This past June, with little fanfare, a long career of public service to the Town of Gardiner came to an end. Former town supervisor Joe Katz stepped down from the Zoning Board of Appeals, where he had been a member since 2012. “It’s the first time I haven’t been on something in more than 20 years,” he notes.
Now 86, Katz is coping with the usual array of age-related health problems and felt the need to scale back his activities. “Physically, I can’t do it anymore,” he says. Surgery to remove a non-malignant lesion on his vocal cords a couple of years ago has reduced his once-hearty voice to a whisper, making it difficult for him to be heard over the din of a contentious town meeting.
He uses a cane to get around his Bruynswick Road farm, and closed down his farmstand this season due to Covid-19. But, says Katz, “I still grow all the vegetables.”
Indeed, the gardens that spread in all directions from the converted barn that he shares as a home and studio with his wife, artist Pattie Eakin, are lush and green right now with crops of many varieties waiting to be harvested. The centerpiece on their dining-room table is an arrangement of artichokes that they allowed to flower, festooned with exotic purple fronds. With its short growing season and cold winters, Ulster County isn’t in a zone normally considered hospitable to the Mediterranean vegetable, but Katz has been raising them successfully for years – the first Gardinerite to do so.
Born in New York City, by the age of six Joe Katz was spending weekends and summers at the property that his father – a wannabe farmer working in Manhattan’s garment industry – bought in Gardiner in 1939. They were one of the first Jewish families to settle in the town. The acreage that had previously belonged to the extensive landholdings of bootlegger Oscar Heddon contained an artificial lake named after Heddon, though the dam that created it was dismantled long ago. Young Joe took to farm chores at a young age, earning money in his teen years by raising and selling eggs and chickens.
Joe’s mother died when he was twelve and his father when he was 19, but he did well enough in school to attend Cornell University, earning a degree in political science. In retrospect, he jokes, “I should’ve gone to referee school. It would’ve served me better in my jobs.”
He signed up for ROTC and joined the Army immediately after college. The Korean War had recently ended, so, he says, “I protected the State of Virginia for two years, and it never got attacked once.” One of his assignments during his stint in the military was to organize Boy-Scout summer camp assignments for the dependents of soldiers stationed at his base, and he insisted on desegregating them – for the first time in Virginia’s history.
When he got out of the Army, Katz made Gardiner his legal residence (he takes great pride in having voted in every election in the town since 1956), but pursued a career in New York City on weekdays. He started a company called Knit Resource Center, Ltd., which designed prototypes for knitting machines. “It happened by accident, but it worked out very well,” he says. “It put all three of my kids through college.”
His eldest son Sandor, who lives in Tennessee, is known as the “Pied Piper of fermentation” and has given workshops on the subject locally, including through the Rondout Valley Growers’ Association and Opus 40. Daughter Lizzi, a cancer survivor living in Oregon, is a medical educator. Youngest son Jonathan lives nearby, in Columbia County, visiting Bruynswick Farms regularly.
In the 1970s, Joe had put his company on an innovative four-day work week so he could spend more time in Gardiner, growing things – including a Christmas-tree farm – hiking, fishing, cross-country skiing, cooking and baking up a storm. It was in 2000, after his kids were grown, that he first stepped up to volunteer for the town’s Hamlet Committee. “What I’m most proud of was that, along with Louis Benson, we negotiated the purchase of the rail-trail,” he recalls. “That was a big thing.”
Once he had a taste of civic engagement, Katz went all-out, running successfully for the town board in 2005 and as the Democratic candidate for supervisor in 2007. He was reelected in 2009 “with no opposition, which is a very good way to campaign,” he jests.
The town board he presided over consisted of Democrat Nadine Lemmon, Republican Carmine Mele and Independents Rich Koenig and Warren Wiegand. “Everything ran so smoothly. It was a good group of people who cared about Gardiner,” he says. “When you start getting your party/my party, then it stops.”
The Katz administration’s achievements included construction of Gardiner’s transfer station, landscaping the parking lots surrounding town hall, and signing the town’s first shared-services contract with Ulster County for snowplowing county roads. He consistently opposed changes to the zoning code that increased minimum building-lot sizes from two to five acres, believing “That’s what keeps youngsters from staying. We don’t have to be Westchester and drive prices up.”
Ever looking for solutions that would save taxpayers money, he resolved a union dispute with municipal workers in 2007 by offering more time off in lieu of pay increases. “It worked out fine,” he says. “If people sit down, they can work it out.”
In the wake of the recession of 2008, however, “The Democrats ended up hating me, because I became a real fiscal conservative for that period. But it was good for the town.” His veto of a fireworks display that would have cost Gardiner $2000 irked some constituents. He pulls a yellowing 2009 newspaper clipping out of a file, sporting a full-page ad with the headline, “It’s Time for Joe to Go!”
In 2011, Katz decided not to run again, passing the Democratic Party torch to Carl Zatz. Instead, Katz volunteered for the ZBA, finding a congenial group that has “worked very well through the years.” He notes that the board’s mandate is quasi-judicial.” The ZBA’s job is not to write law, but it can interpret it.”
Looking forward to Gardiner’s future, Joe Katz seems confident that change will be gradual and that most of the town’s abundant natural assets will be preserved – in part because the absence of a municipal water supply is a disincentive to overdevelopment. He likes the town’s new solar law because it rules out gigantic solar farms that would be visible from atop the Shawangunk Ridge, and has hopes that restrictions on short-term rentals currently being discussed will alleviate noise and other quality-of-life issues.
“Gardiner is a wonderful place to live. It’s got so much going on: the Gunks, farms, some really great people,” he says. “We’ve just got to be careful with the type of development.”
Some of Joe Katz’s reminiscences of rural life and colorful characters in Gardiner in the mid-20th century can be found online at www.hudsonvalleyhistoryproject.org/pdf/katz_joseph.pdf.
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