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David O'Halloran, a longtime resident and owner of the Pine Grove Dude Ranch - a family vacation resort that is one of the area's biggest employers - said "the last thing we need to do is pour gasoline" on the kinds of tensions that constantly arise about how to revive the upstate towns and who gets to decide.

Mr. Silver is "the wrong person speaking for the people who've lived here for a long time," he said, and added that, as far as he was concerned, artists and artisans were "the growth industry in our community."

"Look at Kingston," he said. "Kingston is alive again because of the artistic growth there."

Mr. O'Halloran was not the only one angry. Mr. Silver - who, probably just to be more provocative, says he likes to think of himself the unelected mayor of Kerhonkson - was bombarded with angry e-mail messages, including one from a man who identified himself only as a manual laborer and 20-year Kerhonkson resident.

"Do your brothers-in-flannel up here who read these ads realize that your thinly veiled 'Think Tank' is really a N.Y.C.-based ad agency with a slick and pseudo-intellectual Web site peddling freshman philosophy about, among other things, art?" the e-mailer wrote. "Get real, you self-important fakes. I'd be willing to bet you drink fancy coffee drinks every day. In short, you have no authority to speak as one of us, and no business pretending to be from the other side of the tracks."

But Mr. Silver has found some local defenders, like Irene Rocha, a former Brooklynite who owns property near Mr. Silver's and thinks someone has to fight the resistance to change in the community. "I think a lot of people are just afraid of the New York City mindset creeping in here," she said. John Whiteman, a New York State crop adviser who has lived in the area since 1986, sees Mr. Silver as an entrepreneur willing to take risks that locals are not taking for the sake of the town.

"If people take offense to it," he said of the ad, "well, I think they need to find something in their lives to take up some more of their time."

He added, cheerfully: "I was up in Canada this weekend, and I didn't see any major protests going on up there about this."

In the end, the moral of the story seems to be that provocative, ironic, New York-style advertising is quite effective, even on the back page of a small, rural paper: Mr. Silver said that two of the storefronts have been rented and there is interest in the third, keeping alive his hope of a brave new Kerhonkson.

"This might be the hardest working small-space ad in all of advertising," he said. "In my wildest dreams I never expected anything like this."

One of the people interested in renting a storefront is the editor of the local newspaper, Chris Hewitt, who also runs a letterpress business and needs a home for it. But in an e-mail message he sent to Mr. Silver, even he was not quite sure whether he was eligible to participate in the potential rejuvenation of his hometown.

"I have to tell you, as a Kerhonkson resident, beer lover, coffee drinker, artist, Canadian, Italian, tofu eater and hard worker," he wrote, "I'm a little confused about whether I qualify or not."

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