New Paltz jumped on to the international stage in 2004 when the village’s 26-year-old mayor, Jason West, married 25 same-sex couples. Reporters from national news organizations flooded the streets. Images of the village’s Main Street, lined with funky shops and gently sloping down to the Wallkill River were broadcast worldwide. (No marriage licenses were ever issued, as the town clerk refused to do so.) Of course, gay marriages are not New Paltz’s only claim to fame. There’s the Mohonk Mountain House, supposedly the inspiration for the hotel in The Shining, and also where The Road to Wellville was filmed. In Dirty Dancing, it’s mentioned as the place where the character Penny gets an illegal abortion. Until only 10 years ago, the state university had a reputation as a bit of a party school, and was cited enthusiastically and often during the 1980s in the magazine High Times. (As an alumnus of SUNY New Paltz—class of ’96—I can attest to the veracity of the claim.) Acts like Jefferson Airplane and The Who played on campus, often grand outdoors affairs held in the “Tripping Fields.” New Paltz was also the longtime home of boxing champion Floyd Patterson, who died in 2006.
The town gets written up as a weekend getaway in the New York Times travel section on an irregular but frequent schedule, as if the newspaper had a financial stake in the local tourism industry. The coverage may or may not have to do with the fact that Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger owns a house in the area.
Media hype aside, New Paltz is really the perfect example of why so many people love the Hudson Valley. “It’s a melting pot between the city and the country,” says photographer G. Steve Jordan, who runs a gallery featuring his nature photography in the Water Street Market downtown. “It’s got all the elements—bohemian student character, proximity to New York City, Main Street buzzing with shops, critical mass of intellect and artistic expression—that make it a great place to live and work. We’re very lucky.” Stuart Bigley, director of Unison Arts Center puts it this way: “It really isn’t like other places; it’s very much its own thing. The town hasn’t been commodified and chopped up and spit out in the commercial way that so many other towns have been.”
New Paltzians are proud of the funky character of the town, comparing its quirkiness favorably against the Hudson Valley’s more well-heeled burgs. “Rhinebeck is prettier than New Paltz, but I don’t see a lot to do there,” says Rich Gottlieb, a legendary figure in the rock climbing community who owns the outfitting store Rock and Snow. “We’re a little more of a frontier town. New Paltz is not too precious. Everybody contributes. Nobody owns the place.” Bigley puts it this way: “It’s real here. New Paltz has its pimples here and there. If you go to some other places in the region, there’s a kind of hipper-than-thou quality. [Admittedly, some have accused New Paltz of being hippier-than-thou.] You don’t have to be cool in New Paltz. Maybe you are, but you’re accepted if you’re not.”
And friendly people—don’t forget the friendly people. “One of the biggest compliments we get from visitors is that the people here are just so friendly and helpful,” says Joyce Minard, president of the New Paltz Regional Chamber of Commerce. “And it’s true! Residents here are very much in love with their community.”
The Oldest Street in America
Let’s start at the beginning. (Ignoring the displaced indigenous residents, of course.) French Huguenots, fleeing persecution in their Catholic-dominated homeland, founded a settlement in 1678 on the banks of the Wallkill River. (An interesting ethnic variant in an area almost exclusively settled by the Dutch after their founding of New Amsterdam in the early 17th century. A few of New Paltz’s street names—Dubois, Hasbrouck—attest to the town’s French Protestant heritage.) The Huguenots built a cluster of stone houses along present-day Huguenot Street (regarded as the oldest street in America); seven of the surviving structures date from the early 1700s, and the other houses on the street are similarly styled. The six-acre site is a National Historic Landmark District, and also contains a cemetery and a reconstructed 1717 stone church.
Historic Huguenot Street, the association that oversees the buildings and grounds, hosts events throughout the year, from croquet parties to historic reenactments. In January, HHS will present a talk by historian Walter Wheeler, “Constructing Slavery: Beginning Investigations into the Housing of Slaves in New York State, 1620-1827,” on January 9, and an evening of music with violinist Marka Young and guitarist Jim Bacon (also a town justice) on January 23.
The next significant date in New Paltz history is probably 1828, when the New Paltz Classical School was founded, the forerunner to the current college. Until the mid-1950s, the school—known as the Normal School and then the State Teachers College—specialized in teacher training. SUNY New Paltz has a robust Education department to this day.
The college, with an enrollment of 8,000, in many ways dominates the life of the community. (The population of the village is only 6,000.) The 216-acre SUNY New Paltz campus is situated on a hill above the village’s downtown, and the economy of the surrounding businesses is largely driven by the needs of the students (coffee, art supplies, pizza, beer, cigarettes, socializing with other students in liquor-available environments) and visiting parents (food, lodging). (Interesting, unverifiable fact: Jacobson Faculty Tower, the highest point on the campus at 120 feet, is thought to be the tallest building on the west side of the Hudson between New York City and Albany.)
