Since its founding 45 years ago, the not-for-profit Unison Arts and Learning Center has served as one of New Paltz’s most vibrant hubs of culture, but has also often struggled to stay afloat financially. One of the main impediments to its sustainability has been its location in the foothills of the Gunks: too far to walk from downtown or the SUNY campus. Thus, college students who might be assumed to be the venue’s primary audience are consistently outnumbered at Unison events by grey-haired veterans of its founding days.
While a fierce loyalty to Unison persists among that older crowd, the organization has long wished for some way to entice younger generations of users to the 68 Mountain Rest Road location, such as a regular shuttle bus from the village, or for some pied-à-terre closer to town. “They don’t even know where we are,” laments Alex Baer, Unison’s executive director, who also sits on the New Paltz Town Board.
The organization has finally gotten its wish: A handsome historic house off Route 299 just past Thruway Exit 18 was recently donated to Unison by its owners, Daniel Getman and Janice Pickering. It contains a small exhibition space, several offices and a backyard big enough to build an outdoor stage. And it’s a stone’s throw from the new Empire State Trail.
“This was definitely serendipitous,” Baer says. “Both Dan Getman and Janice Pickering are longtime New Paltz art-lovers. They’re also longtime members. Matthew Friday, who is part of our advisory board and also on the Sculpture Garden committee, was seminal in moving that forward.”
According to Baer, Getman had previously used part of the building at 9 Paradies Lane, which he and Pickering bought in 2004, as the offices for his law firm. But it lay vacant for about a year, and the Covid-19 pandemic further suppressed market interest in leasing the space. “So, he had this idea to take a tax deduction and give it to a not-for-profit that’s going to make a change that benefits the community,” she recounts.
Getman’s mother was a sculptor, and the attorney’s practice, Getman, Sweeney & Dunn, specializes in labor law. Friday engaged his interest by telling him about Unison’s ongoing Prejudice Project and the sustainability focus of last year’s Sculpture Garden exhibition. “We’re committed to bettering our community in a deeper way through the arts – not just presenting pretty art,” says Baer.
Once Friday made the introduction, Getman and Baer got on well immediately, and it didn’t take many virtual meetings before the owners agreed to hand over the deed. “We both spoke Spanish. He had me explain what we would do with this building,” Baer relates. The closing occurred during the last week of December.
Set on a 1.9-acre parcel adjoining the Thruway and partially built into an embankment, the structure is a two-and-a-half-story stone house that may have been built as early as 1776 or as late as 1785, with a later wood-frame addition. It has three bedrooms and one bath, totaling 2,854 square feet. Its original builder is not recorded, so it is known as the Jacob and Charity Holsted House after its earliest documented owners, from the town’s 1798 tax list. “It’s one of the first 18 houses to be built in New Paltz,” says Baer.
A proposal by the Town of New Paltz to list the Holsted House on the New York State Registry of Historic Structures (which never came to pass) chronicles much of what is known of the building’s pedigree. The hamlet we now call Ohioville was partitioned into lots in 1760, and sometime around 1796, a Revolutionary War veteran from Rockland County named Jacob Holsted (or Halstead), born 1757, took title to a 96-acre farm that included the stone house. In 1806 he married Charity Van Aken of Kingston, but they did not stay in the house much longer before moving to Ohio.
The farm was sold to a neighbor, Josiah Hasbrouck, one of the sons of Jacob Hasbrouck, builder of the Jean Hasbrouck House on Huguenot Street. Josiah’s primary residence after 1814 was the mansion in Plattekill now known as Locust Lawn. He and his heirs leased the Ohioville farm and house to tenant farmers for the next century, including Levi Wright, Samuel Tenbrouck, D. T. Van Wagenen and Isaac Cummings.
Under Cummings’ tenure, according to the November 22, 1907 issue of the New Paltz Independent, “The gable end of the old stone house…has fallen in.” Later occupants made repairs. In 1912, a Mr. Beatty moved in, followed by Ray DuBois in 1916. Abram Paradies purchased the farm, then comprising 150 acres, in 1938, and 40 acres were seized by the state in an eminent domain proceeding in 1954 for the construction of the Thruway.
The Holsted House is now in need of a bit of TLC, says Baer: “We need to put in a new boiler and a well pump. But the rest is superficial and can be done with volunteer labor. We’ll start up a capital campaign in the next year.”
Besides having rotating art exhibits in the 200-square-foot gallery, the Unison folks are thinking of moving their offices from Mountain Rest Road into the new annex and renting out some of the other space, including a garage at the rear of the building. “We’re trying to figure out how to use the back area at Paradies for music,” Baer says, noting that some landscaping would be necessary to muffle Thruway traffic noise during outdoor performances. “And we could have another sculpture garden.”
There’s enough of a yard to host gardening classes as well, “possibly Dutch landscape arts. I’d like to teach kids how to use the land,” she says. “Nature is what defines us in this area so much as artists. I want that to be part of our teaching philosophy.”
“Owning Earth,” a two-year exhibition planned for the sculpture garden at 68 Mountain Rest Road and set to begin this spring, will be Unison’s next foray along that path. Its declared mission is to “help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.” Maybe some of that show will find more room to take root at 9 Paradies Lane.
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