Nine decades of New Paltz

New Paltz is a community of immigrants; there are far more people who move here later in life than are born here and remain from one generation to the next. Some of those immigrants have come from the other side of the globe, but others didn’t travel quite that far. For example, David Lent’s migration to New Paltz started just one town over, about 90 years ago. The time since has given Lent the opportunity to watch a tremendous amount of growth and change happen in the shadow of the Shawangunks. 

The early years

David Lent was born in Highland, New York, about 1930, but soon thereafter moved to Waring Farm in New Paltz. This was a 125-acre farm owned and operated by Samuel Waring, whom Lent recalls as a “gentleman farmer” who had served in the state assembly in 1911 and 1912, ran a cider mill in Plattekill and “had an eye for the ladies.” Waring married Cornelia Deyo, a scion of the LeFevre and Deyo families, who died in 1935. Lent’s childhood was spent in the farmhouse where Cornelia Deyo had lived for 75 years, a building at what’s now 275 Main Street. The farm itself stretched along Putt Corners Road, and included the lands on which now can be found two supermarkets and numerous housing developments, including Woodland Pond. Lent’s parents moved their family there in 1935 to help out the parents on a farm that included a range of goods from apples to black angus cows. One can imagine the challenges of keeping cattle safe and healthy, considering how severe Hudson Valley winters could get. Lent recalls a 26-inch storm that hit in 1946. 

An agrarian community

In the 1930s, New Paltz was an agrarian community with a small state college at its center. There were perhaps 300-400 students attending the New Paltz Normal School to learn to teach, as Lent recalls. Main Street included car dealerships, a newspaper office, retail establishments such as a five-and-dime, drugstore, a menswear shop and two hotels. “It was a different community. Most students and faculty live in New Paltz, and were involved in the community.” Even the rental properties tended to be owned by locals. It wasn’t only the types of businesses that were to change along Main Street; the road itself was rejiggered during Lent’s lifetime. An even larger project happened after Lent became an adult: the construction of the New York State Thruway through New Paltz. That profoundly altered the character of the town, as it did with many other communities. The eastern portion was separated by a multi-lane highway, and it was a lot easier to come to this small town for visits — or to live.

Changes for the Lent family

Young David Lent attended the campus school, which had no tuition for students through ninth grade. That opportunity for a free education lasted through the 1960s, in Lent’s recollection. Lent’s older brother, Richard, attended a prep school where the Highland Residential Facility is now located. When David graduated high school in New Paltz, it was among a class of 49 students. 

Lent’s father and father’s father were both attorneys who specialized in property searches. In the 21st century, that can be done on a computer, but in the 19th and 20th centuries it involved going through county clerk records by hand, a process that Lent described as “tedious.” David Lent did not want to grow up to be an attorney, and history helped make sure that Lent would not take that path. 

Lent was a big sports fan, and on a December day in 1941 was listening on the radio to a football game being played at the Polo Grounds when an announcer broke in with news of a surprise attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. That announcer “said it was going to change America,” Lent recalled, and it certainly changed the Lent family. Richard, nine years older than David, was in college at the time and quickly volunteered for army service. As part of the United States Army Air Forces, the elder Lent became a navigator on B-24 bombers, flying missions in Italy. “After 50 missions, you got to go back to the United States,” David recalled. “On the 50th mission, my brother was shot down over Yugoslavia, and bailed out. There was no parachute training in those days, and he broke both legs.” Richard did survive that harrowing experience. 

Everyone who has received higher education experiences some level of stress. It’s a time of self-discovery, testing the limits of family and independence, and a push to expand the knowledge in that young adult brain by leaps and bounds. Lent definitely felt that pressure, and found ways to relieve it, recalling, “I couldn’t have gotten through college without playing bridge.” 

Like elder brother Richard, David also eventually joined the army — by means of the draft — serving during the Korea conflict, and upon returning got a job at IBM, as did a great many others in the 1950s. For Lent, this led to a 35-year career with the company, in manufacturing, production control and production management in both Poughkeepsie and Kingston. The Kingston campus of IBM, the closure of which in the 1980s caused economic ripples that can still be detected today — was the location of what’s now called iPark 87. IBM “was a changed company by the ’80s,” Lent said, with the management style and organizational structure by that time being so convoluted that “I did not know who I worked for.”

Political involvement

It was a time when it was still common to work for a single corporation, rear a family and retire. As a young father, Lent was an active member of a church, served on the library board and was involved in “scout troops like crazy” for many years. The family traveled extensively, visiting every state except Iowa. Given the role of that state in national politics today that could be seen as ironic, because Lent also got involved in the Republican party by serving on the town committee. Until the 1980s, New Paltz was a solidly Republican town in a solidly Republican county. Pundits suggest that in Ulster County, the eponymous Town of Ulster is the only municipality remaining with a strong GOP bent. Toward the end of that decade Lent started thinking about running for a seat on the town board. “My wife told me to run for supervisor, instead.” 

