. Veeder said, “when community in towns like this was important.”
Soon after they bought the boardinghouse for $180,000 and began an 18-month renovation, Mr. Veeder was wearing other hats in Barryville, too. He began a local chamber of commerce, of which he is president, and with whose members he got various grants, including one for $30,000 from the Alan Gehry Foundation, to beautify the town. Along with banners and planter boxes came an information kiosk and tourist maps, and that was only in the first year. Mr. Veeder is loath to take credit for all the achievements and says it was a group effort.
Once the boardinghouse, called the Spring House, was finished, they put in an antiques store, a bed-and-breakfast and several rental apartments. Situated at one end of town, it became a kind of beacon of change.
“More people started buying up here after 9/11,” Mr. Veeder said, “so there was new life coming to the area. But after the Spring House opened, you could see things changing a lot and people getting more pride in the place.” Several weeks ago, an acquaintance of Mr. Veeder’s bought the Spring House, saying that he wanted to keep the same vision for the gracious building.
In 2004, Mr. Veeder and Mr. Schroeder joined with a local couple, Scott and Jennifer VanTuyl, to buy the old general store, which was going out of business. They modeled its replacement, the River Market, after shops they had seen in Napa and Vermont.
“It’s a bit of Dean & Deluca,” Mr. Veeder said, although the River Market stocks everything from basic groceries to fine items.
The two New Yorkers are there most weekends, chatting with customers and staff and keeping an eye on things. They have also started stocking the shelves with their own brand of jams, rubs, scented candles and River Mud coffee beans.
“It’s the anticonvenience store where everyone says hello,” said Mr. Veeder, almost forgetting how chaotic it was to start up. The four partners renovated and opened their doors only three weeks after completing the purchase. No one got any sleep for several days.
“It was harder than any multimillion-dollar event I’ve done,” Mr. Veeder said, although in creating a place where people hang out, he has achieved his aim. “Now people come up to us and say, ‘Thank you for doing this.’ ”
