Where Floods Usually Hit, Fiscal Thirst

This tiny Catskills hamlet doesn’t really strike you as a place whose future would depend on whether a Dubai-based financial adviser can make things work out with clients in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

The big event here every year is the Trout Parade in June. The shops on the block-long Main Street include ones like Willow and Brown home furnishings and Hamish & Henry Booksellers, which cater mostly to the nuevo-Catskills second-home crowd, and Dick Lambert Gunsmith and the Wildlife Gift Shop, which don’t. One proposal to revive the village a few years back was based on putting aquariums fed by the Willowemoc River on Main Street and in downtown stores so people could walk around town and see trout.

But we’re all globalized now, so here we are 9 miles from Roscoe, 117 miles from Wall Street and 6,815 miles from Dubai, with much of the downtown in foreclosure while the financial figure who owns it and who once looked like the town’s savior tries to pay his bills.