MOUNTAIN DALE, N.Y. — When Butch Resnick was growing up in this small working-class hamlet in the town of Fallsburg, he never imagined that decades later, he would be standing in the town’s former grocery store, eying a five-foot-tall painting of a naked Buddha. But times had changed.

Micheline Gingras, the curator of the Grocery Store, a new gallery, said she wanted to put the Buddha in the window. Mr. Resnick frowned, thinking of the Hasidic synagogue just up the road. “It’s a little too risqué for Mountain Dale,” he said.

Ms. Gingras seemed unconcerned. At 70, she had happily left her Brooklyn apartment for a small piece of the Catskills. “I enjoyed the excitement about giving this little village a rebirth,” she said. “I could bring everything to people who don’t even know it exists.”

Mr. Resnick, 50, a self-described “country boy” who has the hulk of a club bouncer but favors bright white sneakers and dad jeans, felt the same way. Six years ago, he bought 31 buildings in Mountain Dale — nearly all of them vacant — hoping to revive the town.