Lent ran a campaign based on the notion that the complexity of town government had outgrown incumbent William Yeaple, arguing that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been lost because town officials weren’t investing excess funds at a high enough interest rate. The 1980s was a time of record-high rates, and Lent maintained that hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest were lost simply by not putting any thought into finding safe investments that paid out at those higher rates. Lent also made an impression by knocking on many doors. “One person said I was the first politician to visit.” The new supervisor took office in 1990. 

New Paltz being politically competitive at that time, Supervisor Lent worked with a Republican board for the first two years, after which the majority were members of the Democratic party. “I had more problems with the Republicans than the Democratic board,” Lent said. Drawing on management lessons from army service and that IBM career, the new supervisor understood that “you have to know what employees are doing.” That was accomplished by visiting the landfill, the courts and other town facilities regularly to find out. Sometimes, that meant uncovering something unsavory, like when landfill workers or the police chief were discovered taking money under the table. 

It was under Lent’s guidance that police management was revamped to include a police commission, as a way to ensure that corruption could be stopped, if not prevented, in the police department by having the eyes of citizens upon the public purse. Lent’s successor as supervisor, Susan Zimet, ultimately oversaw the partial dismantling of that oversight. Zimet returned to office more than a decade later, and was supervisor when council members in 2015 voted to act as commission members themselves. A concern cited at the time was that since council members are responsible for the entire town budget, interposing a commission to review and approve the police budget was inappropriately delegating that job. Reinstalling appointed citizens in that role occurred in 2022, as recommended by a panel empowered to review police practices in a racial context by gubernatorial executive order. 

The old town hall had only recently been converted from its American Legion roots when Lent took office. There was push to move the police into that same building, which in the early 21st century — during the second Zimet administration — was condemned in large part because it just wasn’t maintained well and allowed to fill with toxic mold. The residents voted down that police proposal at the time, and police remained in their increasingly cramped Plattekill Avenue headquarters until relocated under supervisor Toni Hokanson to rented property on South Putt Corners Road, and then under Supervisor Neil Bettez were reunited with justice court personnel in a new justice center on North Putt Corners Road. Today, all emergency services are on land that was once part of Waring Farm in the area once known as Put Corners.

Some things never change

Some of the themes in local government haven’t changed much. Town-village relations were strained when Lent took over, but the new supervisor developed a positive relationship with mayor Tom Nyquist through regular communication. “I called at least weekly.” This was also when television cables were first being installed in New Paltz, and franchise fees started to be collected. “Channel 23 was running hot stuff in the ’90s,” Lent remembered. Today, elected officials are seeing those franchise fees declining, and occasionally express concern about how to replace that money. 

Ultimately, Lent was swept from office thanks to Walmart. The 57-acre parcel adjacent to the Thruway and Paradies Lane, which had been the site of the Plesser farm and orchard, was being considered as a site for store for the giant retail chain. Planning board and community members lined up on either side of the issue, but despite being “personally very opposed to it,” Lent never took a public position, saying that town council members were “between a rock and a hard place” because elected officials could well have been criticized for having an opinion, too. Privately, Lent saw a technical way to get the project sidelined, which was never addressed: as the project was proposed, residents of Paradies Lane would have had to leave through a private parking lot, but the law requires that they continue to have a public road. “You can’t take their exit. Either buy those houses, or build the road.” The final nail in the Walmart project’s coffin was the denial of a request to hook into the village’s water system, which arguably only happened as a result of the steady pressure applied by opponents. Nevertheless, Lent was defeated by a Democratic challenger, Susan Zimet. 

As someone with proven political acumen, Lent was soon thereafter appointed to an open seat in the county legislature, and then ran for a full term. “It was the worst job I ever did on my life,” Lent said, because there was “atrocious stuff going on.” Ulster County wouldn’t have an executive until many years later, which meant that the leader of the legislature called the shots. During Lent’s brief tenure, the county’s highway superintendent clocked in for work two hours after being pulled over for driving intoxicated. Department heads often hired their wives as their secretaries. “It was just poor management. I pushed for change and failed. I didn’t run for reelection.” 

Free of political responsibility

Retiring for a third time allowed Lent to travel more, and to avoid New Paltz politics. On the national level, though, Lent has paid attention, saying that the Republican party as it’s presently constituted is a “disaster for our country.” The last Republican Lent voted for in a presidential race was George H. W. Bush. Part of what appears to be a dwindling minority of the “grand old party,” Lent longs for characters like Javits and Rockefeller on the country’s political stage again. 

Another project Lent took on once free of political responsibility was the creation of the Lent Farm development, which comprised the bulk of what was left of the family farmland. The farm itself hadn’t been operated in decades by that point. Lent served as the primary consultant and shepherded it through the planning process. That may have been why Lent was asked to be part of an ad-hoc committee that reviewed ways to replace the condemned town hall. That work, largely completed in 2015, did not result in an option that council members of the day considered affordable. Municipal employees remain in trailers to this day, as the relocation of police and court personnel was addressed first. The town property on Plattekill Avenue may prove to be the final resting place for town offices, but governmental projects tend to be slow in the planning. 

Descended from some of the earliest immigrants to New Paltz, David Lent has watched many generations of newcomers arrive to make this town their home. It’s a community that looks very different than it did nine decades ago, but Lent would surely agree that there’s something at its heart that has changed not one whit.