There’s major breaking news from the Unison Arts and Learning Center, one of New Paltz’s most venerable cultural organizations – and we’re not just talking about December 1 through 3 being the weekend for its 32nd annual Craft, Art & Design Fair, taking place this year at the College Terrace on the SUNY New Paltz campus. Word is now out that this spring, Unison Arts will be moving lock, stock and barrel out of 68 Mountain Rest Road, its headquarters since 1976, and into the Holsted House on Paradies Lane.
“JOY!” the exhibition of Small Works currently hung at the gallery/performance space at Mountain Rest, will be the final art show at that location, and the Closing Potluck Party scheduled for Saturday, December 16 will be the beloved space’s last hurrah. Effective in March 2024, the building and its 11-acre site will revert back to their owners and next-door neighbors, Stuart and Helene Bigley, who ran Unison for 37 years before their retirement in 2016.
In January 2021, when HV1 covered the donation of the Holsted House to Unison by owners Daniel Getman and Janice Pickering (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2021/01/15/historic-holsted-house-donated-to-unison-arts-center), the plan was to use it as an auxiliary exhibition space closer to downtown New Paltz, with an outdoor stage and a teaching garden out back. There was some talk of moving the not-for-profit organization’s administrative offices there as well, while preserving 68 Mountain Rest as the “main building” for art shows, live performances, classes and workshops.
But keeping the Mountain Rest Road site up and running was always a financial challenge, with costly building and parking lot maintenance, plumbing, heating, air conditioning and water supply issues sparking panicky fundraising campaigns and board turnovers every few years. This certainly isn’t the first time that “moving to town” has been discussed as a way to save the organization. Since late 2021, when Faheem Haider came aboard as Unison executive director with a mission to engage younger audiences – especially students who don’t necessarily have easy means of transportation to the old site several miles west of downtown – the idea of being more accessibly located has become a more persuasive priority for the Unison board.
It was the outright donation of the Holsted House that made this move a tangible possibility. Set on a 1.9-acre parcel adjoining the Thruway, the structure is a two-and-a-half-story stone and woodframe house that was delivered with three bedrooms and one bath, totaling 2,854 square feet. Its oldest section, known as the Creamery, may have been built as early as 1730, according to Haider, although Ulster County first lists its existence in 1776.
The 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. 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, whose 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. Getman and Pickering bought the house from the Paradies family in 2006, according to Haider, and Getman used part of it for a law office.
A building with this long a pedigree is bound to need renovations, of course, and Haider and the rest of the Unison crew have spent much of the past year running a low-key capital campaign, securing grants and doing structural repairs, including stabilizing two chimneys that were in danger of collapse. “We’ve already spent more than $100,000 to reveal the building to itself and to us, so we know what problems need to be solved,” said Haider as he conducted a press tour of the Holsted site. “We have to spend a lot more money on the interior this year.”
In the attic, envisioned as future gallery or studio space, there’s a brand-new air handler ready to be connected to an HVAC unit. A non-load-bearing interior wall is set to be removed to create a large L-shaped gallery, but a smaller gallery space is already “ready to go” to hang an inaugural show come spring. A new ADA-compliant bathroom has been installed on the ground floor, with plans underway to widen a doorway to the parking lot and install an elevator to make the upstairs offices and gallery spaces fully wheelchair-accessible. “This is going to be one of the most ADA-accessible 18th-century spaces in the county,” Haider says.
“My architect, Michael McDonough, says that this building is a cross-section of American architecture,” Haider notes, pointing out pointing various historical features that will be preserved as a living museum. “Its history of occupation is significant. Check out this wall – you can see 100-odd years of wallpaper.”
Future interpretive materials, as well as programming, will be designed to incorporate the historical features and social context of the Holsted House while still looking toward the future of the arts. “We’re working with preservation organizations to mark out how this space was used,” says Haider. Unison artistic director Emilie Houssart is already brimming with ideas. “This is one of the 14 oldest houses in New Paltz. It’s a wonderful, loaded site to talk about local society,” she says.
Once stabilization and renovation of the main building are substantially completed – with a total estimated cost of $1-to-$1.5 million, per Haider, including the value of the donated structure – the capital project will enter its second phase: construction of a new building on the site, tentatively being called the Cube, with a “very doable” $600,000 pricetag. This auxiliary structure is conceived as a soundproofed, “modular” 32-by-32-foot performance space, with “room for residencies, film screenings, theater, concerts, events.” He cautions that the organization isn’t interested in competing with downtown venues that present music, but will focus more on becoming a home for experimental styles.
The Paradies Lane grounds will continue to host the Unison Grows teaching garden, focusing on plants native to the region and used by its Indigenous inhabitants. The site is registered purple martin habitat, with a martin house erected seasonally. It is also envisioned as potentially a new home for some of the sculptures currently housed in the sprawling Sculpture Garden behind the old building at 56 Mountain Rest, depending on negotiations with Bigley and with the artists who loaned them to Unison. “Stuart loves the Sculpture Garden, and we’re discussing arrangements in which some of it can stay on-site,” Haider explains.
Haider, Houssart and Unison director of operations Ally Bell are all excited about the fact that their new home at 9 Paradies Lane, across the street from a large (and long-controversial) parcel recently acquired by Ulster County, is part of an overlay zoning district designated by the Town of New Paltz as part of its Downtown Realization Initiative. “We’re going to be the hub of this more walkable district,” says Haider, noting that the Town and County governments, New York State senator Michelle Hinchey and even the National Endowment for the Arts have pledged support for the revitalization of the Ohioville hamlet, with Unison as its anchor.
With an agenda of serving younger and less-affluent demographics and increasing collaboration with other local organizations – including the New Paltz Central Schools, SUNY New Paltz, the Margaret Wade-Lewis Center and Arts Mid-Hudson, among others – the Unison Arts of tomorrow holds promise to engage and serve a far bigger and broader audience in its new uptown headquarters. “We’re a space where community gathers,” Haider says.
The College Terrace at SUNY New Paltz will host Unison’s 32nd annual Craft, Art and Design Fair from 4 to 6 p.m. this Friday, December 1 and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, December 2 and 3. Admission is by a $5 suggested donation at the door. The “JOY! Small Works” exhibition remains on view from 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday (or by appointment) until December 31 at the Unison gallery at 68 Mountain Rest Road, west of the Wallkill River in the Town of New Paltz. Come and say your farewells to the old place at the Closing Potluck Party on Saturday, December 16 from 3 to 6 p.m.
To learn more about Unison Arts, including how you can support the capital campaign, visit www.unisonarts.org.
Join the family! 
