The Ghent-based Biodynamic farm and Waldorf school organization is taking on stewardship of the Main Street market ahead of its 2027 centennial, the third ownership change for the space in less than two decades.
Hawthorne Valley announced last week that its Farm Store will expand to a second location, taking over Otto's Market, the Germantown grocery store and cafe at 215 Main Street, ahead of the building's 2027 centennial. The move gives Otto's access to Hawthorne Valley's network of more than 200 regional farms and vendors while, according to the announcement, preserving the "character, intimacy, and neighborhood feel" that has defined the storefront through several changes of ownership.
The building opened as Central Market in 1927 and ran under that name for roughly seven decades before closing. It sat empty for a few years until Otto Leuschel, a former Whole Foods executive, bought and fully renovated the space in 2008, reopening it as Otto's Market with an early-20th-century aesthetic and a wider mix of specialty and local goods. Rural Intelligence covered Leuschel's Otto's in its early years as a revived "community headquarters," and later I wrote about his 2015 decision to sell both Otto's and the adjacent Germantown Variety, a five-and-dime he'd opened in 2012, so he could move back to Washington State to help care for his aging parents and return to Wholefoods to assist in its acquisition by Amazon.
New owners, including New York restaurateur Noah Bernamoff and his wife Rae Cohen, took over in 2017 and renovated the space again the following year, keeping the Otto's name through the transition. Hawthorne valley intends to keep the name as well.
Jeremy Laurange, Hawthorne Valley's director of retail, says they are interested more in continuity than acquisition. "Like the Farm Store, Otto's has consistently been more than a grocery store," he says. "It's where neighbors run into each other, where kids stop after school for their favorite snack, and where the town's daily life happens. We see our job as protecting that and giving the market the infrastructure to keep going strong for another hundred years."
Hawthorne Valley says it's committed to keeping Otto's existing staff and hiring locally going forward, and that the two operations' founding logic, built around local sourcing and doubling as a community gathering place, already overlaps closely enough to make the partnership straightforward. "We're growing into Germantown not to replace Otto's legacy," Laurange added, "but to carry it forward."
The Hawthorne Valley Farm Store began its own journey as an honor-system farm stand on Hawthorne Valley's Ghent campus more than 50 years ago, not long after the organization's 1971 founding, and has grown into a hub working with the same 200-plus network of farms, growers, and makers it's now opening up to Otto's. Hawthorne Valley was also one of the founding farms of Manhattan's Union Square Greenmarket, and it helped incubate Rolling Grocer 19, the tiered-pricing mobile grocery that began serving Hudson out of a retrofitted 16-foot trailer in 2018 before opening a storefront on South Second Street. Rolling Grocer became an independently operated organization in 2021, though Hawthorne Valley has continued supporting it, including through shared bulk purchasing.
The Otto's partnership is the second piece of a larger retail push the organization has been building for the past few years. Hawthorne Valley has a standing letter of intent with Hudson developer Ben Fain's company, Nice & Weird LLC, to convert the former Kaz Warehouse at 14 Montgomery Street on Hudson's waterfront into a 16,000-square-foot grocery, food hub, and community space, with SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks NY accepted. Fain has been blunt about what he thinks the project needs to avoid becoming.
"Hudson doesn't need another expensive boutique store," he told Chronogram when the partnership was first announced, "what some people call a 'food museum.'" Together, Hawthorne Valley describes the Hudson store and the Otto's stewardship as two versions of the same goal: keeping food access rooted in communities that already have working models for it, rather than building something new from scratch.
The stewardship transition is expected to continue through 2027, with Hawthorne Valley's purchasing network layered in as they go.
Otto's Market, 215 Main Street, Germantown, NY 12526
More at ottosmarket.com and hawthornevalley.org.
