In November, HV1 reported on the Unison Arts and Learning Center’s recent decision to make the Holsted House — a historic structure on Paradies Lane in uptown New Paltz that had been donated to the organization — its new headquarters (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2023/11/27/unison-arts-has-big-plans-for-holsted-house-as-it-takes-leave-of-longtime-hq). Left unanswered was the question: What will become of Unison’s longtime home at 68 Mountain Rest Road?
“We’re not looking to sell, but I think we can find somebody,” says Stuart Bigley, who owns the combination gallery and theater formerly known as Unison and lives with his wife Helene in the house that lies in front. “We can’t afford to stay here until we have that building rented. The upkeep on the building is significant. It would probably not be difficult to rent it to someone making widgets, but my first choice would be something that reflects the best of what Unison has done over the years — someone willing to take over the logistics of running an arts co-op or whatever.”
Ideally, Bigley says, he’d like to go on doing what he started out doing at the site in 1976, when the not-for-profit Unison Learning Community, Inc. was founded by himself and Peter Pitzele: teaching drawing classes. The Cleveland native was drawn to the arts from an early age, not excelling in academics on account of undiagnosed dyslexia. “Art was one thing I could do passably well,” he recalls. He got his degrees from the Silvermine College of Art in Canaan, Connecticut, and taught there for awhile before ending up in New Paltz.
The original concept for Unison was to house an alternative, “arts-oriented” elementary school in the building that is now the Bigley residence. Hosting concerts in an educational space was something that he had already begun doing back in Connecticut, and it wasn’t very long before what was then called the Friends of the Mountain School became known as much as a place for performance as for learning. “It built over a bunch of years into what it’s become,” Bigley says. “The school ended in 1978, and then Unison went fallow for about two years.”
It was during that period that Pitzele volunteered the use of the facility to a Canadian friend named Gariyan Butler, who had landed the commission to coordinate the torch relay for the 1980 Winter Olympics. Butler needed a staging area somewhere in between Lake Placid and Langley, Virginia, where the miners’ lamps cradling the Olympic flame would arrive from Greece. Improbable as it sounds, the Unison compound became the headquarters for the American leg of the relay. Butler and his wife moved into a trailer and set up their office in a converted goat shed. “It was the first time an Olympic torch relay was ever organized by computer,” Bigley recalls. “Everyone on the property got involved. I was the transportation coordinator.”
Each Olympics has a unique torch design, and the prototype for 1980 was created by Don McFarland and manufactured by an Illinois company called Cleanweld & Turner Industries — commissioned by the Ronson company, manufacturer of butane lighters, according to Bigley. “We got it from Ronson. But the original torch that we got didn’t work very well when it rained or snowed. Jim Kalimeridis, a contractor who was living on the property, took this torch and made it work. He redesigned it to make it weatherproof. We would go out when it was raining and run around and see if it stayed lit.”
By then, the Bartz family, who had operated a small farm on the property, had decided they wanted to retire and leave the area. Pitzele resigned and moved away in the wake of a divorce. So, in June 1980, now flying solo as executive director, Bigley bought the house at 68 Mountain Rest, its large barn and outbuildings. He met Helene soon thereafter, and they were married in 1982. “She became very active in helping the transition,” says her husband.
That early-‘80s transition into what would officially be renamed the Unison Arts and Learning Center mostly involved transformation of the large steel cattle barn on the property, which had served as a gym for Friends of the Mountain School students, into Unison’s performance/gallery space: “What you see now is the original building that’s been giftwrapped in wood,” Bigley says. “It was mostly built out in two stages. First we put a floor in, insulated it, got a woodburning stove. After awhile we had an oil burner donated.”
A major grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1989 enabled further improvements: “We got an architect, who designed the addition. The original barn had the entrance on the side; he continued the roofline out and made the entrance in front, through the box office. A chicken coop became the sound room. We added an office, a green room, storage room, bathrooms and kitchen.”
The centerpiece was and remains the multipurpose 1,000-square-foot theater, which can accommodate an audience of up to 80 and has also been used over the years for art, yoga and dance classes. “It’s mostly set up as a gallery, but we’ve done a lot of amazing performances over the years.”
And how. Under the broad umbrella of acoustic music, this intimate performance space (plus an outdoor stage added later) hosted many top-shelf jazz, blues, folk, singer/songwriter, world music and classical acts. This reporter for one has fond memories of evenings or afternoons at Unison with such luminaries as singer/songwriters Christine Lavin, John Gorka and Bill Morrissey, bluesman Mose Allison, jug band revivalist Jim Kweskin and British folkies Robin Williamson and John Renbourn – not to mention the brilliant annual Thanksgiving comedy shows by local song parodists Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine. There was even a distinguished poet or two: “Allen Ginsberg slept on our couch, and made breakfast for everybody the next morning,” Bigley remembers.
While Unison’s concerts never generated copious income for the organization, it enjoyed a brief windfall in 2006, when then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer negotiated a settlement of the music industry payola scandal, which financed something called the New York State Music Fund. For two years, not-for-profit arts organizations in the state could get generous grants to cover performer fees. Unison qualified for $75,000 each year, making it possible to hire what Bigley terms a “dream list” of names “seriously world-class” enough to fill larger local halls, including the Julien Studley and McKenna Theatres on the SUNY New Paltz campus. “We had Michelle Shocked with a ten-piece band, Pink Martini, Lila Downs, Odetta, Natalie Merchant, Jon Hendricks, the Persuasions… It was the first time we had any cushion.”
The bonus funding made it possible for Unison to premiere Roy “FutureMan” Wooten’s project reviving the music of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a gifted 18th-century composer/violinist of mixed race sometimes described as the “Black Mozart.” It also enabled the presentation of an extended series of classical guitar concerts, programmed by the late Tom Humphrey, a Gardiner-based luthier who built custom instruments for the world’s greatest guitar virtuosi.
Among the top names in that guitar series were the Brazilian superstars Sérgio and Odair Assad, who had brought Unison another of its most impressive “firsts” a couple of years earlier: a “warmup concert” for the eight-member Assad family’s performance at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It came about by special request, as Sérgio confided to Bigley that he was worried that his 81-year-old father might have a heart attack from the stress of appearing at such a high-profile venue as the Met on his first-ever concert tour outside Brazil. “We did it at Studley,” Bigley recalls. “Yo-Yo Ma wanted to go to the concert in the City, but it got sold out. So, he came up to our concert.”
The list of stellar names who played for Unison could easily take up another half a page, but music was far from the only attraction. There were years and years of art exhibitions hung on the gallery walls, of course, and sculptures displayed in the gardens out back – some to become part of Unison’s permanent collection. The extensive grounds had hosted a variety of esoteric participatory events since the 1970s, including Native American sweat lodges and what Bigley says were the very first of Tolly Burkan’s public firewalking workshops. More recently, they served as a home for many summers to the Wayfinder Experience’s live-action roleplaying day camps for imaginative youngsters. “Over the years the vibes have built up,” Bigley observes.
The challenge now is to find a tenant — or multiple tenants — who want to maintain those vibes, preferably doing something with a focus on the arts or education “that will continue to bring cultural or wellness benefits to our area.” While some of the artworks in the permanent collection will eventually be relocated to Unison’s new Paradies Lane location, others — especially the site-specific sculptures — will likely remain in place in the Sculpture Garden. The search is on for someone who sees the appeal of maintaining this venerable venue’s rich legacy.
Licensed real estate broker Matt Eyler is now taking calls from interested parties at (845) 417-8300. Stuart Bigley will be hosting an Open House at 68 Mountain Rest Road from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, January 27 (snow day from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 28).
Join the family! 
