Small towns have long memories. I moved to New Paltz, New York, in 1990, and even with three longish absences, I have considered the college town on the banks of a south-to-north-flowing river home.
In each year that I have lived here, I have heard conversations in which the participants lamented the rapid changes that they’d seen unfold in recent years in New Paltz and others in which participants lamented the absence of change in recent years in New Paltz. I lack written notes, but I will swear to you that both topics had overlapping participants.
Thirty years ago, the Water Street Market was not even a dream. The intersection at the Wallkill crossing saw no commercial development on either side of Main Street/Rt. 299. A high-end realtor and a nonprofit agency occupied the building that the Groovy Blueberry now fills with clothes and music. That shop was uptown on Main Street. The number of drinking establishments along Main Street or nearby has fluctuated and is perhaps at an all-time low number right now. Anecdotally, there were more than a dozen at the same time in very tight quarters for decades.
Some buildings that might have seemed cursed since no business of any sort could last for longer than a year in them have now served as homes for the same restaurant or clothing store or whatever for decades.
The stories of a town’s real estate transactions can dominate conversations among lifelong friends (“The Carroll’s was uptown when I moved here.” “No, Mark, it was downtown.”), but the stories of real estate are merely the surface evidence of the stories of lives lived in that town. Sometimes when I am perturbed about some issue in my life—you know, the small ones like love and money—I walk along Huguenot Street here in New Paltz. Stone houses that were built in the 17th and 18th Centuries sit there as a reminder that many thousands have walked this same street with similar worries in their lives. The worriers of 1823 perhaps wore nicer clothes than what I wear in 2023.
Now a thriving historical site, less than a century ago the stone houses were still residences; at least one of them was employed for student housing. Alf Evers, the great historian of life in the Catskills, told me once that he’d lived in one of them when he was a college student in the 1920s.
I’ve lived in three different homes on Huguenot Street and now live on a northern extension of it. Sometimes I will find myself in a conversation with an online friend, usually a musician or an artist, and learn that the individual once lived in New Paltz or Woodstock or Bearsville and their experiences here are treasured memories.
We live here now, however, and today’s activities are tomorrow’s treasured memories. New Paltz and Ulster County and the Catskills are thriving right now, which can lend to every anecdote about the past a beautiful sense of continuity. People across the country walk to work in buildings made with Rosendale cement on sidewalks topped with bluestone from quarries near Saugerties while they listen on their cellphones to music that was written and recorded here. Someday, a writer will write a similar sentence about what we build and create here today.
Yokel is here to draw attention to and celebrate the work, industry, and creativity we see here in our region now. Yokel Blogs will introduce us all to one another like a virtual salon and offer some memories for that sense of historical continuity.
____________________________________
Mark’s website: http://thegadabouttown.com/