In any college town, there’s bound to be town-and-gown tension. The concerns of an academic institution and its thousands of transient, barely-in-their-majority attendees do not overlay perfectly with those of a municipality and its citizens, who may not take kindly to packs of inebriated college students making merry outside their window at two in the morning. But Mayor Dungan thinks that the days of mutual distrust are over. “There’s a lot less tension than there used to be,” says Dungan, a SUNY New Paltz alumnus, citing the close communication between his office and the college, and his attendance at student association meetings, as the well as the college newspaper’s coverage of village government. “We’re a college town,” says Dungan. “Students are transient; they’re only here for four years. But students as a segment of the population are a permanent fact of life in New Paltz.”
Killing for Traffic
When asked what the biggest problem facing New Paltz is, the dozen or so people I interviewed for this article said the same thing: Traffic. Driving in New Paltz can be a bottlenecked, rage-inducing experience. To get anywhere in New Paltz, you most likely need to drive on Main Street (a tight two lanes), but that road has three state highways and the Thruway converging on it, and it’s the primary east-west corridor in the area. On Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, for instance, when the New Paltz/Woodstock Crafts Fair hits the Ulster County Fairgrounds, cars can be backed up in the hundreds trying to get in and out of town. “There are communities that would kill for our traffic,” says Mayor Dungan. “That people want to come to the area is one of the driving factors in our local economy.” When asked what might be done about the traffic problem, Dungan sighed. “There is no easy solution,” he said, explaining that the village was laid out before the advent of the automobile. The charm of the village’s narrow streets and late 19th-century storefronts rely on this crowded, antiquated quality.
Stuart Bigley remembers a sleepier version of New Paltz in the 1970s. “When I first moved here, you could walk down the middle of the street blindfolded,” he says. “You could hear a car coming from a long distance away. There wasn’t what anyone would refer to as traffic back then.”
One of the causes of all this traffic lies outside of town. It’s the Shawangunk Ridge, or The Gunks, as they are affectionately known. Amazingly, most of this land, which is on the Nature Conservancy’s list of the Earth’s “Last Great Places,” is undeveloped. Twelve thousand acres of protected land stretch from Cragsmoor in the west through Minnewaska State Park and the Mohonk Preserve just above New Paltz. The Gunks are a world-class rock climbing destination, as well as a recreation hub for hikers, bikers, snowshoers, and cross-country skiers.
The scenic beauty of the region draws visitors in such numbers that Minnewaska State Park has to turn people away on summer weekends. It’s that beauty that G. Steve Jordan has been chronicling in his photographs for over 10 years. “I try and transcend the landscape itself,” says Jordan. “I hope my photos evoke a feeling similar to the feeling of being out there.” He’s also witnessed the amazing connection people have to the landscape. “More than once, people have been looking at my images and tears have come to their eyes,” says Jordan. “And I don’t think it’s anything I did. People have a such a strong connection to the natural beauty of the area.”
Social Capital
Every town in the region has had to wrestle with development pressures, and New Paltz is no different. What makes the town such an inviting place to live has also led to a mini construction boom in recent years. (Or what passes for one in New Paltz.) The town’s citizens, however, are actively engaged in how the town will grow and what type of growth is in keeping with the character of their community. Dave Porter, a professor of sociology and a board member of the Association for Intelligent Rural Management, dates the birth of New Paltz’s self-awareness to the mid-1990s, when a Wal-Mart was proposed in a development abutting the Thruway exit. Porter and Chet Mirsky wrote about the town’s tussle over that proposal in Megamall on the Hudson: Planning, Wal-Mart, and Grassroots Resistance (Trafford, 2003). That development never happened—a local group, led by Porter, waged a two-year campaign and convinced the planning board that allowing a Wal-Mart to be built on the outskirts of town was not in the best environmental, social, or economic interests of New Paltz. “It really changed the politics of the town,” says Porter. “There’s been good momentum since then.”
Ten years later, and another developer is now trying to build a mixed-use project on the same site, though the development, The Crossroads at New Paltz, is on hold, a fact Porter believes has to do with the economic downturn. But if the developer ramps up the project again, Porter is inclined to believe that New Paltzians will be up to the challenge. “There’s really an astonishing percentage of people who get involved on any issue. And there are so many younger people that are getting involved as well, to carry the torch.”
The reason Porter is optimistic about the future of New Paltz has to do with the tremendous social capital the town has accumulated. “There really is a very strong interest in participating in the community in all kinds of ways—Little League, school activities, the fire department, volunteer work,” says Porter. “People take an interest in the fate of the community.”
RESOURCES
AFFIRM www.stopcrossroads.org
G. Steve Jordan www.mohonkimages.com
Historic Huguenot Street www.huguenotstreet.org
Minnewaska State Park www.nysparks.state.ny.us/parks/127/details.aspx
Mohonk Mountain House www.mohonk.com
Rock and Snow www.rockandsnow.com
SUNY New Paltz www.newpaltz.edu
Town of New Paltz www.townofnewpaltz.org
Unison Arts Center www.unisonarts.org
Village of New Paltz www.villageofnewpaltz.org
Water Street Market www.waterstreetmarket.info
This article appears in January 2010.
