Taking a drive through New Paltz—any idea where I should have lunch?” asks someone on the Chowhound website. A lively discussion breaks out; one user posts a lengthy guide: the Village Tea Room is a lunchtime must, the Mountain Brauhaus and its addictive buttermilk salad dressing, “smartly chosen cheeses” at the Cheese Plate, “fresh, honest, creative food” at Karma Road, breakfast at the Main Street Bistro or the Mudd Puddle or Paul’s Kitchen. Or, the poster adds, go to Yanni for Greek salad, Gomen Kudasai for high quality Japanese. Then someone else chimes in about Beso, and yet another poster recommends Café Mio, in “the next town south, Gardiner.”
One imagines that the original Chowhound may end up deciding to do more than just pass through New Paltz, like hang around for a breakfast or three. She would not be the first to be captivated.
The New York Daily News paid backhanded tribute in the late 1960s, with a cover photo of longhairs milling about on Main Street, captioned “New Paltz: Town Torn By Too Much Youth.” Page two featured a map and directions, which likely thrilled the town fathers no end. In 1968, a student got arrested for wearing the American flag as a superhero cape in a film class project. His fellow students rallied around him, and SUNY New Paltz college president John Neumaier bailed him out. The 1970s saw appearances of stars like Grace Slick in what were then called the Tripping Fields south of the campus. (“You can’t possibly let Anne go there,” my grandfather proclaimed when he heard about my college plans.)
Alice Chandler and the Evil Plot
In 1980, SUNY officials brought in President Alice Chandler, who had a clear mandate to trim the sails and tighten up on the “Berkeley of the East Coast.” Funds were redirected from environmental and interdisciplinary studies to business and nursing, and protests—rather sparsely attended ones—failed to avail. Some believed it an evil plot and an end to all things good and creative on the campus—which, 30 years later, has added an elegant art museum and maintains a packed calendar of cultural events guaranteed to scare the flag pins off conservatives’ lapels, such as a meeting in November ’10 that brought together a Jewish refugee from the Nazi era, a Palestinian student, and about 150 others to discuss the Palestinian side of the story.
Not only were the rumors of the demise of Art highly exaggerated, the Party for Socialism and Liberation still rocks on. Today, my grandfather would probably be telling my parents I’d better hit community college for a couple of years first if I expected SUNY New Paltz to let me in, and he’d be right.
What the alarmists declaring New Paltz—torn—and the students proclaiming Alice Chandler to be a fascist tool both missed was how adeptly this town keeps its balance, wind-surfing through controversy on wave after wave of impassioned, intelligent new blood and a deep sea of old timers.
The tide rushes in come late summer, heralded by the huge welcome banner at P&G’s bar and restaurant on the corner of Main and North Front Streets downtown; when the tide ebbs again, a fair number of impassioned, intelligent folks remain beached, and so it has likely been since at least the 1940s, when what had been a small teachers’ college became a state university branch.
The university has become a highly selective star in the SUNY firmament, with “Best Of” list mentions pouring in over the past decade from US News and World Report, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Princeton Review, Newsweek, and High Times. And the Town Torn? It’s doing just fine, despite being repeatedly and perpetually Torn by one thing and another, from a gay-marrying mayor to property taxes.
A Simmering Soup of Creative Energy
Storms of controversy are as New Paltz as the very curve of the hillside itself. A Marriott Hotel on Lake Minnewaska was vetoed in the 1980s, to the alarm of some; a couple of outstanding midrange motels and a couple of dozen top-class bed-and-breakfasts have emerged from the fray. A plan for a Walmart on Main Street got another thumbs down; two decades later, the downtown is eclectic and throbbing with life and the Water Street Market, a sopping arcade, boasts over 20 retail outlets. You can get Rolfed, have your computer fixed, eat, antique, gift shop, and gallery hop at “a wonderful place to cherish the day,” as a visitor remarked on the market’s website. It seems unlikely that anyone other than Sam Walton has ever voiced such sentiments about WalMart.
The simmering soup of creative energy seasoned with sweet youth and the cayenne of controversy makes New Paltz—the town that sang to the right-wing hate monger Reverend Fred Phelps until he got back onto his bus and went home—a magnet for dreamers and wild talents of all sorts. There’s Tango Argentino, an international coalition of four exquisitely accredited dance instructors giving bargain lessons in a dance they believe has a healing power all its own, and there’s choreographer Susan Slotnik, transforming children and felons alike with the Figures in Flight Dance Company.
Youko Yamamoto’s vision of “a little noodle shop” has been taking shape since 2004, and has become incarnate as Gomen Kudasai, its offerings described by one of the Chowhounds as “insanely delicious.” “We do a lot of things to give people a reason to come back,” Yamamoto says. “We’re showing eight local artists right now—people like Brenda Bufalino and Helena Bigley.” Bufalino is one of Slotnik’s mentors in the world of dance; Bigley is the wife of the director of Unison Arts and Learning Center, one of a plethora of thriving New Paltz cultural venues, which maintains a popular gallery at the Water Street Market. If one could draw a family tree of creativity in New Paltz, it would resemble a schematic of an intricately connected circuit board, wires going every which way.
New Paltz is a charismatic rock star of a town. Supervisor Toni Hokanson ticks off the familiar handful of reasons why: “The culture of the college, the beautiful surroundings, the fresh food, the Rail Trail, the mountains, the people. Community projects like Bikes that Heal, where you can rent a bike for a dollar and it helps people with leukemia. I really love this town.”
