Mary Lou Pasini Paturel, restauranteur, writer, weaver, and always-Woodstocker, died quietly in her recently-adopted home of Ajijic, Mexico, on June 5, 2024. She was 89 years old. She will be remembered and missed for her kindness and generosity, her involvement and support of the arts everywhere she went, her love of family and friends, and her adventuresome spirit.
Born March 6, 1935 in Brooklyn, NY, Mary Lou was raised in the gritty Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. As a teenager she worked in her Italian immigrant parents’ store selling silk stockings and toothpaste to the soldiers and merchant seamen who landed at the docks a block from the family home on 52nd Street. There she met a friend of her US Navy sailor brother, a dashing Frenchman and Merchant Marine named Bernard Paturel, and just shy of 18 she married him.
They decided Hell’s Kitchen was no place to raise their three children, and in 1962, with a few dollars and a small loan, they moved to Woodstock and opened the Café Espresso on Tinker Street. The family moved into the apartment upstairs and had another child.Â
The Café helped shape the folk music scene in town and beyond, hosting artists such as Phil Ochs, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Bob Dylan. Dylan moved his typewriter in for awhile, working upstairs in what was referred to as the White Room, where he wrote Another Side of Bob Dylan, thanking the family in the liner notes.Â
After selling the Espresso and moving to Europe for a spell, Mary Lou and family returned to Woodstock, where she and a partner opened another restaurant called Country Pie. Continuing west on Route 212, Mary Lou and Bernard opened The Bear Café in 1974. She took a year-long break from the restaurant business and moved to Las Vegas, where she became the first woman to deal poker at the casino Circus Circus.Â
When she and Bernard parted ways and sold The Bear Café in 1979, Mary Lou returned to her passion for fiber arts, weaving for Loominus Handwovens for many years before opening her own studio, L’Atelier II, on Tinker Street.
Mary Lou spent a few years in California, and always the adventurer, moved to Mexico in 2017, where she wrote, painted, wove tapestries, played bingo and poker weekly, and most importantly, made friends. While she missed her Woodstock people, she lived her days happily and with gusto in her newly-adopted slice of Paradise.
In addition to many loving friends in Mexico and Woodstock, Mary Lou leaves behind three of her children; Monique, Gerard, and Nina; her brother Larry and sister Roseann; grandchildren Mimi, Claudia, Mila, Demetri, Sebastian, Shannon, and Sarah; and two great-grandchildren, Kat and Henry, as well as her cousin Lucille, nephew Darren and niece Danielle. She lost her son Jean-Pierre in 2017 and grandson Geoffrey in 2020. Her brother Bobby died in 1992.
The family is planning a Celebration of Life for Mary Lou at a later date.
Contributions in Mary Lou’s memory can be made to the Woodstock Library. Please note her name on the donation so we can put it toward a brick in her honor at the new library.
https://www.woodstock.org/donate/
Woodstock Public Library District
5 Library Lane, Woodstock, NY 12498
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