At this Catskills ranch just 90 minutes outside of Manhattan, New Yorkers are living out their cowboy dreams.
The Longhorn cows at Driftwood Ranch are jonesing. Their cartoonishly wide horns clink the metal fence as they lick the air, straining their necks for hunks of their favorite daily snack: bagels. After polishing off a giant box of the doughy treats, the herd ambles back across the pasture, wading belly-deep into a cool muddy pond. I dust the sesame seeds from my fingers. If it weren’t for the unconventional cattle feed, I could easily believe I’d been transported west, to Texas or Wyoming. In reality, I’m just a 90-minute drive from Manhattan.
Located in the forested hills of Sullivan County, in New York’s Catskills region, Driftwood Ranch offers guests a quintessential cowboy experience, including horseback rides, leather stamping workshops, drinks around the firepit, and, of course, longhorn feedings. Owned by Steve Dubrovsky, a four-time PRCA First Frontier Rodeo Circuit Champion and famed architect, and his wife Anne, an accomplished equestrian who teaches horsemanship in the onsite arena, the ranch is an idyllic countryside escape, primed to welcome cowboy-curious New Yorkers.
Driftwood opened in April 2025, part of a slew of Western-style venues finding fans in the eastern U.S. Glance around in New York City. You’ll almost certainly spot someone wearing cowboy boots–perhaps en route to a line dancing class at newly opened Common Country in the Financial District, or to Brooklyn’s Desert 5 Spot, a bar with live country music, a mechanical bull, and a cowboy boot-shaped disco ball. Although Driftwood wasn’t built specifically to profit from this cowboy renaissance (the Dubrovskys are long-time residents of the area; the nearby luxury hotel, The Chatwal Lodge, was their former home), it inevitably brings guests to its doorstep.
One such guest found the ranch while prepping for a big Montana trip, Dubrovsky says. He was hoping to learn skills in the saddle before departing for his Wild West adventure. “There’s an absolute love affair with the old west right now,” Dubrovsky explains. “It’s become almost a cult. You know, people want to watch [shows like Yellowstone] and ask you about the horses, and ask you about life on a ranch.”
When Rachael Joseph and her husband, two corporate lawyers based in New York City, bought a home in Damascus, Pennsylvania, she stumbled across an advertisement for Driftwood on the Sullivan County Instagram page. “I just ended up sending them an email asking if I could ride with them,” she says. “Now I’m pretty much there almost every single weekend.”
Joseph, who grew up visiting her family’s Idaho ranch, even booked out Driftwood’s four suites for a friend’s bachelorette party. “It’s just such a different lifestyle. So it’s kind of nice when city people get to experience it,” she explained. “Part of the allure for my friends to come is that they’ve never ridden horses before. Then they were on them, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so much fun.’”
It’s easy to view New Yorkers dabbling in horseback riding and line dancing as a passing trend, but the Eastern United States has a longstanding, lesser-known cowboy history. Dubrovsky, a New Jersey native, began his career at Cowtown Rodeo, a Salem County institution founded in 1929 and still operating today, making it the longest-running weekly professional rodeo in the United States. That Eastern lineage is no anomaly. In the early 20th century, Madison Square Garden was one of the most important rodeo venues in the country, says Eric D. Singleton, PH.D., McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and Curator of Ethnology at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma.
It was a place where cowboys became celebrated entertainers and where rodeo found a national, and sometimes international, audience. Even the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association traces its origins to the East Coast, after contestants walked out of a Boston Garden rodeo in 1936 and began organizing for fair pay and better conditions.
Call it a homecoming or not, the timing of this revival feels significant. The cowboy has been reclaimed as a nostalgic American icon and a modern symbol of cool amid national polarization and dwindling faith in the American dream. Could it represent a longing for a more united United States?
“Whether you know it or not, it’s so universal. The story of the cowboy, honestly, is the story of diversity,” says Singleton, emphasizing that an estimated twenty-five percent of cowboys in the Old West were Black. “What’s interesting about being a cowboy is, you can be a cowboy and not be born into it. It’s something that you can come into, and you’re accepted, you know? Like you want to put on a hat and boots? Come on in!”
