Home of former heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson up for local landmark designation

Floyd Patterson, one of the best heavyweight boxers ever to enter a ring, spent decades of retirement as a trainer and mentor on Springtown Road in New Paltz. That home, with the original boxing ring Patterson built there intact, may be designated a town landmark. A public hearing on that very question will be held on August 15, 7 p.m., at the community center. 

John Orfitelli, chair of the town’s Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), sees this application as an opportunity to talk about the process of securing landmark status. Orfitelli lauded the quality of the research property co-owner Judith Halbreich put into documenting not only Patterson’s career and later impact on New Paltz after retiring from the ring in 1972, but also the history of the home at 85-87 Springtown Road that became the center of the boxer’s training and mentoring activities. In some ways this documentation may have been easy, given the amount of coverage Patterson received during a career that included becoming the youngest heavyweight champion, and first person to reclaim that title after losing it. 

Halbreich described in an interview the challenges of finding a suitable property for setting up a leadership program for children in foster care. The search started with trying to purchase a vacant convent, but the prices were in the millions of dollars. Halbreich recalls that there were others interested in the Springtown Road home in 2015, but Patterson’s child Jennifer was interested in what Uriel and Judith Halbreich wanted to create. “This is what my father would have wanted,” Judith Halbreich recalls Jennifer saying. 

Patterson may have wanted it, because Patterson had also taken a special interest in younger people, and specifically in teaching them how to have success in the world of boxing. The very ring where foster children now sit and hear about the challenges Patterson personally overcame — including being sent to a reform school in West Park at the tender age of 10 — is the same ring where Patterson sparred with contemporaries including Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Mike Tyson, and trained fighters including Razor Ruddock and Patterson’s adopted son, Tracy. Patterson also contributed to the sport during that time by serving on the state’s athletic commission, and advocating for the needs of the boxers themselves. 

“The kids we bring here, they are in awe” when they sit in that ring, Halbreich said. “They feel it.” 

Despite the wealth of information publicly available about Patterson, Halbreich did enlist the aid of an historian to dig up dirt on the property itself. With buildings dating back as far as 1871, the property had been a source of award-winning chickens in the 1940s and ’50s. The livestock barn was still standing when Patterson purchased the land in 1965, and over time that was converted into a boxing ring and gymnasium. The house was also modified, and elements of that history from the 1970s all the way back to the 1870s can be found throughout. The result is an 86-page application that includes site and area maps, and details about the uses that these buildings have been put to over the years. 

Orfitelli explained that Halbreich made an initial inquiry to the HPC to start the process of designating a landmark. In New Paltz there are several excellent resources for discovering the history of any particular building, including the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at Elting Memorial Library, and the records kept at Historic Huguenot Street. The historic preservation commissioners have also developed an online interactive historic map, but this is being redesigned and won’t be available again before December. The commissioners themselves — and this is true for both the town and the village commissions — are volunteers with a deep knowledge of local history, knowledge that can be used to preserve the character of just about any building. 

For the new owners, taking the time was a no-brainer. “This has to be a landmark,” Halbreich said. Starting with zero knowledge of the sport, Halbreich has become immersed in the history of boxing and the role Patterson played in shaping it, and also in shaping New Paltz. “Becoming a landmark helps create a sense of pride and encourages our youth to be the best of themselves, like Patterson and Ali. It also creates a sense of pride and unity in the community, and encourages economic growth and prosperity.” 

This is just the start for Halbreich: given enough time and funding, plans are to complete a fuller restoration of the building to its Patterson heyday, when people who called themselves the greatest stopped into this quiet little town to talk shop, and even take shots at each other. It’s hoped that on the shoulders of those giants will stand the young people who train there today, learning the importance of setting one’s sights and then setting goals to reach those heights. Tomorrow’s darling world-shaking entrepreneur may, like Patterson, have started from nothing and gotten some help on Springtown Road along the way.