When distinguished New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator Danny Shanahan was looking for an East Coast home to raise his family, there were many things that took priority. Good schools, a train station, and a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood were at the top of his list.

Shanahan, whose humorous and often peculiar cartoons have graced the pages and covers of The New Yorker for 20 years, has found all this and more in his Village of Rhinebeck home where he has lived with his family for more than a decade.

Shanahan, 52, grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in Bethlehem, Conn. When he dated a woman who attended Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, he found himself frequently visiting Rhinebeck, an area which he describes as "quiet" with "a little bit of sophistication." It also felt a lot like home.

"I was always here, and I loved Rhinebeck — it's very much like the town I grew up in," Shanahan says.

Shanahan moved to Brooklyn in the early '80s, tending bar at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village and attempting to launch his cartooning career. His work was eventually picked up by national publications like TV Guide and Spy Magazine, but he was "constantly rejected" by The New Yorker.

"I once got a handwritten note: 'Not this time, but keep trying,'" Shanahan recalls.

When the last of their roommates in a huge, two-and-a-half story Cobble Hill apartment cleared out and he and now-wife Janet Stetson (associate director of admissions at Bard College) lost their lease, they decided to head west to Albuquerque to raise a family.

"It's cheaper out there; all I needed was a mailbox to do my work," he says. He toyed with the thought of developing a comic strip about the desert, an idea which never fully got off the ground.

"What I was trying to do was avoid bartending in New Mexico at any cost," Shanahan recalls. He could just imagine "being in some cowboy bar where there's a lot of line dancing going on."

Luckily, almost immediately upon arrival in New Mexico, he was picked up by The New Yorker. Shanahan finally won the magazine over with his classic "Lassie Get Help," a two-frame cartoon in which a drowning boy screams for Lassie's assistance, followed by Lassie lying on a psychiatrist's couch.

"When people mention to me that they know my work, it seems that they always know that one," he says.

Over the years, Shanahan says, he's found his favorite cartoons to be the ones with "bizarre, off-the wall type of humor.

"I find it really gratifying when someone reads a cartoon and they don't understand it at all," he says.

After being contracted by The New Yorker in the spring of 1989, the gig frequently beckoned him back to the East Coast. The constant travel "was difficult," and seven years and two sons later, Shanahan and Stetson "just never really fell in love with New Mexico" and decided to move back east.

"We just kept coming back to the idea of living in Rhinebeck," he says. "I like old colonial houses, I like walkable villages, I like people being able to just drop by."

It was also "a big plus" that Shanahan's friends and fellow New Yorker cartoonists Michael Crawford, Michael Maslin, and Liza Donnelly also reside in town. While still living in New Mexico, Shanahan could always count on them for a place to stay when doing business in New York, or to give him additional insight into aspects of living in Rhinebeck, like the quality of the schools.

"They could tell me certain things that maybe a realtor wouldn't tell me," he says.

Finding a house in the village was ideal; Shanahan and Stetson wanted to live somewhere they could get by with one car.