Decorous, Enigmatic, Chic
Strong main lines connect all that creative energy with another big little town six miles south. Gardiner and New Paltz share a mountain range, a river, a school district, a weekly newspaper, and relative affluence—according to community surveys conducted by the Census Bureau between 2005 and 2009, over a third of the citizens of each realm are college educated, and median incomes were right around $80,000.
With a common school district, the young of both towns grow up together; with a common newspaper, citizens can (and do) sort out their controversies together on the letters page in strongly worded missives, bad puns, and occasional outpourings of verse. Rock-star New Paltz has a faster feel and a grittier edge—spiritual descendants of the “Too Much Youth” era still flock back in summer to camp beside the Rail Trail and panhandle from the tourists downtown—while Gardiner’s star quality maintains a more decorous presence, slightly enigmatic and chic. But besides the schools and the paper, both regular generators of controversies and solutions in their own right, both towns can lay claim to high a percentage of dogged dreamers whose achievements resound far beyond the local stage. Gardiner Supervisor Joe Katz has a list like Hokanson’s to reel off: a new library, new businesses in the commercial/industrial zone, community institutions like the annual tree lighting event (“The state trooper told me he wished his town had something like this,” says Katz), and the Cupcake Festival, which has over 1,000 Facebook pals who are avidly swapping cupcake recipes and licking their chops a full six months before festival time in May.
The town’s cherished agricultural heritage blends with its artistic and social consciousness and spawns modern classics; CSAs thrive beside generations-old family farms. White Barn Farm Sheep and Wool, a fiber shop offering classes and gatherings for the handiwork community at its Knit Local Cafe, was born of proprietress Paula Kucera’s artistic sensibilities, melded with her deeply held belief in the importance of sustaining local agriculture. “Knit Community,” urges White Barn’s website—you can’t get much more Gardiner than that.
Both towns share strong environmental sensibilities. In Gardiner, where an open-space bonding act passed by one vote, shifts in the political wind led to the decision to fund-raise for open space without tapping taxpayers—and a lively bipartisan committee is halfway to the $50,000 needed to preserve the beloved Kiernan Farms, site of the Classics Under the Gunks car show that helped build the library.
“I moved up here from a part of Long Island where seeing three trees together in one place was a big deal,” reflects Gardiner resident Andi Weiss Bartczak, “and before I decided where to settle I drove up and down both sides or the river. First I moved to Greene County, but there wasn’t any community activism to speak of. Here, they fight for and against every little thing, and I love it—it’s a little precious at times, but deeply wonderful.” Bartzack is a science consultant with a PhD in environmental toxicology; in between putting in her two cents on local issues and maintaining scienceforcitizens.org, she’s finishing a scientifically based vampire novel. Dreams of all descriptions thrive here, albeit sometimes shaped by the controversies into things the dreamer might never have expected.
Case in point: When Ralph Erenzo purchased the Tuthilltown Gristmill in Gardiner, the avid climber believed he was on track to develop lodgings for his fellow Gunks rock jocks. Neighbors weren’t so sure about a major campground and event venue. The faint-hearted would have packed their things and fled—Erenzo hung in there. Today, he operates the first distillery to open in New York State since Prohibition, having successfully changed state law to make that possible, and his Hudson Baby Bourbon was recently lauded in the pages of the Los Angeles Times as a famed sommelier’s favored party beverage. Not only that, the distillery has a new neighbor: Tuthil House at the Mill, a gourmet restaurant that looks likely to garner its own set of Chowhound raves. The Tuthill House folks, between whipping up mouthwatering new specials, are busily promoting neighbors on their Facebook page, suggesting that a trip to the HiHo Home Mart shouldn’t be missed or mentioning another restaurant’s planned party.
That generosity of spirit, immeasurable in Census questionnaires, is surely yet another element that knits the area close. When the newspaper writes about a Gardiner family needing a home, a home turns up. Family of New Paltz pens a thank-you note citing the Water Street Market, ShopRite, Earthgoods health food store, and McGillicuddy’s Pub for generosity, and notes that 1,247 people came out for its Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving. Susan Gleeson, the dog-training prodigy behind the Center for Heeling, just donated 2,800 pounds of pet food to local pantries.
Magic Mountains
Controversies swirl and simmer, challenging folks to look in the mirror and figure out what they really do want to see happen; some carry on for decades. New Paltz has formed an Efficiency in Government Task Force to study whether village and town government should be consolidated (“It’s been discussed with a lot of gut feeling; we wanted to get serious about the numbers. Taxes are atrocious—we’ve done great preserving open space, but we need to be more proactive about bringing in business and relieving that burden,” says Hokanson). A local gadfly has already launched a campaign for village mayor with an anticonsolidation stance. Anything might happen, and probably will, in the magical and magnetic land along the Shawangunk Ridge.
And longstanding local institutions, private and public, keep rockin’ on. “I came to New Paltz two years ago to ‘go to school,’” a Rock and Snow employee writes on the website of the 40-year-old outdoor boutique, whose owner, Rich Gottlieb, was recently recognized for his long list of community good works—and promptly thanked a long string of his allies. The slight irony of her quotation marks will bring a snicker of recognition to many. This area draws you in, picks you up, and shakes you. Sometimes you’ll discover that the reason you thought you were here has changed completely; in other cases it will simply grow like Alice after she ate the magical cakes. But one thing’s certain: Just living in the Wallkill Valley is an education.
